This week, we discuss the problems with police body cam footage being exempt from NH’s Right-to-Know laws, the mess with the charter school commission, and more!
CLICK HERE to watch my recent interview about The Ecstatic Pessimist (buy yours directly from me now), the Free State Project, my activism in New Hampshire, and more!
This expansive interview covers many of the essays in the book, including a 420 rally gone wrong, growing up in South Africa under apartheid, issues like police accountability, libertarianism , and more!
We discuss the border issue and the kids still being held in cages… what are you doing about it now? Also on the menu are the issue of NH police body cams not being subject to Right-to-Know disclosure, how and why the legacy media is playing you, and more!
It’s 4/20! We chat about the double standard between how citizens and police are treated when someone is fatally shot, what’s the latest on the secret list of bad cops (aka the Laurie’s List), the end of the governor’s mask mandate, and more! You can read more about why I’m excited about 4/20 HERE.
Nothing screams INTEGRITY like Sununu’s proposed appointment of a judge, Patricia Conway, who in 2015 was involved in having her husband removed from the Laurie’s List, followed by a firing of the whistleblower who made that public, which then lead to a $80,000 settlement that taxpayers had to foot. But it seems entirely plausible, that, as they claimed at the time, the removal of her husband from the secret list of bad cops was like, totes, “an error.”
But y’all keep believing this cabal in 2021 when they say, “So we must avoid an approach that is primarily punitive in nature, but rather is supportive and transparent with clear consequences for bad actors. No good officer wants to work with a bad officer, not one.” (From today’s Union Leader op-ed, “We are all in this together” by Charlie Dennis, Mark Morrison, and Marc Beaudoin.)
If ya’ll are “good cops,” trying to “put your best foot forward,” why HAS NO ONE LEAKED THE LAURIE’S LIST? Why do you always testify AGAINST ANY REFORM measures? Y’all are, if you’ll pardon my French: Full. Of. Shit.
Over the course of the past six years, various “police accountability/we’ll do better, we promise, just don’t change anything” commissions, including the most recent 2020 LEACT Commission, made recommendations, none of which actually go anywhere.
And, if you don’t think there’s a problem in NH, did you know in 2017, 25% OF ALL HOMICIDES WERE COPS KILLING CITIZENS? I haven’t run the numbers for 2020 yet, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be another bumper “justified killing” year! Justified, even when shooting fleeing people in the back.
In the meanwhile, two court decisions including one from the NH Supreme Court last year, have said to release the FULL Laurie’s List, without the redactions that shocked thousands of Granite Staters when it was printed in the Union Leader a few weeks ago. WHERE IS THE LIST, SO-CALLED “GOOD COPS” AND PROSECUTORS?
What can we do?
The best defense citizens have at this stage is to END QUALIFIED IMMUNITY, which is basically a cop’s personal “get out of jail free” card. Know how you’re told “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” well, get this, for the enforcers of the law, IT IS AN ABSOLUTE DEFENSE. Yup, they are held to a LOWER standard than the rest of us. No kidding!
Your legislators will be voting on HB 111 to END qualified immunity sometime over the next 3 days. I’ve heard due to support from liberty folks and Democrats, it will pass the House. We then need to keep the pressure on the Senate. Stay tuned!
As the government asserts more and more control over every aspect of your life, going so far as to unlawfully claim they have the right to tell you what face coverings to wear in public, our NH police become less and less transparent.
They spy on us with ill-gotten surveillance cameras, but hide their actions from us. Does this sound right to you?
Traditionally, in Manchester, we had access to the police scanners. This was a simple way for the press and public to exercise some oversight over police actions on our streets, and to know when militarized tools like the BEARCAT was deployed. Around 2016, Chief Willard, in a backroom deal with the City, simply encrypted the scanners. NO PUBLIC INPUT/HEARING WAS HELD.
Today, since it is #SunshineWeek, and I serve on Right-to-Know NH, a statewide nonpartisan coalition of open government advocates, I asked Chief Aldenberg about how he will approach MPD transparency.
