{
GET YER OWN BOWNSHIRTS 
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}
cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/7445
Police gang databases are known to be faulty. The secret registries allow state and local cops to feed civilians’ personal information into massive, barely regulated lists based on speculative criteria — like their personal contacts, clothing, and tattoos — even if they haven’t committed a crime. The databases aren’t subject to judicial review, and they don’t require police to notify the people they peg as gang members.
They’re an ideal tool for officials seeking to imply criminality without due process. And many are directly accessible to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
An investigation by The Intercept found that at least eight states and large municipalities funnel their gang database entries to ICE — which can then use the information to target people for arrest, deportation, or rendition to so-called “third countries.” Some of the country’s largest and most immigrant-dense states, like Texas, New York, Illinois, and Virginia, route the information to ICE through varied paths that include a decades-old police clearinghouse and a network of post-9/11 intelligence-sharing hubs.
Both federal immigration authorities and local police intelligence units operate largely in secret, and the full extent of the gang database-sharing between them is unknown. What is known, however, is that the lists are riddled with mistakes: Available research, reporting, and audits have revealed that many contain widespread errors and encourage racial profiling.
The flawed systems could help ICE expand its dragnet as it seeks to carry out President Donald Trump’s promised “mass deportation” campaign. The administration has cited common tattoos and other spurious evidence to create its own lists of supposed gang members, invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to send hundreds to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center prison, also known as CECOT. Gang databases The Intercept identified as getting shared with ICE contain hundreds of thousands of other entries, including some targeted at Central American communities that have landed in the administration’s crosshairs. That information can torpedo asylum and other immigration applications and render those seeking legal status deportable.
“They’re going after the asylum system on every front they can,” said Andrew Case, supervising counsel for criminal justice issues at the nonprofit LatinoJustice. “Using gang affiliation as a potential weapon in that fight is very scary.”
Information supplied by local gang databases has already driven at least one case that became a national flashpoint: To justify sending Kilmar Abrego Garcia to CECOT in March, federal officials used a disputed report that a disgraced Maryland cop submitted to a defunct registry to label him as a member of a transnational gang. The report cited the word of an unnamed informant, Abrego’s hoodie, and a Chicago Bulls cap — items “indicative of the Hispanic gang culture,” it said.
[
Related
The Evidence Linking Kilmar Abrego Garcia to MS-13: A Chicago Bulls Hat and a Hoodie](https://theintercept.com/2025/04/18/trump-kilmar-abrego-garcia-ms13-gang-database/)
The case echoed patterns from Trump’s first term, when ICE leaned on similar information from local cops — evidence as flimsy as doodles in a student’s notebook — to label immigrants as gang members eligible for deportation. As Trump’s second administration shifts its immigration crackdown into overdrive, ICE is signaling with cases like Abrego’s that it’s eager to continue fueling it with local police intelligence.
Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council, argued that this kind of information-sharing boosts ICE’s ability to target people without due process.
“This opens the door to an incredible amount of abuse,” she said. “This is our worst fear.”
In February, ICE arrested Francisco Garcia Casique, a barber from Venezuela living in Texas. The agency alleged that he was a member of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang at the center of the latest anti-immigrant panic, and sent him to CECOT.
Law enforcement intelligence on Garcia Casique was full of errors: A gang database entry contained the wrong mugshot and appears to have confused him with a man whom Dallas police interviewed about a Mexican gang, USA Today reported. Garcia Casique’s family insists he was never in a gang.
It’s unclear exactly what role the faulty gang database entry played in Garcia Casique’s rendition, which federal officials insist wasn’t a mistake. But ICE agents had direct access to it — plus tens of thousands of other entries from the same database — The Intercept has found.
Under a Texas statute Trump ally Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law in 2017, any county with a population over 100,000 or municipality over 50,000 must maintain or contribute to a local or regional gang database. More than 40 Texas counties and dozens more cities and towns meet that bar. State authorities compile the disparate gang intelligence in a central registry known as TxGANG, which contained more than 71,000 alleged gang members as of 2022.
Texas then uploads the entries to the “Gang File” in an FBI-run clearinghouse known as the National Crime Information Center, state authorities confirmed to The Intercept. Created in the 1960s, the NCIC is one of the most commonly used law enforcement datasets in the country, with local, state, and federal police querying its dozens of files millions of times a day. (The FBI did not answer The Intercept’s questions.)
“This opens the door to an incredible amount of abuse.”
ICE can access the NCIC, including the Gang File, in several ways — most directly through its Investigative Case Management system, Department of Homeland Security documents show. The Obama administration hired Palantir, the data-mining company co-founded by billionaire former Trump adviser Peter Thiel, to build the proprietary portal, which makes countless records and databases immediately available to ICE agents. Palantir is currently expanding the tool, having signed a $96 million contract during the Biden administration to upgrade it.
TxGANG isn’t the only gang database ICE can access through its Palantir-built system. The Intercept trawled the open web for law enforcement directives, police training materials, and state and local statutes that mention adding gang database entries to the NCIC. Those The Intercept identified likely represent a small subset of the jurisdictions that upload to the ICE-accessible clearinghouse.
