It Could Happen Here Weekly 163

I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together our mission on the really no-really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor what's in the museum a failure and does your dog truly love you we have the answer go to really no-really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign Jason bobblehead the really no-really podcast follow us on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast

Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite host, me, WZWTF and me, Mandy B. As we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex,

and love. That's right. Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, we share our personal journeys navigating our 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engage in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations.

From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that will resonate with your experiences, decision decisions is going to be your go to source for the open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections. Tune in and join the conversation. Listen to decisions decisions on the Black Effect podcast network, iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

This is Michael Phillips, an historian in Texas. I'm the author of a history of racism in Dallas called Bite Metropolis, an upcoming book on the history of eugenics in Texas called The Purifying Knife. And I'm Stephen Monticelli, an investigative reporter and columnist in Texas who covers extremism and far-right movements, as well as dark money and other fun things. In 2022, Supreme Court just the Samuel Alito,

authored the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision. Alito's majority opinion reversed the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade outcome that established a woman's constitutional right to an abortion through the first trimester, permitted states to impose limits to protect the health of the mother in the second trimester, and gave states leeway to ban abortions in the final trimester.

The road decision, based in a Texas case, had survived with modification for almost half century. In Dobbs, however, the Supreme Court denied that women held a constitutional right to an abortion and gave the individual states the power to determine whether such procedures were legal at any point during a pregnancy.

In the Dobbs case, Alito seemed to suggest the concept of abortion rights was a modern aberration. MSNBC pundit Lawrence O'Donnell zeroed in a one key phrase in Alito's opinion. Samuel Alito says that a right to abortion services is not, quote, deeply rooted in this nation's history.

Whatever one might think about Alito as a jurist, he fails as a historian. In fact, for much of American history, abortion was quite accepted. When men first formed the American Medical Association in the 1840s, they had to wage a campaign against abortion in part to eliminate competition for patients from midwives who were the primary provider of such services.

The 19th century anti-abortion laws focused on the health and safety of women primarily, and not the life of the fetus, as the modern laws tend to do. And the anti-abortion campaign at the time itself had to do not just with limiting women's autonomy, but also with racism and anxiety over immigration. Through it all, Texas became a central battlefront in the culture wars surrounding women's bodily autonomy.

One group of Texans won women the right to an abortion in the row case, while another worked almost immediately to reverse row and to recriminalize choice. Meanwhile, a Dallas district attorney, Henry Wade, played an underappreciated and underexplored role in the battle.

He often dour Puritans who established the British colony of Massachusetts in the 1620s may have created an impressive theocracy, but they proved surprisingly indifferent when it came to women's decisions when and if to have children. Based on British common law, the colonies in New England allowed abortion up to the quickening, which is when women can first feel fetal movement. In that era, it was the first clear sign of impregnation.

This moment varies widely for women, but it generally happens during the fourth or fifth month of pregnancy. Women typically endured seven to eight live births, and the experience was often grueling and life-threatening, particularly as they got older. Seeking relief and physical safety, women frequently terminated their pregnancy in a variety of ways.

From Native Americans, white women learned which local herbs were considered abortifacence. White and black women also sought advice from midwives to provide wisdom on how to relieve menstrual cramps, get pregnant and breastfeed.

Mid-wise provided abortion services as well. Women attempted end pregnancy with varying degrees of success by consuming penny royal tea or salven juniper or a combination of iron and quinine. They took hot baths or road horses bare back in order to cause a miscarriage.

Before the 1840s, such actions provoked little or no controversy. Even the Catholic Church adhered to the quickening standard until after the American Civil War. By the 1840s, abortion had become so deeply rooted in American history and culture that abortionists advertised their services, albeit in euphemistic but widely understood terms.

These advertisements were carried in popular newspapers such as the New York Sun and the Boston Daily Times. Abortionists told patients they could provide, quote, French cures for what was referred to as, quote, menstrual blockage. A Germanic shift happened after the 1847 founding of the American Medical Association.

Established by men, the organization began lobbying states to ban abortions in an attempt to discredit midwives who represented major competition for female patients. Medical journalists began to dismiss midwives and male doctors who provided abortion services as dangerous ill-informed quacks.

AMA members were still unaware that germs existed, and they didn't clean their hands or equipment when examining wounds or during surgeries, thus causing many other patients to die of sepsis. So-called regular doctors often use dangerous treatments such as bleeding to treat illnesses.

Yet, in spite of their high body count, AMA members persuaded major press outlets such as the New York Times to sensationally cover cases in which women died during abortions performed by midwives. This created momentum for the enactment by 1880 of laws banning and criminalizing abortion every single state except Kentucky, where state courts that already rendered such procedures illegal. The drive against abortion wasn't all that it seemed.

Abortion opponents were worried that the wrong women, or in other words, white wealthy women, were choosing to limit how many children they had. The fertility rate for white women fell by almost 55% between 1850 and 1930.

Horatio Storrer, the leading anti-abortion crusader at the time, railed against non-infantomania among upper-class white women. A trend that the sociologist Edward A. Ross would call, quote, race suicide. President Theodore Roosevelt later argued that white women had a patriotic duty to bear at least four children.

If biologically fit Anglo-Saxons, quote, have only one child or no child at all, while the Irish Italians and Jews have, quote, eight or nine or 10, Theodore Roosevelt warned, it is simply a question of the multiplication table, he wrote. The future of American civilization, Roosevelt believed, depended on reproductive math. White women could not be allowed to become voluntary noncombatants in a racial demographic war.

In the 1880s, Texas was still seen by much of the country as an unsophisticated frontier, but was home to a highly influential doctor with a national following, Ferdinand Eugene Daniel, who became editor of the Texas Medical Journal.

A eugenicist with a national audience, the surgeonates served in the Confederate army and argued that masturbation and homosexuality were dangerous indications that individual came from a family line that not fully evolved or was biologically regressing. Fully evolved individuals, he believed, had less of a sex drive and kept their minds on intellectual pursuits.

Daniel argued that before the Civil War, Americans had endangered their future by bringing Africans into the country as slaves, and were compounding the error by allowing what he called, quote, the dregs of Europe, Jews, Greeks, Italians, and others to immigrate to the United States.

The only way to save America's biological future, he said, was by cash trading, not just gay men and mastermators who would cause the evolution of white America to swing in reverse, but also to sterilize the sexually promiscuous, the mentally ill, those with disabilities, and the criminal element as well.

Daniel could be surprisingly supportive of abortion rights under limited circumstances, however, if it ensured that while off white women had long and fruitful careers as mothers.

Daniel wrote approvingly of how electric currents might be used to end ectopic pregnancies, cases in which fertilized eggs attached to the fallopian tubes or elsewhere outside the uterus, which can be dangerous and can kill or leave a woman infertile. Both outcomes undesirable for a eugenicist like Daniel, who cared for fit white patients. In 1887 issue, he published an account of a debate among doctors held by the Medical Society in Terrell, Texas.

The topic was whether saving the life of the mother was the only acceptable reason to allow an abortion. Some doctors in the debate argue that abortion was morally acceptable for an intelligent and chaste woman who had gotten pregnant after being deceived by a scoundrel into participating in premarital sex.

because of sexual double standards. Several of these Texas doctors argued that such women would no longer be considered a socially acceptable mate by a high status man. And thus should be denied the chance to become an, quote, ornament and useful member of society. Regardless of Texas's abortion law, a surprising number of doctors in the state performed abortions not only to save women's lives, but to save the reputations and to relieve them of the financial and physical hardships of unwanted pregnancies.

In 1899, Waco, Texas, Mary Wheat discovered she was pregnant and sought an abortion. The procedure had been illegal in Texas since 1856. A year before the recently formed American Medical Association began a campaign to prohibit abortion in every state.

By 1880, the AMA had achieved its goal. In spite of the ubiquitous spans, abortions were frequent, and there were a large number of doctors willing to provide the prohibited medical procedure. Wheat, called Maddy by friends and family, found such a physician, Dr. S. M. Jenkins.

Texas law at the time had not eliminated abortion, but instead had driven the practice underground. Because of this, doctors received little or no training in how to perform such procedures. That proved fatal for Maddy Wheat. Dr. Jenkins performed the abortion in the home of a woman identified by the local press only as Mrs. Smith,

And he made a mistake. She got increasingly and dangerously ill, and then after 10 days of this ordeal, Jenkins rushed wheat into Waco City Hospital. He claimed she was suffering a severe attack of dysentery. She then died and an autopsy revealed a bowel perforation, which had been left during the botched abortion. Law enforcement arrested Jenkins on November 1st for the operation, charging him with murder. Jenkins' trial did not go as prosecutors planned.

Jenkins testified that the fetus we was carrying had died and that the abortion was an attempt to save her life. According to a reporter for the Houston Post, Jenkins and his attorney were pleased with how the trial was unfolding.

Quote, the defense seemed to be well-satisfied with their showing so far, and public opinion had changed considerably in favor of the defendant. The newspaper told its readers, but then the trial came to an abrupt and shocking end. While the court was in session, Huit, the brother of the deceased woman, stood, aimed at gun at Dr. Jenkins, and pulled the trigger. A bullet fatally struck the physician, just underneath the ribs.

As the assassin fled, Jenkins' brother-in-law, John Halligan, shot back but missed. That a murder trial ended in another homicide is not surprising in a place as violent as 19th century Texas. But because of the modern image of Texas as reliably and even harshly anti-abortion, it might be startling that the public 125 years ago actually sympathized with a doctor who faced prison after his patient died as a result of an incompetently performed abortion.

Abortion politics were far more unpredictable in the American past than Samuel Lito had asserted. In 1873, anti-vise activists Anthony Comstock of Connecticut successfully lobbied the Congress to pass legislation known as the Comstock Act that made distribution to the U.S. mail or common carriers of birth control devices or any information about birth control or how to obtain an abortion, a federal crime.

Social reformers noted that bearing multiple children off and shorted women's lives and drove their families into poverty, and they battled for women to gain control over their reproductive choices. Once such reformer was Margaret Sanger of New York, the daughter of a radical Irish father and mother who died at 50 after bearing 11 children.

Sanger coined the term birth control in 1915, and just before World War I, launched a movement that promoted contraception as sexual and political reform aimed to reduce human misery. She had to flee the country in 1914 because her publication, The Woman Rebel, intentionally defied the Comstock Law and promoted the distribution of information about contraception through the United States Postal Service.

