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kacydeneen · 5 years

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NorCal Residents Demand Change After Fatal Police Shootings

Three months ago, in this working-class port city 13 miles south of Napa Valley's rolling vineyards, cellphone video showed a white police officer conducting a traffic stop in which he drew his weapon and then tackled and handcuffed a black Marine veteran who was legally filming from his front porch.

In 2017, four Vallejo officers seen on police bodycam descended on an unarmed white man outside of his woodwork shop, throwing him to the ground and pummeling him with fists, knees and batons as he screamed, "I didn't do anything!"

That same year, an officer responding to a fight at a house party fatally shot a Latino man believing he was wielding a knife.

Last year, an elderly black driver mistakenly turned down a closed street — and said she was met by a young white officer who berated her and left her "extremely shaken."

These handful of police encounters and other cases made available in city records, court documents and police reports and through interviews with residents, attorneys and activists represent what they say is a wider pattern of excessive force and overly aggressive policing in their Bay Area community of 122,000 people, feeding into a belief that there is a lack of transparency and accountability for officers' conduct.

Now, a plea for an outside agency or civil rights group to review the Vallejo Police Department has been renewed by residents and activists after the fatal shooting in February of a young black rapper, Willie McCoy, by six officers — the 16th death involving Vallejo officers since 2011, police records show. In San Francisco, with a population more than seven times Vallejo's, the police department has been involved in 22 fatal shootings since 2011.

The majority of those killed by the police in Vallejo have been black and Latino men, police records show. The city remains evenly divided among white, black, Latino and Asian residents.

As in Vallejo, similar concerns have been raised in cities across the country over police interactions that can cost millions of dollars in civil lawsuits, sow distrust, and produce questions about whether independent oversight or outside monitoring is warranted.

"Can we not use the O.K. Corral tactics?" asked Askari Sowonde, a longtime black resident of Vallejo who last fall organized a community meeting around de-escalation tactics of the police department. "We've become the wild, Wild West. That has to change. We're losing too many lives."

Attorneys for McCoy's family say he was shot around 25 times. Employees at a Taco Bell called police after they found him slumped over and unresponsive in his car in the drive-thru with a gun on his lap. After officers arrived at the scene, they discovered the car was locked and in drive. The officers were in the process of blocking in the car when McCoy woke up, and police said in a press release that he failed to listen to verbal and visual commands and was shot when six officers surrounding the car believed he was reaching for the gun. His family says the weapon was for protection, and police say it was stolen.

Police Chief Andrew Bidou called the situation a "tragedy."

While the incident remains under investigation by the Solano County District Attorney's Office and the officers were returned to duty three weeks after the shooting, Vallejo police on March 29 released bodycam footage after pressure from the family, saying they did so to "facilitate a community dialogue about the facts of this incident."

Michael Gennaco, a former federal prosecutor and a founder of the California-based OIR Group, which provides independent oversight of law enforcement departments, said the internal review processes for many police agencies just aren't "robust" enough to effectively evaluate officers who have used force to determine if they are still fit to wear a badge.

The Vallejo Police Department does have an Internal Affairs Division, and Bidou can order it to investigate whether officers in use-of-force cases acted appropriately before making a final determination about disciplinary action. It wasn't immediately clear how many officers they have investigated or filed disciplinary actions against.

"When it comes down to it," Gennaco said, "a police agency is only as good as its worst officer."

SHINING A LIGHT

In 2011, Alicia Saddler's mother moved her family to Vallejo to escape the gun violence and crime afflicting their neighborhood in Oakland, about 20 miles to the south. Saddler and her younger brother, Angel Ramos, then 15, settled comfortably into their new community, made up of charming Victorian homes and a shuttered naval shipyard that lured a diverse population.

"Everything was great for a while," Saddler, now 29, said recently, "until the police came in and turned our family upside down."

In January 2017, her family was hosting a house party. People had been drinking for hours, and by early morning, a fight broke out.

Vallejo police were called, and Officer Zachary Jacobsen told investigators that he witnessed a brawl occurring above him on a second-story balcony. He said he saw a man — later identified as Ramos — holding a kitchen knife and making a stabbing motion toward another person.

Jacobsen said that he already had his firearm out because of the nature of the call and that he had explicitly "seen the guy who had the knife inside the house," according to Solano County District Attorney's Office documents recently released by the city. Once Ramos appeared and Jacobsen believed he was stabbing the other person, documents indicate the officer fired his gun four times, killing Ramos.

Family members said to investigators the fight involving Ramos began after he was roused from sleep and rushed over to defend his sister amid a larger melee.

