Community members demand police and prosecutor accountability, renew call to drop racist gang charges against BLM protesters
Yesterday, community members flooded the Phoenix City Council’s Public Safety and Justice Subcommittee meeting to demand that the committee and the City Council immediately take action to oversee the investigation of members of the Phoenix Police Department’s use of a challenge coin bearing white nationalist iconography. Court records show the coin was sold and shared among members of the Phoenix Police Department’s Tactical Response Unit.
City officials interrupted community members, one after the other, who were repeatedly asking why the challenge coin incident was not on the agenda. Council Member Betty Guardardo finally intervened and asked the Chair, Michael Nowakowski, to permit people to talk. Newly installed assistant City Manager Jeff Barton suggested moving people to the end of the meeting, but community members pressed on, disrupting the subcommittee’s agenda by demanding to know why barking dogs were more of a priority than racist police who have been targeting and helping issue false charges against protesters.
Following the meeting, Mass Liberation Arizona issued the following statement:
“We’re outraged by the City Council’s Public Safety and Justice Subcommittee’s refusal to take immediate action to oversee the investigation of white supremacists and neo-Nazis within the Tactical Response Unit. It is a heinous failure of Sergeant Doug McBride’s leadership to openly employ white supremacists on his watch. It is disgraceful but not surprising to learn that the very people who violently attacked Black Lives Matter protesters with chemicals and rubber bullets are openly exchanging neo-Nazi challenge coins.
“The City Council and the mayor must take immediate action to root out these neo-Nazis in a police department that has already proven to be the deadliest in the nation. There must be zero-tolerance for white supremacy and violence.
“We also reiterate our call for the dismissal of charges against Black Lives Matter protesters and demand that the prosecutors, April Sponsel and Nick Michaud drop all charges against protesters, especially those with gang charges and gang sentence enhancements. These charges are politically motivated and are being used as a means to quash the community’s First Amendment right to protest. It is already a mockery of justice to have white supremacists with badges arrest people speaking out against white supremacy and racist police violence. What is even more heinous are prosecutors like Sponsel being allowed to further persecute those civil rights protesters with racist gang charges and sentence enhancements.
“The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office must be held accountable for their part in perpetrating this injustice. While we are very concerned for the health and wellbeing of County Attorney Allister Adel and wish her a full and swift recovery, we are dismayed that, despite being sworn in, there is no apparent oversight of the prosecutor’s office during her recovery period. Justice cannot wait. The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office should and must remove April Sponsel now. And if Adel cannot discharge the duties of the office, she must surrender her seat. Now.
“We also call on our state legislators to remove gang laws from the law books because they are designed to target Black and brown people; which is why McBride ‘missed’ the fact that, if held to the same standards, members of his unit qualify for four of the seven legal criteria used to accuse people of street gang membership. That’s because these laws are written so broadly that they are easily manipulated to target specific people.
“Perhaps Sponsel and McBride should focus on the gang of white supremacists being paid by taxpayers to attack and arrest Black Lives Matter protesters. Those neo-Nazis are an actual violent threat to our community.
“We have proof positive of white supremacy within the Phoenix Police Department. We have documented the racist persecution of civil rights activists by the prosecutors. The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office is unresponsive. This is why people continue to turn out in the streets to demand accountability and an end to police violence and prosecutorial attacks. We demand justice.”