When she returned to this country, she was an international celebrity for women's rights and free speech. And she opened a family planning clinic, which faced continual police harassment. The lack of access to birth control, saying her complaint led to abortion, as she has said in a 1957 interview with reporter Mike Wallace on CBS News. Why did you do it? I realized that you had an intellectual conviction that birth control was a boon to mankind.

but I'm sure that others have that conviction, too. And so what I'd like to know is this. What events, what emotions in your life made Margaret Sanger a crusader for birth control? Well, Mr. Wallace, it's hard to say that any one thing has made one do this or that. I think from the very beginning, I came with a large family. My mother died young, 11 children, but maybe depression only as a child.

I was a trained nurse, went among the people. I saw women who asked to have some means whereby they would have to have another pregnancy too early after the last child, they asked abortion, which many of them had. So there's a number of things that are one after the other that really made you feel that you had to do something.

It may surprise many today that the woman who founded the American Birth Control League, which later evolved into Planned Parenthood of America, actually opposed abortion and advocated easing access to birth control as a means of making it vanish. Meanwhile, around the time of Sanger's interview with Mike Wallace, Texas doctors became friendlier to abortion rights. But before we get into that, quick ad break.

In 1963, the Houston Chronicle surveyed doctors about their views of abortion. About 18,000 abortions took place in Texas every year, the newspaper reported, and that quote, an increasing number of doctors believed abortion should be legal for reasons beyond saving the life of the mother.

Texas women fought fiercely for the right to control their bodies. In North Texas, the Women's Alliance, the first Unitarian Universalist Church in Dallas, launched an education campaign about the need for the state to reform its abortion laws. Meanwhile, Dr. Yu Savage of Fort Worth, the president of the State Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists lobbied the Texas Medical Association to draft a statement supporting abortion rights.

The state's abortion ban was, he said, in conflict with actual practice of reputable hospitals across the state. Doctors regularly have provided abortion care when a woman's life was in danger, and they interpreted that mandate broadly.

In 1969, members of the Texas Medical Association who were surveyed approved liberalization of abortion laws by an overwhelming vote of 4,435 to 536. The Texas legislature even considered loosening abortion restrictions in its 1967 and 1968 sessions, although neither effort was successful in spite of support from conservative state Senator George Park House and a growing number of churches and physicians.

In the end, activists carried the day. Two Texas lawyers, Linda Comfy and Sarah Weddington, took up the cause of Norma Maccovey, who had sought an abortion in Dallas. Almost a century earlier, Texas doctors had argued whether to allow an abortion for unmarried upper-class women so they could contribute to the gene pool by bearing children with comparably privileged men. Those Victorian doctors did not have someone like Maccovey in mind.

largely neglected by her parents, but Covey had suffered abuse at the hands of men throughout her life and was a frequent drug user. After giving up one child for adoption and having another taken by her mother, in 1969, she was pregnant for a third time while she was living in Dallas.

Maccovey tried to end the pregnancy herself with a home remedy, a peanut and cast royal, but she only succeeded in making herself nauseous. She was eventually told about an illegal clinic, but when she got there, Dallas police had already shut down the clinic. But nobody was there, she said later. It was an old dentist's office. Then I saw a dried blood everywhere and smelled this awful smell.

She believed that she falsely claimed that she had been gang raped by African-American men, a doctor might be willing to provide her an abortion. She was unsuccessful, but a doctor referred her to an attorney who connected her with a pair of lawyers who were seeking to challenge the Texas anti-abortion law.

These attorneys, Linda Coffey and Sarah Weddington, filed a class-action suit against Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade, claiming that the Texas anti-abortion law, which allowed the procedure only to save the patient's life, violated the constitutional right of privacy. Before his name would forever be linked with the history of American abortion law, by the time of Norma Maccovey's suit, Henry Wade enjoyed a reputation as one of the most successful district attorneys in the country.

His reputation in Dallas was built on ruthlessness, racism, and the advantages a brutally unfair criminal justice system in Texas gave him. Wade would claim a 90% conviction rate. But in many of those cases, he faced off against poor defendants that were bullied, lied to, and coerced into confessions by Dallas police officers.

In one infamous murder case, Tommy Lee Walker, an African-American man with several alibi witnesses, was threatened with a beating if he didn't sign a confession. He was misled about the consequences of signing a mission of guilt and later died in the electric chair in 1956. Wade reportedly joked, quote, any prosecutor could convict a guilty man that takes a real pro to convict a innocent man.

Emmanuel Wade provided prosecutors after the civil rights era, provided tips for excluding African Americans and Mexican Americans from juries.

Wade left the District Attorney's Office in January 1988, and as of 2008, 19 criminal defendants convicted by his team had been exonerated through DNA evidence. During his time as District Attorney, Wade directed police to raid gay bars and vigorously prosecuted violators of the state's sodomy laws that banned oral and anal sex, including a straight couple arrested in Dallas in 1961.

While Wade may have racked up wins against badly outmatched targets, before Roe, he bungled his most famous case, a murder covered by Dallas radio reporter Gary Dolan of KLIFAM.

Let's get it right. Police officers and sheriff. They're shot right now. They're shot right now. Andrew Oswald, pause.

Leon's law has fallen. Leon's law has fallen. Leon's law has fallen. Leon's law has fallen. Leon's law has just been shot.

On November 24, 1963, Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby had murdered Lee Harvey Oswald. He accused assassin of John Kennedy as he was being escorted by police in front of a nationwide TV audience.

The case should have been open and shut. Wade's staff won a conviction in March 1964, but the verdict and death sentence Ruby received was unanimously overturned by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on October 5, 1966, in part because the judge should have granted a change of venue, but also because Wade's team had introduced improperly obtained evidence at the trial.

Ruby was awaiting a new trial where he died of pneumonia and cancer in 1967. The Wade team apparently did similarly sloppy work in the Roe v. Wade case. In abortion cases, Wade's office had generally prosecuted amateur abortion providers who had killed or badly injured their clients. And the Dallas DA's office in the city police had not focused on enforcement of abortion laws on the books.

Legal experts would later characterize the Dallas DA's office filings and the row case as perfunctory, especially compared to the exhaustive constitutional research done by Weddington and Coffey. Texas assistant General J. Floyd won no allies on the Supreme Court when he opened his argument with comments considered sexist and condescending even by the standards of 1973. When the Supreme Court rendered its verdict, Wade reportedly never bothered to read it.

No one laughed and a Texas legal team would win a landmark legal victory.

On January 22, 1973, news anchor Walter Cronkite made the Earthshaking Roe v. Wade decision the lead story on the CBS evening news. Good evening and a landmark ruling the Supreme Court today legalized abortions.

The majority in cases from Texas and Georgia said that the decision to end the pregnancy during the first three months belongs to the woman and her doctor, not the government, thus the anti-abortion laws of 46 states for rendered unconstitutional. Stay with us through this ad break to learn more.

It took a while for the country and particularly Texans to absorb the news about the road decision. The Supreme Court ruling was announced on the same day as another big news story that over the next few days absorbed attention south of the Red River. Cronkite was on the air when the press secretary of a former giant of Texas politics called the newsman to tell him a former president had died. Thank you very much, Tom. I'm on the air right at the moment. Can you hold the line just a second?

I'm talking to Tom Johnston, the press secretary for Lyndon Johnson, who was reported that the 36th President of the United States died this afternoon in an ambulance plane on the way to San Antonio where he was taken after being stricken at his ranch, the LBJ Ranch in Johnson City, Texas.

News of the road decision had to compete not only with coverage of Johnson's death and the planning for his funeral, but also the recently negotiated American withdrawal from the Vietnam War. No one could have guessed how deeply this one decision would reshape the makeup of the Democratic and Republican parties over the next half century. Americans divided almost evenly soon after the Supreme Court announcement.

A Gallup survey indicated that 46% supported a woman's right to choose, and 45% opposed granting women access to abortion care in the days following the road decision.

Reactions were often surprising. WA Criswell, the arch-conservative pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, the largest southern Baptist congregation in the nation, initially applauded the court. Perhaps the pastor, who had repeatedly warned 13 years earlier that the election of a Catholic, John Kennedy as president, would mark the end of religious liberty, was relieved that the Supreme Court was not controlled by the Vatican.

By the late 1970s, Chris Wellitt would emerge as a national leader of the religious right and would help make opposition to abortion gay rights a centerpiece of Republican politics.

Shortly after Roe, however, he struck a very different tune, quote, I've always felt it was only after the child was born and had a life separate from its mother that became an individual person, Chriswell said, and it always therefore seemed to me that's what's best for the mother and the future should be allowed.

opposition to the legalization of abortion quickly formed and would build to homicidal intensity over the decades. In 1970, three years before the road decision, when abortion was still illegal in Texas, Michael Schwartz, a student at the Conservative Private University of Dallas in the suburb of Irving, staged what might have been the first anti-abortion protest in American history.

He held a sit-in at the Planned Parenthood headquarters, not far from downtown Dallas, because the organization provided assistance to pregnant women planning on traveling to states where abortion was already legal, not unlike situations that Texans face today. The movement soon came to be dominated by right-wing Republicans, and the occupations of clinics soon became violent. Abortion opponents pouring notches chemicals into clinic ventilation systems.

anti-choice extremists that fired the clinics, bombed them, and even murdered doctors and clinic staff providing abortion care. One set of Texans may have won the decisive battle for abortion rights in the past half century, but a different set of Texans would lead the charge to reverse those gains. Strangely enough, the backlash to abortion rights included Norma Maccovey.

One day, Flip Benham, a leader of the extremist anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, approached her while she was autographing copies of a book she had authored called I Am Row. They became friends, and she later claimed that she changed her mind about abortion when she saw photos of fetuses at different stages of pregnancy.

After being baptized in a swimming pool by evangelicals in 1995, an event filmed and widely disseminated in the anti-abortion movement, Maccovey became a popular fixture at anti-abortion protests. At first, Maccovey embraced evangelical Protestantism, and by 1998, she converted to Catholicism.

But towards the end of her life, while being interviewed for a 2020 documentary called A.K.A. Jane Row, McCovey confessed that her religious conversion had been a scam and that she had been financially benefiting from her transition into a star of the evangelical anti-abortion circuit. Did they use you as a trophy? Of course. I was the big fish. Do you think they would say that you used them? Well, I think it was a mutual thing.