Witnesses told police that Ramos, 21, had been holding a knife inside the house and began swinging it at two others. Police said the two others suffered lacerations and one also had an open wound. The knife was taken away from Ramos, and then he reached for a second one. But when the alcohol-fueled fight moved to the balcony, Ramos was no longer armed, his family told investigators.

Attorneys for the family would later say Ramos was making a punching motion, and not a stabbing one. One officer told investigators that Ramos appeared to be making a striking motion with the bottom of his fist, while another officer said that he did not see a knife, but based on Ramos' movements would have also used lethal force if Jacobsen had not shot him, according to the district attorney's findings.

Amid the chaos, police said, no one listened to commands to break away. Saddler was arrested for resisting and obstruction as her brother lay dying beside her. She was never charged with a crime.

A Solano County District Attorney's Office investigation ended last year with officials concluding that Jacobsen, who had been on the force since 2013, "acted lawfully" and he was "in reasonable fear that Angel Ramos was going to murder another person," according to their findings. The office also concluded that "it can be clearly stated that Angel Ramos was armed with a knife," although it was unclear where — either in the house or on the deck — he stabbed someone, according to the report.

The family said they still had questions: Did Jacobsen really see Ramos holding a knife? Why did he fire toward a dimly lit balcony with an obstructed view and with small children and other witnesses close by? And why didn't he deploy a Taser, as another officer had done, or allow another officer with a clearer vantage point to intervene?

Police insisted Ramos was armed, which the family disputed in the months after his death as they held rallies and vigils maintaining that he didn't have to die.

Then, Saddler told NBC News, the harassment began.

She said that officers shined spotlights into the windows of the family's home, flashed emergency lights and blared sirens as an intimidation tactic, and that her request to Bidou, the police chief, to make it stop went ignored.

Bidou did not respond to requests for comment through the department about the family's allegations as well as overall concerns about policing in the city.

Saddler's family filed a federal lawsuit against the department, which alleges wrongful death and the violation of the family's civil rights. The suit, filed in August 2017, says that five months after the shooting, a man claiming to be a Vallejo police officer "accosted" Saddler in a nightclub parking lot and said that her family "needed to quit pursuing legal actions."

The city denied the various allegations in its answer to the lawsuit. A jury trial is set for October.

At a rally in front of Vallejo City Hall in February, Saddler and other families gathered amid a sea of posters with pictures and messages about loved ones who died in police shootings.

"There is no justice for the daily hell that we're living," said Paula McGowan, whose son, Ronell Foster, 32, was fatally shot in 2018 during what police said was a "violent physical struggle" with an officer — who would be one of the six involved in this year's shooting of McCoy. (A lawsuit is pending against the city by Foster's family, and the city in its response has denied all allegations of unreasonable and excessive force. A district attorney's investigation remains ongoing.)

"Something is rotten within the Vallejo Police Department," added John Burris, an Oakland civil rights attorney who grew up in Vallejo and represents several of the families suing the city of Vallejo.

When it was Saddler's turn to speak, she clasped her cellphone in her hands and trembled.

"I never imagined it would be the police that would come and kill my brother," she said. "Why are so many people dying at the hands of these officers? My family has lost all faith and has nothing but fear in our hearts when it comes to cops."

Police did not respond to Saddler's comments. Seven months after Ramos' death, Jacobsen would be involved in another shooting. He and four other officers fired at a man who led them on a high-speed freeway chase and got out of the car holding up a machete and screaming, "Kill me." The officers — believing he was a threat to the public — shot him 41 times, according to the coroner's inquest report. A jury at an inquest hearing last year ruled his death a suicide by police, and found there was no wrongdoing by officers.

Among the officers involved in that case was David McLaughlin, who joined Vallejo's force in 2014 after two years in Oakland. Earlier this year, McLaughlin was in the spotlight again for confronting Adrian Burrell, the black Marine veteran who was filming a traffic stop from his front porch involving his cousin about 30 feet away.

Cellphone video shared by Burrell shows McLaughlin ordering him to "get back" and accusing him of interfering with the stop. He then approaches Burrell and tells him to "stop resisting," at which point Burrell told NBC News he was slammed into a wall and swung into a pole, where he knocked his head and sustained a concussion. He was then handcuffed. Only after McLaughlin learned that he was a veteran with no police record, Burrell added, was he released from the back of a police car.

Bidou called for an "expeditious" internal affairs investigation after Burrell's video began circulating on social media. McLaughlin remains on leave following the incident.

Burrell said he feels fortunate it didn't turn out worse — with him getting swept up in the criminal justice system or losing his life — but he wants to shine a light on the police department after filing a legal claim alleging false arrest and negligence.

The city has yet to respond to that claim.

A 'PROBLEMATIC CULTURE'

The prevalence of cellphone recordings and officer body cameras has opened up Vallejo to increased scrutiny in other cases — and exposed what some say is a web of connections between them.