The Chief refused to answer whether any active MPD are on the current redacted Laurie’s List/EES. The NH Supreme Court overruled Fenniman last year, and the “personnel record” exception no longer applies. Nor, frankly, should it ever be permissible, in a functioning open society, for state agents, especially those permitted to use lethal force, to hide their own bad behavior from citizens. Watch this week’s episode of Manch Talk for a primer on the Laurie’s List, the court cases, and where we currently stand.
When asked about the dark scanners, the Chief suggested “that’s just how it is.” Chief, you have an opportunity to reverse course on this issue, and be more open and transparent. Please consider this.
The Chief also incorrectly stated the police log is updated every 30 minutes. It’s not. AND, not all calls are logged. Why’s that?
If the police log online is now the public’s sole “check and balance,” what reassurances do we have about the veracity or timeliness of the information on the log? How can we exercise any oversight? Is this how you establish trust? I think we can do better…
Please consider your duty and oath to the NH Constitution:
[Art.] 8. [Accountability of Magistrates and Officers; Public’s Right to Know.] All power residing originally in, and being derived from, the people, all the magistrates and officers of government are their substitutes and agents, and at all times accountable to them. Government, therefore, should be open, accessible, accountable and responsive. To that end, the public’s right of access to governmental proceedings and records shall not be unreasonably restricted. The public also has a right to an orderly, lawful, and accountable government…
ACCOUNTABLE AND RESPONSIVE.
Thanks for doing the Q&A, Manchester NH Police. I look forward to seeing us make progress on these issues to improve citizens’ oversight of your department.
In honor of Sunshine Week, this Sunday, the Union Leader printed the entire redacted Laurie’s List to show Granite Staters the shocking number cops with “sustained findings of misconduct” being hidden from public view. We discuss your Constitutionally-protected Right-to-Know, recent court successes, and suspicious rollbacks being attempted at the State House. Tune in to learn more!
Learn more about this issue:
Open government
Government accountability
Catch my video asking Mayor Joyce Craig for a full, public inquiry into the deadly debacle at the Quality Inn last week.
Worried about the increasingly dangerous policing, lockdowns, and new police cameras being introduced without any public input? Join me at City Hall on Tuesday, April 9th at 5PM for a rally–1984 Is Not an Instruction Manual–to highlight these issues. You are also welcome to provide 3 minutes of public testimony at the Alderman meeting that starts at 6PM.
My LTE from today’s Union Leader:
“Demand full inquiry
To the Editor: Last week, Manchester SWAT working with the DEA deployed chemical weapons on two twenty-something small-time drug users in a hotel near Exit 1, where they died. News articles already fail to mention this use of gas, so I can only assume the official narrative will attempt to ‘memory hole’ this damning detail.
Should we believe the official version? We have no way to vet the information provided because after the unlawful 2016 West Side Lockdown, the police ‘solved’ our concerns about transparency by secretly encrypting their scanners, destroying years of tradition, and leaving law-abiding citizens in the dark.
How do we know these LEOs are ‘ones we can trust,’ rather than ones on the blacked-out Laurie’s List of misconduct the AG is actively fighting to hide from us.
Why is the DEA operating in Manchester, expending meaningful resources on small time drug users (the dead 26 year old was out on bail for 0.4 grams of crack cocaine).
Was the public at large more or less safe during this debacle? Someone doing coke in a hotel room puts me at 0% danger…
Who pays when businesses on South Willow, like Starbucks, are closed down for hours?
Who pays for the unlawful displacement of hotel guest and nearby residents?
Who pays for the damage to our Queen City’s reputation, based on what sounds like an operation that went rogue and escalated unnecessarily?
Manchester residents all pay, but the buck must stop at Mayor Joyce Craig’s desk: Demand a full public inquiry.
CARLA GERICKE
Hooksett Road
Manchester”
Today’s Union Leader has a front page article titled, Police: Encrypting scanners thwarted criminals. Of course, you should take their word for it, right? Because we now have no other source to vet police activity in our city, other than what they themselves tell us after the fact. This means there are zero checks and balances left if you care about police accountability, as I do.