You know, I take their money and they put me out in front of the cameras and tell me what to say. That's what I'd say.

By that point, anti-abortion politics have become orthodoxy in the Republican Party. In 2008, the state passed the misleadingly named Women's Right to Know Act, which mandated the physician's share misinformation about alleged fetal pain during abortion with women who sought the procedure.

In 2013, a state senator, Wendy Davis of Fort Worth, staged a dramatic 13-hour filibuster of Senate Bill 5, legislation that banned abortion after 20 weeks, required clinics to meet the same demanding standards as hospitals and surgical centers, and required doctors performing the procedure to hold admitting privileges at nearby hospitals.

Davis' filibuster stopped the bill from being voted on before midnight June 25th, the mandated end of the legislative session. She killed the legislation for the time being, and the pink tennis shoe she wore became a symbol of abortion rights activism around the world.

However, Rick Perry called a special session of the legislature the next day in Senate Bill 5 passed. Her efforts propelled her into the 2014 gubernatorial race, but she was crushed by Greg Abbott by a 21-point margin. In recent years, Abbott has led the charge to erase many of the gains women have won in the fight to control their bodies.

We will promote policies that limit the growth of government, not the size of your dreams.

Under Abbott, Texas has passed some of the most intrusive and extreme anti-abortion laws that tightly regulate women's bodies. In 2021, Texas passed Senate Bill 8, which banned abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy. It made performing an abortion a first or second degree felony unless the mother's life is in danger or there is risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.

The vagueness of that latter provision has terrified Texas doctors into not providing care to several of them who have shown up in emergency rooms at death's door. Texas physicians have become less willing to perform emergency abortions than they were in the days before the road decision, even as far back as the 19th century.

In 2023, the Texas Supreme Court denied Kate Cox of Dallas the right to end her pregnancy, even though her fetus suffered from full trisomy 18. The severe genetic anomaly that guaranteed that the child, if it survived pregnancy, would only live minutes. If the pregnancy continued, Cox may have lost the ability to have children in the future. She fled the state in order to obtain an abortion, but a procedure remained legal.

In 2023, Amanda Zurwarski almost died waiting for a life-saving abortion when doctors hesitated to provide care because they feared criminal prosecution. For years, abortion-right activists had chanted, pro-life, that's a lie, you don't care if women die. In fact, the state legislature and governor, Greg Abbott, did nothing as the deaths of pregnant women in Texas soared 56%.

In 2021, Jocelyn Lee Barnica, a mother of one, was joyful when she realized she was pregnant. She hoped to deliver a sibling for her daughter, but on September 21st, 17 weeks into her pregnancy, she was miscarrying with the fetus pressing against her cervix and about to exit the womb. Barnica's life was in danger, but doctors at HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest told her and her husband that because of Texas's law, they could do nothing until the fetus's heartbeat had stopped.

Fearing criminal charges, doctors refused to medically accelerate the delivery of the dying fetus and let 40 hours pass. Bernika arrived in agony, begged to be allowed to see her daughter and a fatal bacterial infection ravaged her body. She would die three days later, leaving her young child without a mother.

On October 28, 2023, 18-year-old Neva Crane was six months pregnant. She began vomiting and she became soaked and sweat during a baby shower at her home in Beaumont. She too was miscarring. Her boyfriend drove her to nearby Baptist hospitals of southeast Texas, where they waited for five hours in a waiting room before doctors diagnosed her with strep throat and gave her a prescription for antibiotics.

sent home or conditionally worsened. Crane was driven to another hospital in town, Krista's southeast Texas St. Elizabeth. Her fever soared to 102 and she was bleeding, but her doctors continued to do nothing but administer antibiotics.

Eventually she is wheeled into a third emergency room. Doctors gave her two ultrasounds to, in their words, confirm fetal demise. Crane's mother, who have long been opposed to abortion, screamed at the medical staff to help her dying child. Crane suffered for 20 hours before her heart failed. Bernika and Crane's stories were revealed by the investigative news outlet ProPublica just days before the 2024 presidential election.

Democratic nominee Kamala Harris made abortion rights a central part of her doomed campaign when an anticipated red wave expected to bring a Republican majority in the 2022 congressional elections fizzled and a number of abortion rights initiatives passed even in traditional Republican strongholds like Kansas and Ohio. Many pundits believe that a Dobbs effect had heralded a permanent political realignment or at least the upcoming presidential election results.

This phenomenon clearly failed to materialize for Harris. Abortion rights referenda passed in seven states, including Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and New York in November 2024.

But they founded in Nebraska and South Dakota, as well as Florida, because the support of 57% of voters fell short of the required 60% supermajority. In Texas, Trump, once a pro-choice person, but now the proud instigator of the Dobbs decision, carried 56% of the vote.

One of the most prominent Trump supporters, University of Texas PhD Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, might soon be in a position to see his dreams of a national ban on the so-called abortion pill, Mythopristown, and even the reversal of the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court decision that overturned state laws banning control pills and devices.

When Harris lost anti-abortion extremists exuberantly celebrated Trump's triumph, neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, who if right-wing rap artist Kanye West got to go to dinner in 2022 with Trump, saw the Republican victory as an opportunity to reduce women to the status of property.

Hey, we control your bodies. Guess what? Guys win again, okay? Men win again. And yes, we control your bodies. Hi, I'm your Republican Congressman. Hi, I'm your Republican Congressman. It's your body, my choice.

Texas government has become big enough to regulate women's bodies and small enough to fit inside of its citizens' bedrooms. Even though abortion rights have always enjoyed far greater support than Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has suggested, the right of women to control their own bodies and get the vital medical care they need to prevent bodily harm or their premature deaths seems on the precipice of vanishing.

This grim reality is not deeply rooted in America's history or traditions, but unfortunately, it is the current status quo. And Texas has played a major role in bringing us to this place. I'm Stephen Montcelli. I'm Michael Phillips. Thanks for listening.

you

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together... On the Really No Really podcast... Our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions, like... Why they refuse to make the bathrooms door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to really, really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, no, really. No, really.

Go to ReallyNoReally.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. I hope you've been enjoying the holiday season. I know I have. Or at least I've been trying to. It's difficult because I keep getting distracted by this funny feeling. Like there's something watching over me up in the sky, something buzzing around. And at first I thought this might just be Santa's sleigh. But then I realized, no, no, no, no. This is actually a drone.

And oh boy, am I not the only one. Drone fever is just sweeping the nation right now with the New Jersey drone panic somehow making headlines based on unconfirmed and very disputable reports.

The New Jersey drone thing isn't real. This is mass hysteria. Almost all of these incidents of UFOs, UAPs, or mysterious drones are actually just like regular airplanes going to the airport, airplanes that you can track online via flight radar.

These aren't nuclear scanning drones. These aren't secret government military projects. These are either like legal registered hobbyist drones in some cases, but really just mostly airplanes. A few weeks ago, there was a really cloudy day over the New Jersey coast. And that day, all of the drone sightings stopped because you couldn't see up in the sky. You couldn't see the airplanes.

But yeah, the New Jersey drone panic isn't real. The reason why there's blinking lights flying over LaGuardia is that those are airplanes taking off and landing at an airport. This whole panic was boosted by unconfirmed social media reports and local news sites trying to gain clicks. And somehow this just broke through into the national mainstream discourse.

But fears over invasive drones isn't necessarily unfounded, though the ones that you should be worried about aren't UFOs or nuclear scanning drones, but are actually police drones, which are becoming all the more common place. More and more cities this year have adopted police drone programs. So for this episode, I'm going to rerun my episode from early in 2024 about police drones.

Now, in the past year, there's also been a great increase in the reporting on police drones, including a fantastic wired investigation titled The Age of the Drone Police is Here. They analyzed nearly 10,000 individual flight records from July of 2021 to September of 2023, containing more than 22.3 million coordinates.

The investigation showed that poorer communities, especially working class and immigrant communities, were disproportionately surveilled with police drones in Chula Vista, flying over neighborhood blocks on the west side more than 10 times longer than blocks on the suburban east side.

And considering Trump's second term, fears over widespread police surveillance are only more relevant, especially in immigrant communities, and even in instances where drones like this fly over places like abortion clinics. And these fears are not unfounded. In 2020, the San Diego Union Tribune discovered that the Chula Vista Police Department was sharing its license plate reader data directly with ICE.

Now, it's still unclear how many drones Chula Vista PD currently has, but as of 2022, they had 32 of these high-definition camera mounted drones, drones which have now done over 20,000 flights since 2018.

All of this will get discussed more in-depth in the episode, but for an update, later I discuss a court case to secure the public's right to access drone footage, and this case is still ongoing. Last spring, the city tried to appeal to the California Supreme Court, who ultimately declined to take up the case.

basically reaffirming the lower courts ruling against the police to withhold drone footage. This case is, once again, back to trial court to finalize details of how certain footage should be released. So, without further ado, here is my episode from the 2024 Consumer Electronics Showcase, Police Drones and You.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, I'm Garrison Davis. Now last week, I spent a few days in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Showcase. Most of the time at the convention, I was just walking around the show floor looking at various new types of surveillance equipment, AI products, and various other bullshit that was being peddled to

the many, many industry attendees of CES. But I was also able to go to a few panels. Now panels are really interesting because you get to hear people who are working inside industries talk about stuff that they don't usually really publicly talk about very much. And on the first day of the convention, I went to a panel about drone technology.

Half of the panel was about how Walmart is launching new delivery drones in Dallas, Texas. The other half was about police drones. And that's what we're going to be talking about here today, how the police are using drones, why they're using drones, and how you can probably expect to be seeing a lot more drones up in the sky piloted by either an AI or a police officer. So let's get started.

Chula Vista is the southernmost kind of medium-sized city in California, with the population of 278,000 people. Chula Vista has a police force of 289 sworn officers, as well as 120 civilian employees.

On top of their nearly 300 officers, they operate a drone fleet 10 hours a day, seven days a week, launching a high-def camera-mounted drones from four locations throughout their small city. I'm going to quote from an article from the MIT Technology Review, which did a deep dive onto Chula Vista's police drones back in February of 2023. Quote,

Chula Vista uses these drones to extend the power of its workforce in a number of ways. For example, if only one officer is available when two calls come in, one for an armed suspect, and another for shoplifting, an officer will respond to the first one. But now, CVPD's public information officer, Sergeant Anthony Molina, says that dispatchers can send a drone to surreptitiously trail the suspected shoplifter. Unquote.