For instance, an officer in the McCoy shooting, Mark Thompson, was also involved in an alleged use-of-force incident in July 2017 involving a white man named Carl Edwards.

Edwards, 49, said he was tinkering with his fence outside of his woodwork shop when a group of officers "worked in concert" to "viciously beat him," according to a lawsuit filed last September against the city, the police department, the police chief and the four officers.

Bodycam footage purportedly taken from one of those officers, Spencer Muniz-Bottomley, appears to show him pulling up to the scene, walking up to Edwards at his fence and commanding him to "put your hands on your head, bro." NBC News does not know what, if anything, occurred before the footage was shot.

As Edwards begins to question the officer, using an expletive, Muniz-Bottomley immediately pulls Edwards down, and in a matter of seconds, other officers are on top of him. His face and hands are bloodied on the pavement. He shouts repeatedly, "I didn't do anything!" and "Why are you laughing?"

Edwards obtained the video as part of his case, and later found it had surfaced on social media, his attorney, Michael Haddad, told NBC News. According to the lawsuit, Edwards suffered multiple injuries, including head trauma, a broken nose, and cuts and bruises across his face and body.

Haddad said that police were investigating a call about a man using a slingshot on children, and that Edwards was misidentified as a suspect. In addition, he said in the lawsuit, the officers falsified reports claiming Edwards had been identified as having thrown the rocks. Charges of assault with a deadly weapon and resisting an officer against Edwards were dismissed last summer.

Muniz-Bottomley, who was hired in Vallejo in 2015, was no longer with the department last fall, although police officials have not said what led to his departure.

"There's a clear, very problematic culture in the Vallejo Police Department," Haddad said, adding that "I suspect that a lot of community members feel powerless."

"This kind of rampant brutality and lawlessness in the police department can't go on without enablers in the city government," he said.

The city has denied the allegations of wrongful or negligent conduct in Edwards' lawsuit. Efforts to reach Muniz-Bottomley for comment were unsuccessful.

Vallejo Mayor Bob Sampayan referred questions about policing practices and the city's financial costs to the city manager's office and the police department, which did not immediately respond to follow-up calls and emails.

The toll that questionable police conduct takes can be counted in a less apparent way: a city's bottom line.

"One of the most astonishing things to me is when you look at the big cities, they pay out tens of millions of dollars a year, every year," said Samuel Walker, a professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and a police oversight scholar.

For instance, in Oakland, whose police department has been under federal court monitoring since 2003, roughly $3 million was spent annually from 1990 to 2014 to settle police lawsuits, according to an analysis by the independent reporting project Oakland Police Beat.

In Vallejo, civil rights lawsuits and claims in connection with the police department have cost the city more than $7 million in settlements since 2011, according to city settlement records examined by NBC News. (Still pending are about a dozen other cases and claims indicating potential lawsuits.)

The settlements don't imply wrongdoing by the city, but they can be an easier and cheaper alternative than going through the courts.

Last year, City Attorney Claudia Quintana told the City Council that "escalating costs of defending claims and paying claims" were leading Vallejo to drop out from its municipal insurance pool, which it had belonged to since 1987 and helped shoulder the costs of litigation.

Previously, the city's risk fund was responsible for paying up to $500,000 of a settlement, and the insurance pool would cover the rest. But the pool's board voted to raise the city's deductible amount to $2.5 million because its losses were "large and disproportionate" compared to other cities. Vallejo, instead, joined a new insurance pool in July.

The financial hardships resonate deeply in Vallejo, which was mired in bankruptcy from 2008 to 2011 as it struggled with a reputation for crime and remained relegated to the fringes of the region's tech boom. Residents lament that the money set aside for lawsuits could have instead gone to pot-holed streets, social services, schools or even additional officers.

The city was paying its officers and firefighters six-figure salaries before last decade's deep recession, after which the police force fell from a high of 158 officers in 2005 to fewer than 95 in 2012. There are now about 100 officers in Vallejo, although local leaders have acknowledged in recent years that the department was "woefully understaffed."

WHAT ABOUT OVERSIGHT?

Critics of the Vallejo police say the department's strained past shouldn't thwart its ability to make substantive changes.

"We have police policing police," Burrell, the ex-Marine confronted filming the traffic stop, said. "It gets swept under the rug. The police department becomes complicit in creating a culture of violence."

The idea that some officers might rack up excessive-force allegations against them or be involved in multiple shootings, including fatal ones, while remaining on duty is exemplified in the case of former Vallejo Officer Sean Kenney. He was involved in three fatal shootings over six months in 2012 — in two he was the lone officer — and was promoted to detective before he was formally cleared in all of the deaths.