New York Focus first reported the NCIC pipeline-to-immigration agents when it uncovered a 20-year-old gang database operated by the New York State Police. Any law enforcement entity in the Empire State can submit names to the statewide gang database, which state troopers then consider for submission to the NCIC. The New York state gang database contains more than 5,100 entries and has never been audited.
[
Related
CBP Agents Can Have Gang Tattoos — as Long as They Cover Them Up](https://theintercept.com/2025/07/16/cbp-ice-trump-gang-tattoos-cecot/)
The Wisconsin Department of Justice, which did not respond to requests for comment, has instructed its intelligence bureau on how to add names to the NCIC Gang File as recently as 2023, The Intercept found. Virginia has enshrined its gang database-sharing in commonwealth law, which explicitly requires NCIC uploading. In April, Virginia authorities helped ICE arrest 132 people who law enforcement officials claimed were part of transnational gangs.
The Illinois State Police, too, have shared their gang database to the FBI-run dataset. They also share it directly with the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s umbrella agency, through an in-house information-sharing system, a local PBS affiliate uncovered last month.
The Illinois State Police’s gang database contained over 90,000 entries as of 2018. The data-sharing with Homeland Security flew under the radar for 17 years and likely violates Illinois’s 2017 sanctuary state law.
“Even in the jurisdictions that are not inclined to work with federal immigration authorities, the information they’re collecting could end up in these federal databases,” said Gupta.
Aside from the National Crime Information Center, there are other conduits for local police to enable the Trump administration’s gang crusade.
Some departments have proactively shared their gang information directly with ICE. As with the case of the Illinois State Police’s gang database, federal agents had access to the Chicago Police Department’s gang registry through a special data-sharing system. From 2009 to 2018, immigration authorities searched the database at least 32,000 times, a city audit later found. In one instance, the city admitted it mistakenly added a man to the database after ICE used it to arrest him.
The Chicago gang database was full of other errors, like entries whose listed dates of birth made them over 100 years old. The inaccuracies and immigration-related revelations, among other issues, prompted the city to shut down the database in 2023.
Other departments allow partner agencies to share their gang databases with immigration authorities. In 2016, The Intercept reported that the Los Angeles Police Department used the statewide CalGang database — itself shown to contain widespread errors — to help ICE deport undocumented people. The following year, California enacted laws that prohibited using CalGang for immigration enforcement. Yet the California Department of Justice told The Intercept that it still allows the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office to share the database, which contained nearly 14,000 entries as of last year, with the Department of Homeland Security.
“Each user must document their need to know/right to know prior to logging into CalGang,” and that documentation is “subject to regular audit,” a California Department of Justice spokesperson said.
[
Read Our Complete Coverage
The War on Immigrants](/collections/the-war-on-immigrants/)
Local police also share gang information with the feds through a series of regional hubs known as fusion centers. Created during the post-9/11 domestic surveillance boom, fusion centers were meant to facilitate intelligence-sharing — particularly about purported terrorism — between federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. Their scope quickly expanded, and they’ve played a key role in the growth of both immigration- and gang-related policing and surveillance.
The Boston Police Department told The Intercept that agencies within the Department of Homeland Security seek access to its gang database by filing a “request for information” through the fusion center known as the Boston Regional Intelligence Center. In 2016, ICE detained a teenager after receiving records from the Boston gang database, which used a report about a tussle at his high school to label him as a gang member. Boston later passed a law barring law enforcement officials from sharing personal information with immigration enforcement agents, but it contains loopholes for criminal investigations.
In the two decades since their creation, fusion center staff have proactively sought to increase the upward flow of local gang intelligence — including by leveraging federal funds, as in the case between the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department and the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center, which works directly with the Department of Homeland Security. An email from 2013, uncovered as part of a trove of hacked documents, shows that an employee at the Maryland fusion center threatened to withhold some federal funding if the D.C. police didn’t regularly share its gang database.
“I wanted to prepare you that [sic] your agency’s decision … to NOT connect … may indeed effect [sic] next years [sic] funding for your contractual analysts,” a fusion center official wrote. “So keep that in mind…………..”
Four years later, ICE detained a high schooler after receiving a D.C. police gang database entry. The entry said that he “self-admitted” to being in a gang, an Intercept investigation later reported — a charge his lawyer denied.
For jurisdictions that don’t automatically comply, the Trump administration is pushing to entice them into cooperating with ICE. The budget bill Trump signed into law on the Fourth of July earmarks some $14 billion for state and local ICE collaboration, as well as billions more for local police. Official police partnerships with ICE had already skyrocketed this year; more are sure to follow.
Revelations about gang database-sharing show how decades of expanding police surveillance and speculative gang policing have teed up the Trump administration’s crackdowns, said Gupta of the American Immigration Council.
“The core problem is one that extends far beyond the Trump administration,” she said. “You let the due process bar drop that far for so long, it makes it very easy for Trump.”
The post State Cops Quietly Tag Thousands as Gang Members — and Feed Their Names to ICE appeared first on The Intercept.