And this really gets at the heart of how these drones are going to get used. They exist to funnel more people into the criminal justice system. Instead of having to choose between two calls, one of which actually could relate to saving someone's life, the other just a petty crime, now the police can easily follow someone doing a petty crime while responding to other calls and eventually catch up. It's a way to just expand the amount of people that can be arrested and thrown into jail.

Nowadays, drones are pretty common tools for police. Over 1,500 departments currently use drones. Usually for special occasions though, like search and rescue, crime scene documentation, protest surveillance, and sometimes tracking suspects.

But at the moment, only about a dozen police departments regularly dispatch drones in response to 911 calls. The first of which was Chula Vista PD, who launched their, quote, drone as first responder program back in 2018. With the goal of having an unmanned aerial system, or drone, be proactively deployed before an officer is on scene.

Now we'll hear from Chief Roxanna Kennedy of the Chula Vista Police Department talking on the Drone and Technology panel at CES. We are seven miles from the Mexico border and we have a second largest city in San Diego County. So we have about 290 officers and we serve a community of about 300,000. But because of the close proximity to the door, we have a lot of people that travel back and forth. We have a drone program

that I'm awfully proud of. And we are responding proactively to calls for service in our community. And so we have drones stationed from Florida locations throughout our city. We have pilots in command that are on the rooftop. And then we have a operations center where we have sworn officers that are part one and seven pilots that fly the drones.

So we are responding now to calls for service. On average, the officer on scene, the drill pendant on scene, that's sharing information with our officers, light streaming that information on our cell phones or on our computers, they're receiving information about the call within 90 seconds on average. And so what it's doing for us in Cholubista and for our community,

is we are providing information rapidly, real-time information to officers so that they can make better decisions so that everyone goes home safely. We say the community safer, the officers are safer, and the subjects that we encounter are safer. So we're all proud of what we're doing.

The way police are able to deploy drones used to be a lot more limited. The use of drones is regulated by the FFA, the Federal Aviation Administration. In most cases, the FFA requires that both hobbyists and police departments only fly drones within the operator's own line of sight.

But starting back in 2019, agencies and vendors could start applying for a beyond visual line of sight or beveloss waiver from the FFA to fly drones remotely, allowing for much longer flights in restricted airspace. Chula Vista PD was the first department to get a beveloss waiver. The MIT Tech Review estimated last year that roughly 225 more departments now have one as well.

Another thing that I always talk about because I think it's critical is the concept of why we're using drugs and what the benefit is to the community with the use of our drugs. And I truly believe that my officers can pick up their cell phone before they even respond to the call and they can look and see the scene.

what's happening, where the individual is. If the person's facing in the middle of the bark, there are no children around and there's nobody that's within the reach of this individual harmony.

You might not have to rush into that scene so quickly. Officers can de-escalate, make better decisions, and I mean, this is just a game changer for law enforcement. And right now, you know, we were the first agency to be involved in the integrated pilot program with the FAA. We're very proud of that, that they trusted us and that for us to be the organization that brought forward all these ideas that are now being utilized in law enforcement.

Now, I've watched a lot of videos of police talking about why they're using drones, of drone training companies, talking about why police drones are so important. In one video on their website, this guy from Skyfire Consulting was talking about how police may not have had to kill Tamir Rice if they simply had a drone watching beforehand so they could see that it was a toy gun.

which is a ridiculous thing to say because in the 911 call that jump started this entire police interaction, it was expressed that the caller thought the gun was probably a toy. And this notion that is simply if police have more ability to surveil, they'll be able to respond safer and apply less deadly force. I think is a pretty suspect premise.

Now, the effectiveness of drone technology in law enforcement is challenging to verify and quantify. The MIT Tech Review cannot find any third-party studies showing that drones reduce crime, even after interviewing CVPD officers as well as drone vendors and researchers. Quote, nor could anyone provide statistics on how many additional arrests or convictions came from using drone technology.

I was able to find some data on CVPD's website, talking about how many drone initiated interactions resulted in arrests, but quantifying additional arrests seems to be a little challenging. Now, if you look at Chula Vista PD's own drone responses stats,

The vast majority of deployments I estimate around 70% are for what the Director of Investigations for the Privacy Rights Group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, refers to as, quote, crimes of poverty, unquote, which he believes will be the target of most drone policing as opposed to violent crime. Nearly 30% of Chula Vista's drone deployments are for what's categorized as disturbances.

Almost 15% are for psychological evaluations. 10% are for, quote, check the area and information. Over 7% are for welfare checks. 6.5% is for, quote, unknown problem. And over 6% is for suspicious person and another 6% for traffic accidents.

Now, some drone deployments do results in patrol units not having to be dispatched, but CVPD also says that drones have existed in thousands of arrests. And I'm really not sure if having a drone following someone around is the best thing for a 5150 psych evaluation.

The presence of a police officer doesn't always make the situations better either, but I don't see having a drone be a really calming presence if you think someone needs mental help.

Funding a whole fleet of heavy-duty surveillance drones and paying dedicated operators costs money. Now, it's unclear to me how many drones Chula Vista PD currently has, and on their website, they list 10 different drone models currently being in their fleet. Most of them really expensive DJI drones, like the DJI Matrix, the DJI Inspire, the DJI Phantom, the DJI Maverick, as well as drones from a few other random companies.

But nevertheless, Chief Kennedy is very grateful for their local police foundation, for heading up the funding for their DFR drone first responder program. Let's hear from her.

I don't know if anyone in here is in law enforcement, but many agencies use drones and there are all different types of drones that are available. I call them reactive drones or ones that are like the tactical drones that you can use to go in on a hostage situation or a missing person to check in the canyon areas or interior drones. We have drones that go underneath.

bed, go inside the attic, all types of different drones. And many organizations have drones like that. But a DFR drone is very unique and different because these drones are flying, as you can imagine, 18,000

missions, it puts a lot of wear and tear on. But that is one of the biggest challenges beyond the fact of funding. So we don't have huge budgets that are allotted for drum programs. And so we had to be very, very creative at our police department. And we were very blessed to have a police foundation that has taken on the responsibility to help us really start our drum program and continue it going forward. So funding is always going to be a challenge.

And depending upon the drones that you use, there are some drones that you can't get any, you can't use for assets seizure funding, nor can you get grants for, because sometimes when it comes to foreign-made drones, there are many challenges as well. So you have to think of that. And then we deal with legislation right now. That's the new challenge that we all have. We had to fight some battles. Like I said, I'm agnostic. I want to use what's the best drone out there and protect the information.

And we do that with encrypted software programs that are on private servers. But you'll see that there's a lot of discussion about drones and what drones we should be using right now. We'll get back to the chief's off-handed mention of legal battles in a bit here. But Chula Vista's budgetary situation may not be as dire as the chief makes it out to be.

On top of their current $55 million operating budget, back in 2020, the LaPrenza newspaper revealed that departments in San Diego County had secretly been getting hundreds of millions of dollars in high-tech police equipment, including armored vehicles, facial recognition and phone-breaking software, license plate readers, drones, riot gear, among other miscellaneous technology as a part of a DHS grant program due to their close proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Chula Vista was one such department, and as of 2020, so four years ago, they had already received over $1 million in grant funds from this DHS program titled the, quote, Urban Area Security Initiative.

Considering Chief Kennedy's budgetary concerns, drones actually have a lot of upsides financially, as they are often a lot cheaper than alternative surveillance methods, as well as being relatively easy to deploy remotely, either with a joystick or just by clicking a point on a map from a comfy office building.

Issues around this ease of use was pointed out by Dave Moss, the Director of Investigations for the Privacy Rights Group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who was quoted in the MIT article saying, quote, up until the last, like, five to ten years, there was this unspoken check-in balance on law enforcement power.

money. You cannot have a police officer standing on every corner of every street. You can't have a helicopter flying 24 seven because of fuel and insurance is really expensive. But with all these new technologies, we don't have that check and balance anymore. That's just going to result in more people being pulled through the criminal justice system. Unquote. My officers constantly are on the air now. Is UAS one available? Is UAS one available? Because it's giving them more information

think about the fact that you can look at yourself up. I can be anywhere in the world and I can look at let me know whenever there's a drum block and I can walk, I can have visual awareness, aerial overlay of what's happening in my community, no matter where I am. Advancements in technology are leading to further normalization of police surveillance.

Ten years ago, would people react to news of a 24-hour police drone program the same way they would now? What was once the threat of Big Brother has since become a very sought-after and fetishized nanny state?

In the V for Veneta graphic novel, anarchist writer Alan Moore imagined a fascist Britain characterized by surveillance cameras around every corner. And now cities around the country are setting up their own street-mounted cameras, linked to private security cameras, and ring doorbell cameras to create a network of live coverage around a whole city, which is instantly accessible to police.

The more widespread consumer adoption of new technologies like small camera-mounted drones and doorbell cameras, the more acceptable it seems for police to add such technology to their arsenal of surveillance tools. It almost becomes expected. Two-levestepED has routinely declined to answer why their drones are always recording both to and from the scene, and the department has put in a lot of effort into managing the backlash against their expanding drone program.

And I'll tell you one thing, even some of the activists, they were very concerned about drones in the sense of privacy. What are you doing with these drones as you're responding? You're trying to gather data and information to spy on us, right? And we have to go to a lot of detail and explaining that as our drone lifts off, it is immediately

It is recording because that's the information gathered for us. As that drone responds, the camera is already going all three miles down the road where the scene is and giving us vital information as the officers are responding. But one of the criticism was, well, on the way back, is your drone just going in my backyard? What if we're smoking marijuana in our backyard? And I said, during California, does it really matter about what I thought about that one? Right? But we said, OK,

we gave your concern. And so what we did was we worked with the software company that we worked with, and they created an automatic so that as a drone returns, it automatically tilts to the horizon. So we're not recording anything. If another call came out, we could immediately, we'll go back in and it'll like map it for us and it will share that information later on. But the goal is to listen to your community as well.

Chief Kennedy's claim here is difficult to back up, because CVPD have refused to show the public any of the drone footage they routinely collect. But if we take the Chief at her weird here anyway, she admits that the drone goes back to recording at street level as soon as there's another 911 call as they record everything on the way to a scene.