The language in the article reads like a dime store novel: “thwarted,” “foiled,” “sneaky intel,” “sinister activity,” “very cunning criminal enterprise,” “merciless gang,” “iron grip,” etc.
What the article fails to mention is how the encryption of the MPD scanners in 2016 came about. Let me remind you:
- It was a backroom deal with no public input AT ALL.
- It was done right after the West Side Lockdown, during which the MPD declared what sounded like martial law and ordered ordinary West Side residents back into their homes at gunpoint.
- Many West Side residents listened to the scanner during the eleven hour ordeal in order to try to glean information about what was happening and why our rights were being curtailed. Because of the information on the scanners, we were able to piece together the facts, including that the suspect was arrested BEFORE the lockdown started.
- Many West Side residents were displeased with the handling of the unconstitutional lockdown and the subsequent encryption of police scanners. I led a protest at City Hall. You can read my speech here, which included suggestions and solutions to curb the problems of policing in secret.
“Open, honest and transparent policing can not come from actions like encrypting all police communications without any prior public discussion. Public access to information transmitted by police radios is a longstanding, healthy tradition, and to unilaterally make these communications encrypted, while increasing the use of military tactics and equipment on the streets of our city is unacceptable. It is unacceptable in a free and open society, and it is unacceptable in our hometown!”
- The MPD responded by saying they were doing “nothing nefarious.” Again, let’s just take their word for it!
Oh, Carla, I hear you say. Why are you harping on about this? That ship has sailed! But I disagree. I believe more and more people are waking up to the reality that the checks and balances between “we, the people” and the government have flipped.
The way it is supposed to work: The government is open, transparent, and accountable to the people. The government doesn’t get to keep secrets from you, because they work FOR you. (As a board member of Right to Know NH, I can tell you, this notion is now an uphill battle.)
The way it actually works: YOU have no right to privacy, YOU are spied on, YOU have no right to know what the government is up to, YOU better get back in your house when a police officer points a gun at you when you walk out your front door. Makes you wonder if they are, indeed, working for you…
The most telling sentence in the article is this: “Instead, police were the ones being spied upon as an elaborate and very cunning criminal enterprise was conducting surveillance on them.”
Let’s parse this out. Is it “spying” when you access information that is supposed to be public? Can you unilaterally decide that ordinary people must be equally punished for some bad actors? Can you call it “surveillance” when someone listens to the police scanner (as we once could)? Does this way of thinking by our police department not chill you to the bone–as it does me? Does it not unequivocally show the MPD does not understand the rights of ordinary law-abiding citizens, while grabbing those rights for themselves? Like I said, the checks and balances have been flipped upside down!
Yes, there are bad guys in the world. Yes, we want the police to catch them. But when we take away the rights of everyone because there are bad guys in the world, we have a problem. When we condone policing in secret, lockdowns, and the notion that information that was historically publicly available (and was stolen from us in a backroom deal) is now regarded as “spying on” and “surveilling” the police, we have a serious problem.
When the MPD calls for even more encryption for other public departments, like Chief Capano does in today’s article, we have a serious problem.
Hey guys: We have a serious problem! Us reasonable folks over here are stuck in the middle getting squeezed. Our rights are supposed to be inalienable, but they are being eroded in the name of “safety,” and this is unacceptable. It is a short jump from this way of thinking to tyranny.
A vote for me on November 6 is a vote for limited, Constitutional government and the restoration of our rights. You should also vote in favor of both proposed Constitutional amendments (I’ll be covering these more in the coming months, but in the meanwhile, read about it here), because these two proposals are steps in the right direction. Remember, restoring and retaining our rights is up to us all!
If you would like me to come speak at an event–I’d love to meet you!–please email me at Carla (at) Carla4NHSenate (dot) com.
Join me at my monthly "Town Square" gatherings at Manchester City Hall on the first Tuesday of August, September and October from 5:30-7PM. Learn more and RSVP on Facebook.
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