Police records show he was involved in a 2017 shooting in which he was hospitalized with minor injuries, and a lawsuit against the city is pending in that case. In the three fatal shootings in 2012, three separate lawsuits filed by the respective families were settled with the city totaling nearly $2.5 million, and the city did not admit liability or responsibility.

Kenney retired from the department in December, and started his own consulting company for law enforcement agencies called Line Driven Strategies LLC. He has since tried to solicit work with the Vallejo Police Department, according to The Vallejo Times-Herald.

He told the newspaper last month that "I wish the shootings and other traumatic events never happened" but also that "we would be foolish not to learn from the good and bad experiences we all experience." Kenney declined to comment to NBC News.

Walker said officers in general are thrown into dangerous and demanding situations as part of the job, and they have legitimate concerns when they feel demoralized by budget cuts, shrinking staff and public criticism.

Following the McCoy shooting, the Vallejo Police Officers Association reiterated the challenges faced in making split-second decisions, particularly when a person appears to be armed and fails to follow commands.

"Officers receive countless hours of training to resolve emergency and dangerous situations without having to resort to taking someone's life. That is a massive responsibility that weighs heavily on each officer — in Vallejo and across the Nation," the union said in a statement in February, adding, "It is unreasonable to believe police officers have the skills to shoot someone in the arm or shoot the gun out of their hand. This is real life, not television. Maybe more importantly, we cannot be asked to wait to see if the subject is going to shoot first and hope they miss, potentially injuring or killing an innocent citizen."

Walker said that even if an officer's actions are determined by a department or prosecutors to be justified in case after case, that shouldn't dissuade a reexamination of training and policies for how to best preserve life. From 2010 to 2018, 13 officers in Vallejo were involved in at least two shootings each, according to police records.

"There's clearly something wrong here," Walker said.

The city in 2013 worked with federal mediators from the Justice Department's Community Relations Service to ease tension between residents and the police department after officers fatally shot a man who had a pellet gun inside of his car. That partnership led to a community relations section being formed within the department.

But Gennaco, the former federal prosecutor, said it remains incumbent on a city's leaders and community members to be vocal if they want accountability, an active citizen advisory board or an outside monitor for police.

Such an undertaking can be challenging under the Trump administration.

In 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions rolled back Obama-era efforts to investigate police departments accused of a "pattern or practice of civil rights violations. At the time, 14 police departments across the country were under Justice Department consent decrees — agreements that would enforce the overhaul of the local police. But now, new agreements are much more difficult to obtain, so states, if they are so inclined, are being forced to fill the void.

"It's a terrible step backwards," Walker said.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a Democrat, agreed last year to oversee changes within the San Francisco Police Department that were started by the Justice Department after the deadly shooting of a black man in 2015 that drew protests.

Becerra's office told NBC News that while local district attorneys handle individual incidents involving police, the state will "occasionally undertake a broader review of these agencies where our office's involvement in these matters is merited and necessary when weighing a variety of factors." The office declined to comment about Vallejo.

The city has not seen the same unrest that has unfolded in other Bay Area communities or Sacramento after questionable police shootings. There have been calls from some residents for Police Chief Bidou's resignation, and he said in March that he would be stepping down after more than four years on the job. City officials, however, said his retirement was already in the works and voted unanimously Tuesday night to allow him to remain as interim chief until a successor is found.

Mayor Sampayan, who told the City Council he has been fielding visits from "people coming into my office to talk to me about what they see is a police department that's running amok," said before the vote that the city will conduct a national search for a new chief with the help of the community.

But while residents have given Bidou credit for increasing training programs for officers and community outreach initiatives, including "Coffee with the Cops" and basketball for children, there remain setbacks for some.

Brenda Crawford, 72, who works as an advocate for elderly residents in the city, said she was driving last year when she accidentally turned down a public street that had been closed for a film set. The young officer who stopped her was "red-faced" and irate, and threatened to give her a $500 ticket, she said.

Such interactions undercut the goodwill of other officers, Crawford said.

"I love Vallejo, and I don't want to indict all police officers," she said. "But people have a feeling that these rogue ones — who can be so absolutely brutal — are the best Vallejo can get."

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com.

Photo Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images This story uses functionality that may not work in our app. Click here to open the story in your web browser. NorCal Residents Demand Change After Fatal Police Shootings published first on Miami News

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repwincostl4m0a2 · 8 years

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Anger At Donald Trump Could Break The Democrats' Midterm Curse

WASHINGTON ― Running for Congress under even the best circumstances is a grind: Up early for breakfast meetings, on the trail all day and finish with an evening event. The time between your head hitting the pillow and your alarm going off gets squeezed until there’s little of it left. Then you get up and do it again.

Doing all that to win is one thing. Doing it just to get wiped out at the polls requires a level of dedication bordering on bonkers.