And the way she phrases this whole tilt feature is quite misleading because the camera never actually stops recording. She just claims that it tilts slightly upwards in between 911 calls. But it's still capturing footage up to three miles away the entire time it's in the air. Police in Chula Vista have flown over 18,000 missions with their drones. That's a lot of footage.

When talking about the privacy concerns had by some residents of Chula Vista, Chief Kennedy really emphasized how much her and the department really care about listening to community feedback and how data transparency is so important to CVPD. Community engagement is essential, especially in law enforcement because there are so many challenges when it comes to misinformation that's out there.

Whenever you're a part of what's deep as a government, everyone thinks that you have some ulterior motive when you're involved with any type of technology. And so we have worked really hard to build very strong relationships with every aspect of our community. So it was about in 2015, when we started talking about the concept and the possibility of drones. And I laugh and chant and say, Joel Jensen, because that's my story that I used to, and I love it, because I made fun of my

That's when they said that we want to flood drones. I said, oh, come on now. What do we need? George Denson, the Minecraft cars. And then I saw today they talked about a flying car. So it happens. It happens. All right. And so with the community, we started having these conversations. We created a working group. We started doing community forums. We started asking the community about what would you think if we were able to do something like this?

We even went to some of the organizations that may not always be so supportive of these types of groups. We worked with the ACLU and asked for their input on our policy. So before we ever flew the drum, we call it the crawl, walk, run base. We're still at the very end of crawl. We're not into walk yet. And we've been doing it again also for five years. So you have to make certain that you're transparent.

And we provided all types of information that are available if you go to about children. All you have put in is children with placed drones and it will come up with us. And you can look at all the things that we do, all the information that we share, the flight maps that we share. I mean, it's just super important to have those community forums every year. We do a community forum twice a year where we ask for input from our community.

Later on in the panel, Chief Kennedy said that CVPD is quote unquote, extremely transparent about their flight data and quote unquote, have nothing to hide relating to their use of surveillance drones, which is a curious claim considering the fact that CVPD has historically kept all drone footage hidden from the public and has fought in court to do so.

Despite the chief's emphasis on the police's commitment to transparency and the importance of listening to community feedback, even going as far as to consult the ACLU when developing their drone program.

For years now, the Chula Vista Police Department has denied all FOIA and public records requests for any drone footage. In response, Arturo Castanares, a Chula Vista resident and owner of the local bilingual newspaper, La Prenza, filed a lawsuit against the city.

CVPD argued that all drone footage should be categorically exempt from the public records requests on the basis that the footage could be used for a future investigation. Just last December, only a few weeks before CES, the California Fourth District Court of Appeals ruled that this blanket exemption is invalid.

and that not all drone first responder footage could be classified as a part of a pending or ongoing criminal investigation pointing to examples such as 911 calls about a roaming mountain lion or a stranded motorist.

And police were not happy about this ruling. I'll talk about their reaction at the end of the episode. But controlling the narrative about the drone first responder program has been of the utmost importance to Chula Vista police as the chief herself expressed at the panel. And we're real good about telling our story. If you don't tell your own story in law enforcement, other people will tell it for you and it might not be the right story.

So we've gotten really good at sharing on our social media.

and through, you know, YouTube channels and everything success stories of what we're doing. That is quite the claim there. To paraphrase the Electronic Frontier Foundation, without public access to their drone footage, it makes it very difficult to assess how much privacy you have in Chula Vista and whether police are even following their own rules about when and whether they record sensitive places like people's homes, backyards or public protests.

And that's why this recent ruling and the legal precedent it sets is a huge win for actual transparency, and marks the first step towards the public finally getting a look at how these drones are being used in Chula Vista.

With drone first responder programs is spreading to police departments across the country, modeled after the one in Tulavista, combined with the increasing presence of stationary street level cameras, the ability for police to be watching everywhere without the need for on-the-ground officers creates what the EFF refers to as quote, a fundamental change in strategy with police responding to a much, much larger number of situations with drones.

resulting in pervasive, if not persistent, surveillance of communities." Speaking of persistent surveillance, near the end of the panel, the chief announced that Chula Vista PD is planning to expand their 10-hour-a-day drone first-responder program to a constant 24-hour-a-day drone surveillance program.

More than doubling the department's capacity to have eyes in the sky would mean a lot more work hours for drone operators, as well as a large increase in the amount of video files being stored indefinitely. But Chief Kennedy claimed that they're looking into offsetting costs by replacing some of the drone piloting team with AI-assisted piloting and autonomous devices.

We've clearly been the leader who had thrown this first responder at technology. Looking forward, what is the future hold for the department? I assume you're spending a lot of time telling others about the program in addition to using drones, but, y'all may know. What's it look like?

Well, my hope is that we'll be moving towards 24-hour operations. Right now, we're from Sunrise to Sunset. We go until close to 10 o'clock at night, which goes a little bit beyond that. And then one of the challenges, and I know you're only getting a little piece of the information about exactly how we're doing this, but from the four different locations that we fly on each of the rooftops, we have what's called the piloting command.

and that piloting command is contracted through a company, and we, and they just have visual awareness of the sky and they work in a coordination with our drone pilot that's inside our operations center. But that's a huge expense for us to pay. Lead for each site right now with the operations that we have to pay about $100,000 per year. So that's $400,000 for four locations beyond all the other processes here. So if you get expensive,

Michael is that, and we keep hearing about it, he's seen some of the testing, and we've been testing it as well in our area, or what's called drum in the box, or there's some of the systems that are out there right now that organizations are using that are tournaments, and so we're getting there, but we're not quite there, because it's very different when you're dealing with

flying over people and you're flying into areas where the drum was to drop out the sky and haunt people on a community that could create tremendous challenges for us. So we're very, as I mentioned, the crawl phase.

So to explain how these AI autonomous drones would work, it's essentially this box about the size of a truck bed that can either be mounted in like a police pickup truck or be stored on various rooftops around the city. And someone just needs to point at a place on a map and the drone will fly and pilot itself around obstacles and basically circle around an area to do surveillance. And you can call it back when you're done. This would require

a whole bunch of drones to just be launching and being piloted by themselves. You wouldn't have to train random police officers to become FAA licensed pilots, and you could just have the whole thing in the box, like it's called, drone in the box. And these are only going to become more common and cheaper.

Imagine having 10 of these throughout a city, launching from like 10 different rooftops, being able to fly around by themselves, constantly going around in communities, constantly going to GPS coordinates linked to the 911 calls, creating a whole wealth of footage, instantly available to police, live streamed from the air.

Matt Sloane, the founder of SkyFire Consulting, a company here in Atlanta that trains law enforcement agencies on the use of drones and DFR programs, thinks that we'll start seeing autonomous deployment of police drones within the next year or two as police budgets increase and become allocated for unmanned aerial systems. He referred to the state of drone use by police as, quote, rapidly escalating.

Chula Vista likes to market itself as a pioneer of the Smart City movement, which consequently makes them able to receive a whole bunch of grant funding. Now, the idea of the Smart City is built around having a massive amount of data to automate certain city services. So for this idea to work, there needs to be a way to collect that data, and these drones are a major part of that.

The website for the city of Chula Vista also lists projects like electronic transportation, adaptive traffic signals, an app for non-emergency city services, as well as quote, crime mapping and police dispatch modernization, unquote, as also being smart city initiatives. We have this called by 911.

And that allows my officers to hear incoming 911 calls before dispatch even puts it into the system. They can hear what's going on there. And that is tremendously invaluable to them. We have so many different layers of technology.

live 911 is a new piece of software that allows patrol officers to listen to live stream to 911 calls directly and pinpoints the location of the caller via GPS. Now I don't even have time to get into the many reasons that this could be a bad idea.

But simply put, police do not need to respond to every call that goes into 911. Let alone be giving random cops this ability to self-dispatch on their own. It just seems like that could have many, many consequences. But anyway, back to drones. According to a 2020 article in the newspaper, LaPrenza,

Cities in San Diego County, like Chula Vista, have received equipment such as tethered drones used for stationary surveillance, pole cameras, license plate readers, and cell phone cracking technology used to circumvent passwords from the Urban Area Security Initiative DHS grant program. A lot of these technologies have used in the smart city idyllic plan for data collection to automate city services.

After the drone panel was over and I was walking around the show floor at CES, I couldn't help but notice all of the smart cameras and AI image recognition systems being advertised for law enforcement applications. Software that can almost instantaneously scan through a wealth of footage and track people's movements, run facial recognition, and identify every article of clothing.

versions of this type of software are already in use by many police departments, and they will only get better, cheaper, and more common. In effect, what this does is remove a lot of the detective legwork. Instead of having to manually map someone's movements and track down what niche Etsy shirt someone's wearing, these AI systems can now do this all automatically.

To quote the MIT Tech Review article on CVPD's DFR drone program, quote, as the technology continues to spread, privacy and civil liberty groups are raising the question of what happens when drones are combined with license plate readers, networks of fixed cameras, and new real-time command centers that digest and sort through video evidence.

This digital dragnet could dramatically expand surveillance capabilities and lead to even more police interactions with demographics that have historically suffered from over-policing." Pedro Rios, a human rights advocate with the American Friends Service Committee and a member of Chula Vista's Community Tech Council, was quoted in the MIT article saying,

People in the community have no awareness of what images are captured, how the footage is retained, and who has access. It's a big red flag for a city that says it's at the forefront of the smart city movement."

Taking drone seriously right now will be left behind. We have flown 18,150 missions. You can go on our webpage. You can see the flight data. We're extremely transparent. We share all that with our community. We have nothing to hide. We are in the business of saving lives. And I believe drones are one of the bestest questions.

If they truly have nothing to hide and are extremely transparent about the use of their camera-mounted drones, I wonder why they've spent years in court fighting to keep every second of drone footage from being seen by the public.

Luckily, after Chief Kennedy talked for like 30 minutes about how much they care about community engagement and how transparent they are with their flight data, I was able to ask the chief how their commitment to transparency relates to the recent lawsuit she just lost over hiding drone footage. And I also threw in a question about drones at protests. Let's take a listen.

Yeah, a question for the chief. So I know you talked about the importance of like listing to the community and community engagement and I'm not sure this is the case for your department but other departments who've kind of followed suit for for your example have been using drones to like surveil first-time and activity stuff and I know you recently lost a court case regarding the availability of drone footage. So I'm curious about kind of what was

what the rationale for that footage is and how that plays into this idea of trying to be transparent with the community for how these drones are being used. That's going to be a little bit difficult for me to answer because the court case is still moving forward. It's an active case. If you read it, we didn't lose the case. It was recommended go to a lower court to go back for some clarification under three categories.

Now, this is either a straight apply or a huge cope and a gross mischaracterization. But more on that in a sec. I think it's really important, as I mentioned, there are ethics involved in the ethical responsibility that you have as a law enforcement agency is super important. So how you utilize your drones and how you do outreach with your community is fundamentally important. And so

We don't use our drums or if there was a protest, we would not use our drums. If there was, if it turned into a riot, 100%. So if people were out there and they have the ability to

to speak freely, to share their concerns, if it's in opposition. Our goal is to make sure that we keep it safe for all parties involved on either side. So my hope is that other people look at it the same way that we do, and hopefully I've been able to answer as much as I believe me. I'm dying.

to give you more, but I can't, okay? Thank you for those questions. Folks were out of time. Maybe there could be questions after the session. So yeah, there were no more questions after mine. I kind of shut down that possibility. Anyway, okay. So.

First of all, the line between a protest and a riot is meaningless. Police can declare a riot for any reason they see fit, including people being in a road marching. I've seen this happen dozens of times, nearly hundreds of times actually. So just moving on from that immediately. Let's go back to the court case.

The city of Chula Vista did lose the argument that they were trying to make. They did lose the case. The 4th District Court of Appeals ruled that claiming exemption from the Public Records Act was unlawful and sent the case back to trial court to hammer out the details of how much footage is subject to public disclosure and figure out a process for standardizing the release of the footage.

Now, the same day I attended this panel in Las Vegas, January 9th, the city of Trulevista requested an appeal to the California Supreme Court to prevent the release of their aerial video footage. There is a 60-day waiting period where the High Court will decide whether or not to take the case. And if they decline, finally it will go back to trial court to decide on the process of how to select a drone footage shall be made publicly available.

The police are now currently claiming that making DFR footage adhered to the Public Records Act would violate the privacy of Chula Vista residents captured in the videos, which perhaps demonstrates that the aerial videos should have never been captured in the first place.

I'm going to read a press release from the city's communication manager, quote, the city declined to provide the copies because doing so might have violated individual privacy rights. The city would have to manually review and redact every video recording to protect information considered personal, such as the images of faces, license plates, backyards, and more, unquote.

So the city is both trying to argue that having to manually review each requested file to determine if the video in question is related to a pending investigation as well as redacting personal information captured on camera would be way too costly and time consuming. City officials claim that reviewing and redacting videos from one month to obscure faces, license plates, and backyards would take a full-time employee around 230 days.

I'm going to read a little bit more from the city's recent statement, quote, while the city takes very seriously its obligation to provide the public access to public records, the city is concerned that the court of appeals opinion may compromise significant privacy concerns of members of the public in this case or in future requests, unquote.

Somehow, the city is missing the point that this is the very reason the drone footage is being requested to learn the actual nature of this highly influential drone first responder program that's being adopted across the country.

If the existence of this footage is such a massive privacy violation, that implies that the recording of said footage itself implicitly violates people's privacy. And the harder police fight to hide their sweeping collection of aerial footage, all the more suspicious this entire program seems.

so that is what i have to say about chula vistas drone first responder program in about a month and a half the supreme court of california will make the decision on whether or not they're going to hear this case if they decline then the president will be set statewide against this exemption of the public records act

by hiding drone footage so that will be really cool and then hopefully within the next year will finally be able to see what some of this footage actually looks like how good their cameras are how much they can zoom in all of the details of how much of the city they're capturing all this kind of stuff how often the drones are in the air all of those types of things that will be easier to highlight once we can actually take a look at the footage and i assume that going through and releasing requested files from one month.

We'll probably end up not taking 230 days, but I do know how the police love to stretch out these public records requests for as long as they can, as the request that this lawsuit stems from dates all the way back to April of 2021. So hopefully, more than three years later, we'll finally get a look.

Special thanks to La Prenza for starting this lawsuit and doing all of the hard work to actually force the police to be transparent. And if you want to read more, I'd recommend checking out the website LaPrenza.org, as well as the MIT Tech Review piece, which provided some really, really useful information to fill in the gaps between my own research. So yeah, thank you for listening to It Could Happen Here. It certainly could happen here in terms of seeing more of these little fuckers flying around in the air.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together... On the Really No Really podcast... Our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathrooms door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientists who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus...

Does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Crasson is what he's doing. How are you, too? I love my friend Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to really, really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging... Really? That's the opening? Really, no, really. No, really. No, really.

Go to ReallyNoReally.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.

It could happen here, the podcast that's happening right now. This is maybe the foremost of the putting things back together episodes. I'm your host, Mia Wong with me is James Stout. A guy who likes to put things together. Yeah, and on the subject of putting things together. Over the last, I don't even know, three, four weeks, the question I have been asked the most by everyone is, how do I start organizing?

And, you know, the problem with how do I sort of organizing is that it's not a question that has cleaner, simple answers. Now, the most common answer you get is just join an org. And the problem is that most of the people who you were hearing this from are already in an org and want you to join their org. Yeah. Also, the problem is a lot of the orgs that are currently dominating left to spaces in the United States are trash. Yeah. And bad for people, bad people in them, bad people are not in them.

Yeah. Here's a little test you can do. Is your org currently sad that Bashar al-Assad is no longer governing Syria? Because if that's the case, leave. Yep, and that's a lot of orgs. Yeah, that takes most of them right.

Now, we'll come back to orgs in a bit, but what I'll say about orgs is that, okay, if you know an organization in your area that you like and you think does good work and most importantly spends their time actually doing work instead of either infighting or talking about doing work, join them, it'll be good. But the important thing about organizations, and this is something we'll come back to later, the important thing about organizations is they have a lot of people.

And the thing that makes organizing work is people. It's not organizations, it's not even necessarily ideological labels. It's there being a bunch of people who you can use and who want to do things. But something I realized, the more I had these conversations, right? I'm having it with friends, I'm having them with strangers, I'm having them with other organizers. And the more I had these conversations, the more I realized something sort of startling,

You, the person listening to this, almost certainly already knows how to organize, but you don't know that that's called organizing? Yeah, that's a very good point. I have encountered some of the most stunning organizing that I can't discuss the specifics of, but some of the best organizing I've ever encountered. I have ran into in the last three weeks some people who don't think that they're organizers and started talking to me about their stuff.

And I was like, what, like, people are winning victories that like the like hardcore committed organizers haven't been able to do in like 30 years. Yeah. And it's just by random people who don't think they know how to do anything. Yeah. Can I tell a little organizing story? Do we have time? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, go for it. So I remember in like 2018, I am on a trip with a friend, we're coming back and we see the arrival of the migrant caravan, one of the migrant caravans, the one that everyone decided to have a fucking cow about right before the 2018 midterms. And at that time, they were corralling the people of the migrant caravan in

a baseball stadium in Tijuana, and it was raining every day, so the baseball stadium ends up looking like the Battle of the Somme after a couple of days, right? You know, the kids in Leedie Mudd and shit. And I didn't particularly know what to do, but evidently there were people there who were hungry and thirsty, and so I get through my friends at this time. I was still making

about half my money riding bicycles and the other half riding. My friends and I are supposed to do a long bike ride. All of us are people who make a living riding bikes. We're not expert organizers. I was like, hey, guys, this is a fact which we do. We call the friend who has a company who makes waffles. We're obtained.

Like as many waffles as we could physically carry across the border, at that time we weren't able to get in. We found a way to get in. We began distributing the waffles. After that, we put something online. People sent us money and we continued feeding people for months. None of us, I think, had a particular plan or a schedule. Yeah, it was a bit chaotic at times. But A, we were able to do that. And with a lot of other people, clearly it wasn't just us, right? But we were able to process $10 to $1,000 of feed thousands of people.

be everyone there. And I've seen this countless times, especially working and organizing with refugees for the most part. People are so good at organizing each other in themselves. Like when we got there with bottles of water and food, there are a thousand people there who have not had sometimes a drink for days, let alone more than a thousand, I think, let alone something hot to eat, right?

Everybody made sure that the children and the sick people got what they needed first. Organizing is something that is very inherent in us as people. We don't call it that. That's part of the myth. I want to try to puncture with this because I think particularly in the US, but this is true in a lot of places, there's this way in which the organizer sort of TM, capital T, capital O, the organizer gets held up as this

I guess particularly masculinist thing, which is this guy with specialized knowledge, and that's just not true. This brings us something that I think is actually really important, which is what even is organizing, right? And the answer is that most organizing is you get a group of people together, you get them to show up to something, and then you do something, right? And the thing about this, right?

That's something all of you know how to do if you can organize a dinner party. If you can get eight people to show up to a place to eat dinner, you can do this.

It is largely the same skill sets and all of the skill sets that make people good organizers are skill sets that you have to develop to, you know, work a job, right? You know, like one of the things that comes up a lot in this, which is less discussed and also kind of annoying, but you know, you have to manage it is that organizing is about people.

And sometimes you have to, you know, you have to do things like you have to manage people's egos. But like, I don't know, almost all of you work jobs or have worked jobs, right? You have had to like deal with your boss being on one, right? Yeah. You have the skills to do this. You know how to do the interpersonal relationship stuff. It's just that you don't think about that as organizing, even though that's, that's just what it is. Yeah, that's the core of it is getting people to do stuff. Like, like you do it every day.

Yeah, and the way you do this is by building relationships with people, right? And this isn't necessarily friendships, although that works in like one of the easiest ways to start organizing is by getting all of your friends together because you're already friends, you have pre-existing relationships and being like, okay, motherfuckers, we gotta go, we gotta go do something.

And actually, I love that the first thing that you brought up was an admittedly sort of medium-ish scale lift version of this. But one of the very easiest things that you can do is you can just get food of some kind. You can either buy it or you can make it yourself. And you and a group of like eight people, not even eight people, you can do it with lower. I know people who've done this just solo is that you can just go give food to people. Yeah, literally this morning.