That means that one of the first questions top potential candidates ask party handlers before making the decision is a simple one: “Can I win? If so, show me the numbers.”

But a funny thing is happening this time around: Democratic prospects, in conversations with party elders, are skipping that question. Meredith Kelly, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said that the question of how winnable a race is is often among the top concerns. This year, the energy among Democratic activists has persuaded potential candidates that anything is possible.

“So far, this cycle is very different,” she said. “People are coming to us in a way that’s new and exciting, and it’s clear that we will have strong candidates across an expanded battlefield in 2018.”

Finding good candidates has been even easier this year than it was in 2016, bucking a years-long trend.

“Despite the fact that presidential cycles tend to benefit Democrats in terms of turnout, recruitment was not easy last cycle,” Kelly said. “Our political department ultimately recruited a number of strong, successful candidates, but it was only after camping out in districts and going person to person, sometimes for months, until they found someone qualified and interested in running.”

It started with the Women’s March events in January, when around 4 million people took to the streets around the country, for the largest single-day rally in American history. It continued with surging turnout in special elections from Minnesota to Iowa to Virginia, Connecticut and Delaware. It has flowed down to Georgia, where a 30-year-old Democrat, Jon Ossoff, is attempting to take Republican Tom Price’s House seat. Ossoff is breaking fundraising records thanks to a burst of small-dollar support from around the country. And now in Montana, Rob Quist, a bluegrass legend, has jumped into the race for the Democrats to fill the seat vacated by Ryan Zinke, who, like Price, joined President Donald Trump’s cabinet.

Quist has a long history of public service and charitable work and is wildly popular in Montana, but he has never run for office. Trump has changed things. Groups that have exploded since the election, like Swing Left, Flippable and the Sister District Project, are funneling money and volunteer resources from blue districts to where it’s needed more.

Democrats have been bad at getting out their base in recent midterm elections ― although history is on their side this time around, since the party in control of the White House traditionally suffers losses in these off-year elections. But with midterm turnout low, the best candidates often take a pass at making a bid. Without good candidates, turnout falls lower, accelerating a vicious cycle.

The Democratic Party is face an uphill climb in the Senate in general, but particularly this year: Democrats are defending 25 of the 34 seats up for grabs. Winning the 218 seats needed to take back the House of Representatives is a daunting task as well, no matter how much energy is in the streets, because Republicans have used their power at the state level to redraw districts to favor them. The fact that Democrats tend to cluster in major cities also plays a role in sorting voters in a way that allows Republicans to claim 55 percent of the seats, even though more people voted for Democrats for Congress.

But Republicans can’t gerrymander a state ― and 36 states have governors races in 2018. Those elections will be critical in helping to un-gerrymander the damage that was done after the 2010 census. Nine of those are in currently Republican-governed states that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton won in 2016, and at least another half dozen are well within reach. Another nine are currently held by Democrats.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has already had more than 175 serious conversations or meetings with potential recruits in more than 55 districts ― far more than in past cycles. The group said it’s seeing more interest from veterans, who are concerned about Trump’s views on national security and see running for office as a second call to duty.

There’s also been a surge of interest from people who have never run for office and now want to at least explore stepping up to the plate. This trend is happening even in GOP bastions like Utah and South Carolina. When the state party opened up registration for a March candidate training, officials sold out of their 50 tickets in the first day. A week later, the party expanded it to 200 spots ― and again immediately sold out.

In a wave election, districts that are evenly split swing toward the party that is surging ― Democrats in 2006 and 2008, then Republicans in 2010 ― and districts that lean toward the majority party become winnable. In a district which went for Trump by 10 points, it’s not hard to see how that becomes a tight race under the right circumstances.

Mark Fraley, chairman of the Monroe County, Indiana Democratic Party, said that Democrats on the ground are fired up, and Republicans are checking out. Stephanie Hansen, who won a Delaware special election in February, saw the same thing, moving what was a two point race to an 18 point blowout.

“If our people are mobilized and Trump supporters are demoralized, then yes, some of these races that have nine-point Republican advantages start looking close,” Fraley said. “A lot of Trump’s core supporters aren’t going anywhere, but you start seeing demoralization among working people ― they voted for Obama twice, then Trump. If we’re not seeing the changes they hoped to see you’ll be able to see disengagement on that part.”

There are, meanwhile, eight districts that could be easier picking for Democrats. These seats ― one each in Arizona, New Jersey and Kansas, two in Texas and three in California ― are all congressional districts that voted for the GOP presidential candidate in both 2008 and then 2012 ― and then went for Hillary Clinton this past cycle. They’re also all still represented by GOP House members. It won’t be easy, of course. Texas’s 7th district hasn’t elected a Democrat to Congress since 1967.