So I'm tired yesterday morning. I have some minehouse neighbors, right? And it was cold. And so I went out and gave them some hot breakfast or hot coffee. It's super easy to do. If you are struggling socially wherever you are, maybe you're hiding hard to make friends. I know that's the thing that people often struggle with, especially if you've moved to a new place or post pandemic or you're still concerned with large gatherings or any of those things. Like if you start doing that, you will find other people who want to do it too. Like so many of my friends I organize with are people

Like when we had the end of Title 42 and people were in between the fences there, a lot of the people who I organize with now or who I help people with now, I didn't know, I just showed up with a giant sort of generator that I happened to have and some stuff that we had a whip around a cool zone for. And like people who care about the same things as you are generally cool and it's a good way to make friends and then you can go on from there. Yeah, and there's a second compounding thing here too, which is that

You know, feeding people, it's a way to build relationships with people. And also, it's a really good way for people to get to know you in general and know that you are someone who will help them with things. Yeah. And from there, and this is a very common example, I mean, this is, I literally had this conversation with one of my friends who's like an old school, food and up bombs or organizer. Food and up bombs is a very, very, it's a cool organization. You can just like, found a food and up bombs chapter.

They have like a couple of principles or you can just do your own thing. And I'm pretty sure it's still like the largest anarchist project in the world. Yeah, because all it takes is you and like three other people and you just go feed people. But the thing is from doing that, right, if there's other things that you're concerned about, people will bring you their problems and you can help them doing it. And this is a very good way to get into other kinds of organizing because suddenly,

Once you start building these relationships, everything sort of cycles and cycles and you know, you get involved in more and more things. Yeah. And that's kind of a, that's kind of a late stage thing that we're sort of jumping to a bit. But I want to go back to the beginnings of how, so how do you get a group of people together to do a thing?

And the answer is you kind of already know how to because you presumably, at some point in your life, have like organized a group of friends to go do something, right? You've got a group of people together to go accomplish a task. Yeah. And it could be to be anything, right? Like, yeah, if you've got some people to go to a bar, you have the skills. One way I've been thinking about it recently in my project is thinking about it as like putting together a heist crew.

Okay, I could vouch for this, right? The feeling of walking up to eight people and telling them individually, I'm putting together a team and I want you. It is, it feels, you could just do it. There is nothing stopping you. Nothing in the world can stop you from just walking up to your friend and going, I'm putting together a team.

And it feels exactly as good as you think it would for my movie. It rules. It's so fun. Amazing. Yeah. But this gets into also what kinds of people you want to do, right? Because obviously, you know, there's two vectors of this. There's on the one hand, you have the aspect of, okay, who do you know?

And a lot of organizing is just about here is a problem and I know someone who has some sort of skill or resource that can help deal with it and you put people in touch with each other. And that's organizing. That's so much organizing is literally just, hey, I have a broken part of my car. I know someone who's like a car mechanic, right? And you put them in touch and you have successfully organized people and you have built relationships and you have made

All of the sort of social web that creates organizing, you've made it stronger. Yeah, it also just feels good because, you know, and that's an auxiliary benefit to all of this is that it's a great way to sort of break the isolation we're all under. Yeah, I think the best solution for despair is

I'm thinking of a quotation here, something the busy bee have no time for despair. But the thing that makes me feel better about the world is that I have seen that people can fix massive problems with very few resources by just showing up. And I think organizing is what allows me to enter this period of time that we're entering into with a great deal more hope than I otherwise would have done.

Yeah, and do you know what else will help you enter? Is it the products and services that support this podcast? I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but we are not in control of the length of the ads. They just do it. We're sorry. Here's a really long period of ads. I'm so sorry.

We are back. So I want to return to my high school. If you're a D&D person, the other way you can think about this is you're putting together like a Dungeons and Dragons party or like an RPG party. And the way you need to think about this is, okay, so you've picked a thing that you want to do, right? You've seen something in the world that is bad and you figure you go, okay, I can do this thing to solve it. And maybe that's, you know, it's literally something as simple as feeding people. Maybe that's,

I want to start doing tenants organizing. I want to start because my rent is too high, right? People are getting evicted. I want to start doing immigration defense. And from there, you make a list. And that list is what you're interested in doing. And you try to match what things need to be done with people you know who have those skills.

And this is, you know, this, this is wishes where you release and get, get into the heist things, right? Cause everyone has their sort of like heist role. Now, obviously part of this that you want is you want to create sort of balance teams, right? You want people who have overlapping strengths. So you don't just have only one person who can do a thing.

And part of the way that successful organization works over time. And I mean, just how successful organizing works is that eventually you are trying to organize yourself out of a job, which is to say you want your organization to function such that if you're not able to do it, you know, or just you're gone or you cycle on to a next thing or, you know, any, any number of things that can happen, you want the organization to still be able to keep working without you. And you want, you're, you're trying to get people to be able to replace you as the person who's like organizing the thing, right? Yeah.

And at this point we can start talking about the kinds of skills that people need for organizing and a lot of people and this is unbelievably common when I talk to people and like especially women and especially like a lot of binary people trans people particularly have this is that. People don't believe that they have any skills.

And then you talk to them for five seconds and they're like, well, I'm good at carrying heavy objects. I'm good with kids, which is a huge one. We'll get you in a second. I don't know. I have a car. That's a huge skill. There are so many different skills that are so useful for so many things. I'm just going to go over lots of things that are actually really useful to get people a sense of the kinds of things that there are massive roles for.

So one of the most important ones, and this is something you deliberately look for, this is one of the things you do at the beginning of any union organizing campaign. Someone who's good at talking to other people and making friends, that is a staggeringly useful person. Because again, most organizing is just talking to people and building relationships. And one of the things you do when you're doing your sort of, I call it power mapping, but when you're figuring out,

how you're going to organize a workplace is you find the person who everyone likes and talks to and respects and you talk to that person because that person can, you know, can sort of like organize people down the chain because they have, they have the relationships already and also they're good. They'll be good at, you know, talking to new people and spreading the organization that way.

And so like, you know, if you're just someone who's social or, and this is also very useful, if you have a friend who is very social, because I know a lot of us are not very social, but you probably have a friend that you're thinking of right now who is very good at conversations that is charming and is good at making friendships, that person, unbelievably useful, incredibly useful and compelling skill.

Yeah. There are also things like research, people who are good at, and I think people are much better at research than they think to take like a tenants organizing example, right? One of the common things you have to do is find out stuff about a landlord, right? Yeah. And there's the higher difficulty version of that, which isn't that hard. Also, I want to, I want to mention this, but like going to a courthouse and finding records about who owns property companies. No, not that hard. It's not that hard. It's like, you could just do it, right? It's not as hard as you think it is from someone saying it.

But there's also even just easier things than that, right? That all of you probably already know how to do, which is just looking at someone's social media profiles and finding out information about them. Yeah. And this is very useful, yeah, for like union campaigns, you know, bosses. If you've ever been a person who uses dating apps, especially if you're a woman. Yeah. Yeah. Then you know how to OSIN, actually. Maybe you don't credit yourself with that skill. But 100% that you have developed that skill to keep yourself safe.

and you can use it for good. Do you want to explain what OSINT is and how that process works? Yes, sure. So, open source intelligence is an acronym that doesn't really need to exist. It's gathering information of open sources, things that are easily openly accessible, right, as opposed to like human, which is like being a spy.

or SIGINT, which is capturing signals. Open source information is you're creeping someone's Instagram, creeping their Facebook, looking at the weird fucking shit that they put on good reads, right? All the data that is out there largely on the internet about us. A lot of people put a lot of information on the internet, and it's very easy.

I would imagine that if you're under 50 and maybe you're over 52, you just know how to do this because it's what you do anyway. You want to find out about someone. Especially if you are a person who goes on dates with people who you haven't met before and haven't been introduced to by a mutual friend, but you meet on the internet, you probably already do this to keep yourself safe.

Yeah, and this is something that's very useful for, I mean, there's so many use cases for this, right? There's, you know, there's the very obvious ones where you're dealing with the local Nazi and you're trying to organize around like running them out. People say from them and you can find information about them. But I mean, it's useful for, I mean, cops who are beating people is useful for like politicians, particularly. It can be very useful for, it's useful for landlords. This happens all the time. It can be very, very useful for bosses in union campaigns.

Unions have like teams of researchers usually to like do this kind of stuff But the thing is also and this is something I don't think people understand those guys They're like the people they're hiring to be researchers are just you but they got a job being a researcher for Union like they have the same skills as you They know how to like Google stuff and they know how to look through people's like dating profiles and like look through their their Facebook's and their Instagrams and like a big one a big one and

that the rich people especially do not think about is like cash app in Venmo. Oh, Venmo is called. Because yeah, yeah, because people's people just leave public transactions up there. That's how they got what's his name, the congressional magates. Can I legally call him the congressional pedophile? I guess I call him the accused pedophile. Yeah, yeah. The man credibly accused of sleeping with an underage woman lots of times.

And one of the ways they found that was that, and also like paying for that, right? Yes. Which is rape, by the way, I want to be very clear about that. Having sex with someone who is underage is rape, it is always rape. And the way people found that was that they just looked through his cash app history and they found all of these money transfers to people. This is all very, very simple stuff that's very, very useful, organizing-wise that you already know how to do.

Pinterest is another absolute bang. So much Pinterest. People are pinning. If you're hearing some of these things and you think that you can figure out how to do this, that's also a huge skill. Finding people who are willing to learn things and willing to learn new skills

is a huge benefit to organizers because this gives you a flexible person, right? It gives you someone who can flex into any of a bunch of roles that you need and also can pick up skills to learn things. Having a car, being able to drive, and I know a lot of you don't do this, but if you do do this, you immediately, even if you literally cannot contribute anything else to a project, being able to just drive a bunch of water to a place. Oh yeah. Huge. Staggeringly useful.

The amount of things that people can't access because they can't get there is vast, especially when I talk to migrants who have recently arrived in the US, they don't have a US cell phone, they can't Uber. Oftentimes nowadays you can't even pay for mass transit with cash, you have to have a special card and you have to get to the place to get the card. The problems you can solve by being able to drive someone five miles are enormous.

especially in the US where everything is designed around everyone owning a motor car at all times.