One of those seats is currently held by veteran congressman Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), an eccentric libertarian-leaning Republican who’s been in office nearly 30 years. He faced his toughest challenge in 2008, but still won by some 10 points and hasn’t faced a true challenge since. That changed this year, thanks in large part to the endless demonstrations local Democrats have held against Rohrabacher.

The Women’s March, coupled with the activist movement here ... was the biggest motivation that now is the time for all of us to get involved and be the change we want to see. Californian Democratic candidate Harley Rouda

Local businessman Harley Rouda, seeing the energy in the streets, decided to jump in and challenge Rohrabacher.

“The energy is what motivated me to get in the race, hands down,” he said. “The Women’s March, coupled with the activist movement here ... was the biggest motivation that now is the time for all of us to get involved and be the change we want to see.”

It mattered to Rouda that, with the uptick in anti-Trump energy, the race seems winnable.

“I’ll be straight with you,” he said. “The fact that midterms don’t typically draw voters out ... is tempered by the populist movement we’ve got going here. Now is the time to tap into that crowd who really want to get engaged and committed to making that difference.”

In some rare cases, there may even be too much engagement. California has a top-two primary system, meaning the top two finishers, regardless of party, go on to compete in the general election, even if both are from the same party.

Christy Smith, a progressive school board president in the Los Angeles region, had her eye on California’s 25th congressional district, a seat held tenuously by Republican Stephen Knight, but one carried in 2016 by Clinton. The DCCC in 2014 had backed Bryan Caforio, who raised a lot of money but never connected with voters and lost by six points. With the energy coursing through the district, a campaign began to draft Smithto jump in the race. He’s popular with both supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and those who backed Clinton. Smith gave it a lot of thought, and when first interviewed by The Huffington Post this month, she was undecided. “I was riding two horses with one ass,” she joked a week later, having finally made up her mind to run for state assembly rather than Congress.

Her reasoning, she said, was two-fold.

“California is on the leading edge of what’s possible with effective government,” she said. “To be able to be a part of that could be tremendous and allow me a lot of latitude to really get things done for people in my district and bring resources back.”

Strategically, though, it was also the smarter move. “With all of this newfound energy, there’s not a lot of understanding of strategy with those folks, because they’re new to the game,” she said. “There’s a broad ‘y’all come’ attitude, with people coming out of the woodwork.”

That’s great when it comes to turnout, but California has a top-two system, meaning that the top two finishers in the primary, regardless of party, go on to the general election. If a big batch of Democrats run, then Republicans tend to run only two candidates. That can allow those two candidates to finish one and two, while Democrats split the remainder among themselves. That puts two Republicans on the general election ballot.

“We need to be smart if we’re going to flip this district,” she said.

HuffPost Survey: Should Democrats in Congress resist Trump across the word, or work with him where there is common ground?

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wordswithwayman · 8 years

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Interview w/ Poet Bethany Moore

Recently, I got a chance to interview Bethany Moore about her works of poetry. Bethany is a Denver based poet who recently published two books of poetry. Hope you enjoy this format, and be sure to let us know what you think of it, on Twitter and Facebook @wordswithwayman

1. When did you get your start in poetry and how did you find it? I’ve been writing poetry since I was a really young child, and thankfully I feel I’ve improved in my style and technique over the years! It was one of the ways I entertained myself as an only child, in addition to writing and singing songs and dancing and other theatrics. I’ve always been one of those expressive types. I remember writing little stories in Kindergarten, and later being strongly encouraged by my 5th grade teacher in Southern Maryland of Hollywood Elementary School, Ms. Betty Brady, to pursue seriously writing poetry. As a teacher and member of the community, she was a great leader for literary programs like poetry festivals in our school. I was so impacted by her encouragement in elementary school that I remember her influence all these years later, and I included her in my dedications in my second poetry book, “Weather Magick”. Thanks to the magic of Facebook, we’ve been able to stay in contact after all these years (I was her student in 1992-1993) and she was so pleased to hear I’m still writing and that I’ve published some of my work. I sent her a copy in the mail recently, too, and it was a nice feeling to see that kind of positive influence come full circle in a way after, oh, twenty-five years. Throughout high school, I was all about the after-school poetry club, which we all referred to as “The Writer’s Society” - and yes, we were certainly a crew of eccentrics and misfits. Then, in my early twenties, I participated in open-mic poetry events in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C., for many years. I lived in Portland, Oregon, for a stint in 2009-2011 and enjoyed checking out open-mic readings and even hosted a couple of “Retro Speakeasy”-style poetry and jazz events during my time there. For the last three years here in Denver, Colorado, I sometimes hit the mic on Sunday evenings at the Mercury Cafe and other venues like Mutiny Information Cafe. Poetry has always manifested as a quintessential part of who I am in my identity all along, to be honest.

2. You’ve released two books of poetry lately “The Cicada and the Firefly” and “Weather Magick", how did these books come about and why now? It was always my intention to publish my collection of poetry from throughout the years I’ve been writing, at least since I was an adult. Last year, in January, I finally set a goal to publish my first collection on or before my birthday in late September. So I researched online self-publishing tools and settled on Amazon’s CreateSpace platform and began going through my collections and formatting the pages. It was the end of March last year in 2016 when I got very sad news about a close friend of mine that I’d known since I was fourteen years old. His name was Benjamin Johnson, Benny, and he was very influential on my life as a kind of soulmate. Unfortunately, he struggled with demons such as drug addiction, and met his untimely death last spring when he was struck by a car. Honestly, this was the first time someone close to me had passed away, and I grieved deeply for quite awhile. During the grieving process, I dug up every poem and journal entry I could find that referenced my feelings for Benny, or our experiences together, over many years, dating back to when I was a teenager. I compiled them and formatted them into their own collection as a way to honor him and our relationship together. It was important to me to prioritize this collection first. I published by mid September. My soul had to release it out to the universe. Because of the nature of how he came in and out of my life, which you can read about intimately, you’ll understand the reference to insects in “The Cicada and the Firefly: a study of love and insects” when you read through the storyline in real-time poetry and prose. As for second book published on October 31, 2016, titled, “Weather Magick: a collection of poetry and witchcraft”, it is a selection of 31 poems from my general collection, which you’ll find references to nature, both serene and disastrous, and the emotional turmoil involved in growing up and maturing in a world of life, love, and spiritual journey. I reference ritual and alchemy, and other Pagan concepts are easy to find in my writing if you’re an adept. As this writing is an outlet that helps with my spiritual and mental balance, it’s just as important to share this writing with others as it is to produce it for my own catharsis to begin with. I hope and wish that this display of my journey, the joy and pain and everything between, provides a realm of understanding and language for others seeking to know that they’re not alone in this world.

3. Who are your poetic influences? My quick three responses are Emily Dickensen, Sylvia Plath, and Dorothy Parker. I also find myself inspired by Margaret Atwood, and then a dive back into the works of the Sufi poet Rumi. When I was younger, back in Ms. Brady’s fifth grade class, I remember being greatly inspired by the work of Langston Hughes.

4. How do you write? Do you have a time of the day that you are most productive or do you wait till it comes to you? It’s difficult for me to write at home, actually, so I find myself at coffee shops and local brew pubs to get that time out of my daily routine and usual pattern of function in order to get the headspace to reflect and write in my handwritten journals. So, weekday evenings at pubs, for sure, and weekends give me more flexibility for the coffee shop writing sessions. Bonus if the weather is nice and I can sit outside for the writing process.

5. How does being a witch influence your poetry? Being a witch influences my writing more and more as I accept it as not only a part of who I am, fully embracing this part of me while being brave against a world that may not understand me, and also allowing my poetry to channel the voice of the witch without fear or perhaps concern that the symbolism or concepts won’t translate to the general public. I’d like to think that those who gather Pagan spiritual concepts will recognize those patterns and references in my writing, but also that those who aren’t adept in such practices will still be moved and perhaps intrigued by the archetypes and metaphors presented enough to find inspiration.

6. How do poets look at the world differently from other people? I can’t speak for other poets, but for me, I know I feel this world, every experience, every insecurity, every possibility, every dynamic, more intensely than most in this world. For those of us who need to express ourselves and be heard, to bear witness to the complicated suffering of this world; words, prose, and poetry is our gospel to the universe.

7. How did you find and begin to practice paganism as a child? The short answer is that I was an odd child who found the cool part of the bookstore in Barnes and Noble at an early age. I was easily interested in subjects like astrology and faery lore and animal magic by the age of ten or so. By age twelve, I was reading books on more intermediate subjects like Celtic magic and crystal healing and the Tarot, mostly a self-taught solitary student, though by age fourteen, I started working and studying at the local Wiccan shop in my small rural town that opened up called ‘Keepers of the Moon Garden’, and there I was mentored under the wing of the shop owner, Theresa, and thus began my more formal and serious study of Paganism by a state-recognized circle. My parents were, thankfully, very supportive. My father does woodworking as a skilled hobby and even built my spiritual altar which has a dark-wood inlay of a pentacle on the surface. I am blessed to have had such support when so many of my peers were being rejected by their families and loved ones for their ideas and beliefs along the Pagan path.