Yeah, and like transport based skills are also very useful. I mean, if you hike a lot, that's a very, very useful skill. There's a lot of sort of mutual aid projects. There's a lot of, you know, I mean, even things like like setting up summer camps is a thing that like leftist groups do, right? And being able to hike very good for that. It's good for things like wilderness rescue. There's a lot of, you know, the games like the work you do that has to do with like going and helping migrants like

being able to hike is staggeringly useful skill. It's useful, it's important, it's okay if that's not something you can physically do or the works for the way you like to live your life. Another thing I was thinking of which can be massively important and people don't realise is

If you know how to take off a taillight and replace the bulb in it, yes, like we're entering a time when people with darker people with TBS people who are undocumented people on temporary migration status is going to be deathly afraid of any interaction with law enforcement. Yeah, if you can.

change the bulb on someone's tail light or their turn signal indicator for those of us in the UK, then you can meaningfully protect that person in a really important way. And it can literally take 10 minutes. And this is something that can scale up depending on how much skill you have. Even just very basic auto-maintenance stuff is very useful for stuff like this. But if you're a carpenter, if you're an electrician,

You do some kind of trade work, right? You do plumbing, right? That is the thing that is massively useful to a lot of people. There's a lot of other kind of just skills that you have from your job. That can be very useful. I mean, having someone to manage a spreadsheet. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's staggeringly useful. And another one that I think people don't understand that they really have, but like being able to set up a meeting

And like having a thing that lets you be like, okay, here's when everyone is free. Like you probably have to do this for your job or just for, you know, trying to get your friends to go even just like be on a call together or like go have food or like just do anything.

That is literally genuinely one of the most important skills you can possibly have as an organizer is the ability to just sort of like go talk to people and be like, hey, can you show up to this thing here?

Yeah. And that is, that is so much of just what organizing is, can you be here at this time and then trying to figure out a time? Yeah. So we're going to close out the sort of skills section with some, I think just sort of like domesticy skills that I don't think people realize are super useful. Um, if you have a button maker, you are instantly the single most useful person in any organization. I love that. Yeah.

or you can obtain a button maker. They're very easy to use, but if you have one or you know the person who has the button maker and suddenly you can just crank out buttons for every single event, they rule. Everyone loves them. It helps enormously. It's awesome. That's a badge for those who are in the Commonwealth.

Also, if you have a sewing machine. Yeah, I was about to mention that. Yeah, you're a hero. Yeah, one of my friends recently made me a little patch and it's really cool and I like it and putting it on my stuff. But if you can sew, that's a skill that I do not have. It's so great when people can

like fix stuff for someone or, you know, make stuff fit someone, you know, if you're a person who finds it hard to get clothes that you like to wear, that make you feel good. And someone, one of my friends could do that. And one of my friends was making clothes for another friend for like a renaissance fair. And like, it was the nicest thing I've seen someone do for someone else in a very long time. It really made her like, yeah.

feel like nice and cared for and like you might think that this is just a weird little thing that you like to do with your sewing machine but you can meaningfully really make someone feel cared for using that. And that's a huge part of what organizing is right and that goes into one of the things that is also an appreciable skill that's very useful is.

I mean, just like being nice to people, being kind to people, and having people around who are good at keeping groups together, that's its own distinct kind of person, is someone who can keep all of the people who are involved in a thing, enjoying being around each other. That's a kind of person who's very valuable, and it's something that you can look for, and if that's not you, that's something you can find in your friends, you can find in the people around you.

Yeah, definitely. There's also something that I think you can tell when an organization is collapsing because this is like the first thing where the quality drops. Drawing a graphic design are very, very useful because a big part of what you do organizing is like you make a flyer and you put a flyer on a bunch of telephone poles to tell people that there's a thing happening. Yeah. And

Yeah, and this is also something, you know, later on, you might be making a social media presence, but just having good artists and having good graphic design people is enormously useful for this kind of stuff. Yeah.

And along this slide, there's things like making music. And there's a bunch of different ways this can go. This can be an immediate thing where you have people on a picket line, right? And everyone's singing songs. And this is great. We love this. Also, and this is another thing that you can be thinking about in terms of what skills you have and what things you can create. Benefit shows. This has been a huge part of a lot of how some of the union stuff up here has been getting funded is by just having punk benefit shows.

And if that's the thing that you can do, or you know people in bands, you know people who make music, you know people who just make stuff who are willing to contribute it to the cars, that's great. I remember one of, we had one night last September, so cold. We were in the desert and I'm like a thousand people, right? And we were, at that point, we were really struggling to feed everyone even, you know, because there was so few of us, but my friend bought out like their guitar and some bongo drums they had. And I think I have my harmonica in my truck.

And like we were sitting around with these, we had some Sikh guys, had some Uyghur folks come from China, and then some Kurdish people, and they were all playing their different music, and it was so nice. Taking people out of a shitty situation for a moment with music, again, don't underestimate how important that is. Don't feel like if you have that skill, it's not a useful one.

No, and this is something I've been starting to say more and more. If you need a theory-brained way to say this to someone who, like, is like a crumbagity Marxist who hates fun, morale is a terrain of struggle. There's a reason why morale is one of the most important factors of military campaigns. You can't get people to do things if they're too depressed to do it. And being able to raise people's morale

It's this massive, if you want to go into technical language, it's a massive force multiplier, right? It makes everyone you have enormously more effective the better they feel about themselves and the better they feel about the situation they're in. And things like music, things like art, I mean, things like pulling pranks.

If you were a good practical jokester, this is a staggeringly useful skill. Both in terms of, you need to be careful about whether you're playing your pranks on other people in the org. But if you know how to just pull pranks, this is a really, really useful thing in union campaigns. In tenants organizing, there are a lot of people who you can prank, and it's very funny, and it lowers their morale, and it raises your morale.

Yeah, and I come back to your music as like a like morale is a terrain of struggle. Like the other memory I have last year of playing guitars is in Rajava being inside at night because everyone was getting drone struck all the time and it was dangerous to be driving around, sitting around with some Azidi friends. Like we spent all night playing the oud which is like a

It's like a guitar with a gourd on the bottom. I don't know how to describe it. It's a string instrument. It's a string instrument is what it is. And that made everyone so happy. We had such a nice evening. Everyone was able to get through this relatively difficult thing.

you know, it sucks that people have been killed and just for driving around are existing and they're bombing all this really an infrastructure and the power keeps going out and all these things, right? But there's a reason that those people have kept around after 15, 13 years of war. And it's because it is important. And so don't overlook that.

And, you know, and resisting fear is another huge aspect of this, right? A lot of the ways that people, like a lot of the ways that you demobilize people, this is why regimes like this spend a lot of effort trying to make people afraid, is that it makes it harder for you to act. And things that, you know, the things that make you less afraid, even if they sort of seem silly are very, very important. And, you know, on sort of this note, one of the things that, you know, as you've assembled your group of people, right,

One of the things that's important to be able to sort of have a grasp on is that you can't just do organizing by having it only be the capital, the serious thing, the ability, organizing thing all the time. Your organization will not hold together. There has to be actual bonds formed between you and the people you're organizing with and the people you're trying to help.

I don't want to call out any organization in particular. There is an organization that perceives organizing to exist solely in the realm of wearing a high-vis vest and carrying a clipboard and getting people to write their email addresses down and then telling them to attend things. Maybe there are several organizations like that. I don't know. I've just perceived one locally. If you don't have those bonds, those interpersonal relationships,

These things won't hang together. So many of my happiest organizing memories, again, going down James' memory lane, I guess. I have a memory of Christmas Eve last year, 2023. Me and my friends have been out. I know some of them listen, because some of them have come across from different states to help us over at Christmas holidays, which is nice. And it was cold.

And we had been feeding people all day, and then we'd heard some people in another location that we'd gone to find. And then we got to the end of the day. And like, rather than just going home, I had a bunch of, we had some MREs left, the refugee MREs sort of vegan, lots of us are vegan. So we were like, oh, I'm not going to find anything.

have a vegan food in the middle of nowhere out here. So we all sat around eating our little vegan MREs and just talking and sharing some thoughts and things we experienced over the last months of doing this and it's those moments that make your organizing group so much stronger. Don't want to telling anyone to do anything. Those genuine bonds and the love and friendship we build up between each other doing things that are very important.

don't overlook the value of those because it's extremely valuable. And this is something that I think you can understand in your own life pretty easily where, okay, if a random person on the street walks up to you and tells you to go do something, are you going to do it? And it's like, no, why? No, probably not. Like, I don't know, maybe it's something like really sort of

Hey, there's children in a burning building. We're going to run it and grab them. But like the odds are no, you're going to ignore them. But if your friend goes and tells you to do the same thing and you've been friends with them for a long time and you really care about them, the odds of you doing it are much, much higher. And that's, that's all organizing is. It's finding ways to, you have a thing to do and you go talk to people and you ask if they want to help you do it.

Yeah. And the stronger your relationships are, the more lucky that is to happen. And that's why it's very important to do things like, you know, just like having potlucks, like bringing snacks to meetings. Oh yeah. And like, you know, even if you're doing a potluck, it's good to, you know, you do like one capital O, capital T organizing thing, right? You get like a little bit of work done. Yeah. But mostly everyone's just sort of relaxing and eating chili or whatever. Yeah. If you're a baker, you know, you can bake people. That's a wonderful thing to share. Oh my God. Yes.

I just know I had a cook. I've realized I forgot to mention this one. Knowing how to cook is a staggeringly useful skill. It is useful in literally any kind of organizing you could possibly be. It is a skill that is useful in war zones. It's useful literally no matter what organization you are in. If you can cook for people, and you don't have to be a good cook. It's just like you can show up with food that you have made. You have instantly made this whole thing more successful.

Yeah, definitely. I've had some wonderful meals in water and deeply appreciated those people. More broadly, those ties, the way we organize without the state, the reason I believe that that is the way we should organize and where we will continue to organize and the way that we can make the state irrelevant is

because we understand each other as people and care about each other as people and then we approach our organizing holistically right with everyone in it knowing this person is good at this but they're struggling with this right now and i care about them so i'm not going to make them do that right now. That is how we can build sustainable communities in a way that state cannot in a way that capitalism cannot right because uh.

The fucking Hertz rent a car doesn't care or know about its employees in a way that we who organize with people in Karen and love one another do. That's where organizations will always be stronger than those created by capitalism or the state. Unfortunately, speaking of capitalism or the state, we're taking our last ad break. Hopefully it's rent a car.

We are back. So I want to wrap things up by doing a couple of doing a few things. One, I want to talk about some kind of basic organizing things that you're going to have to do that are not very difficult, but are extremely important. And second, I want to talk a bit about how we did the first organizing project that I ever was involved in, which was tenants organizing.