8. What do you want your books to do for people? This is a great question to consider. Somewhere between the exhibitionist expressive artist, and the confessional, sometimes commanding mystic, I suppose I simply wish to share my experience as fully and wholly as I can with anyone who seeks to commiserate or feel they are not alone in this complex human existence. Perhaps to learn from my pain and my experience, so that others can maybe suffer a little less.

9. Have you ever performed your poetry in front of people? And if so, how did it feel to perform words you wrote to an audience? Yes, many times, in many capacities, and I still feel that nervous reaction each time I begin, blushing cheeks and quivered-voice, worry of sounding ridiculous or worse, but I’ve continued to be brave and follow my truly fiery inner need to share my words with the world, so I power through, sweaty forehead and all. The reward begins with the release, and then anyone who relates to you therein gives you reassurance on occasion. The most important part, however, is that you are brave and give your voice the volume of sound it deserves.d

10. Denver is getting more and more expensive, is it hard to be a creative person there these days? Are you full-time poetry or do you work a day job? Yeah, definitely, I think about it often and it’s difficult to know where the benefits of the rental versus ownership market lands for most of us here. I proudly and very gratefully have been a full-time employee of the National Cannabis Industry Association since January of 2014 where I do communications, media, and public relations projects. It’s a non-profit trade association, so I don’t make big corporate bucks, but I do make a decent living and love working hard in an industry where I have roots in the activist movement before it even really became an industry. There are good people shaping the roots of the cannabis industry, and as a healer and activist, doing this work is greatly rewarding in my path. I enjoy multimedia production, managing website content, managing and hosting our weekly podcast, and working with video content, so that allows me a path of creative expressiveness in my routine work, which is pretty exciting. My career in non-profit political and social justice issues as well as my personal activism and artistic endeavors have kept me busy through the years, and I certainly prefer it that way. “Idle hands…” and so on, perhaps. So I do my best to make time to show up at open-mic nights when I can, and I am planning more opportunities to reach out to various venues and book stores to share my work. It’s so cool to see the culture of Denver in particular with the cornerstone neighborhood bookstores that create welcoming environments for local authors to participate in the literary economy. So I’m selling poetry books independently as an artistic revenue income stream in my spare time. I self-publish through Amazon’s CreateSpace. Through that platform, the revenue percentages that I see are about half the retail price the author or creator assigns. Author’s copies can be ordered for a reasonable charge which allows for direct personal sales, though shipping charges apply. There’s math involved, and it basically comes down to an occasional flux in a boost of sales which gives me a nice few dollars of sales here and there. But I’m also issued tax-related forms from these sales which are accounted for when I file my yearly taxes. But there you are, marketing yourself, responsible for all your sales and taxes when ordered online. It’s just one avenue to get one’s art out there, knowing the risks and losses and work involved. But I just couldn’t wait anymore. It was time for me to publish. It was overdue, so I made a resolution to do it, and I did. I set out to publish one book of poems, and as it turned out, I published two. And it feels right.

11. Five years from now, best case scenario, what does your life look like? I appreciate the gravity and hopefulness of this question so much. I’ve been blessed to have on my resume several roles throughout the years as I grew at companies and organizations that have facilitated great change and impact on our society in America, and perhaps beyond. And in my growth as a person and spiritual being, advocate, activist, artist, and whatever else I think I am, I just hope to continue to find roles and opportunities where I can have an impact for the greater good. I know I’m an odd duck, a strange bird, but I think most people by this time in my life understand what I stand for and what kind of help and strength and offerings I have to give. I just want a role in five years where I can give all my best talents and skills and strengths into some greater good. I’d also like to see more progress toward my goals of “house, hound, husband, and happiness.”

12. Where can people find your stuff on the internet? Well, I’m active on most social media including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and I’ve also created a Facebook author page specific to my poetry publications. I’m very active, I always have been, on social media and I do post about my professional role in the cannabis industry as well as my Pagan-centric spirituality. It’s in my nature as a communications and media person, as well as an artist and activist through the years. So, to find me on most social media platforms, I go by ‘Beatnik Betty’. And I love to connect with friendly like-minded artists and activists.

Twitter: @BeatnikBetty Facebook: /BeatnikBetty Facebook: /BethanyMoorePoet Instagram: bqatnikbetty

I’d also love if folks interested in supporting my poetry by purchasing my publications would please find them on Amazon.com.

Weather Magick: a collection of poetry and witchcraft

The Cicada and the Firefly: a study of love and insects Thanks so much for allowing me to share my work with your audience. My message is that there are many of us out here that want to create a better world, who wish for healing and transformation, and you are not alone. Just as I seek my particular flavor of love and purpose, I hold sacred space, and know of many who hold sacred space at this time as well, with all pointing toward a greater reality. Now is the time when we must find each other and connect and share now more than ever before.

Be well, and Blessed

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