From The Intercept via this RSS feed
cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/214283
A new site, FuckLAPD.com, is using public records and facial recognition technology to allow anyone to identify police officers in Los Angeles they have a picture of. The tool, made by artist Kyle McDonald, is designed to help people identify cops who may otherwise try to conceal their identity, such as covering their badge or serial number.
“We deserve to know who is shooting us in the face even when they have their badge covered up,” McDonald told me when I asked if the site was made in response to police violence during the LA protests against ICE that started earlier this month. “fucklapd.com is a response to the violence of the LAPD during the recent protests against the horrific ICE raids. And more broadly—the failure of the LAPD to accomplish anything useful with over $2B in funding each year.”
“Cops covering up their badges? ID them with their faces instead,” the site, which McDonald said went live this Saturday. The tool allows users to upload an image of a police officer’s face to search over 9,000 LAPD headshots obtained via public record requests. The site says image processing happens on the device, and no photos or data are transmitted or saved on the site. “Blurry, low-resolution photos will not match,” the site says.
From 404 Media via this RSS feed
cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/208080
While Donald Trump was trying (and failing) to cheer himself up with a self-congratulatory birthday parade — I mean, just look at this sad boy:
— the Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles Sheriffs Department were busy turning peaceful protests in violent protests.
Throughout the nation, millions gathered peacefully to protest Trump’s military parade. The “No Kings” protests were only interrupted by violent acts of interlopers.
In Los Angeles, the ongoing protests against ICE intermingled with “No Kings” demonstrators. Everything was going fine until the cops decided that they’d have to riot if no one else was going to do it. This isn’t a narrative being pushed by protesters seeking cover for their own violent actions. This is something that was confirmed as it happened by multiple reporters on the scene.
@msnbc.com reporter at the 1:15 mark. “The chaos you’re seeing is not the result of peaceful protestors, it’s the result of actions of law enforcement, specifically the Los Angeles sheriff’s department.” #nokings
— Justin Satzman (@jsatz.bsky.social) 2025-06-15T01:18:26.734Z
Whether this is God showing his sense of humor or karma being the bitch it is doesn’t really matter. The only thing that matters is that it happened, it’s verifiable, and it’s pretty fucking funny.
From the scanner right now: LAPD is taking rubber bullets from LASD. I am not joking. (They're in each other's crossfire, it's a clusterfuck that they've largely brought on themselves)
— Curator at the Museum of Low Interest Rates (@catmolir.bsky.social) 2025-06-15T00:23:47.045Z
“Training and expertise.” After escalating things by firing flashbangs, rubber bullets, and tear gas into crowds of people who were, at best, refusing to immediately respond to a dispersal order (although that’s still a point of dispute), the only people engaging in actual violence mainly managed to hurt each other. (That being said, plenty of protesters were still in the middle of this friendly fire exchange, as it appears the LAPD and LASD were both trying to keep separate groups of protesters from joining forces.)
As amusing as that is, it’s still cops instigating conflict, rather than seeking to de-escalate it. And it still means other horrific things happened, like the deliberate shooting of a NY Post reporter by an LA law enforcement officer.
Again, there’s some cruel irony to partake in here, given that the NY Post is firmly pro-cop and has published plenty of cop propaganda while covering anti-ICE protests.
Never mind the narrative being pushed by Trump and some members of law enforcement. The reality is that cops are provoking confrontations and using any excuse possible to engage in violence. And they’ll do it even when they know their actions are being recorded:
WATCH: ABC News reporter Matt Gutman keeps his cool during live coverage on Los Angeles yesterday after officer snaps at him for reportedly touching him.
There are plenty of violent people at these protests. But most of them are wearing badges.
From Techdirt via this RSS feed
A mistrial has been declared. The holdout was the sole Black juror in the jury of "peers" who would not aquit the murder happy Bastard . 
The prosecutor will not retry. Which means the Bastard cop gets off with murder.
Article
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — A member of the jury that couldn’t reach a verdict in the Christopher Schurr murder trial said race never came up in the deliberations, that Schurr helped himself by taking the stand and that there was one main holdout that kept the former officer from being acquitted.
That holdout, he told Target 8 in an exchange of emails, was the jury foreperson — the only Black jury member on the 12-person jury. Schurr’s defense team confirmed that.
The jury could not reach a verdict after four days and 21 hours of deliberations, leading to a mistrial. Prosecutor Chris Becker on Thursday announced he would not retry the case that has divided the community. Becker has said the jury voted 10-2 in favor of acquittal. The defense attorney said it was 11-1 for acquittal.
In an exchange of emails with Target 8, a member of the jury wrote that the foreperson “claimed there was no way that they could see Schurr actually fearing for his life” as he and Patrick Lyoya struggled over the officer’s Taser.
Schurr, who is white, encountered Lyoya, who is Black, during a traffic stop in April 2022.
The juror, one of three men on the jury, said it wouldn’t have made sense to retry Schurr, as “they are going to have a real tough time finding 12 people who would unanimously vote guilty in Kent County based on majority demographics alone.”
The 12-member jury was made up of nine women and three men. Ten were white, one Hispanic and one, the foreperson, was Black.
The juror who spoke to Target 8 didn’t want to be identified.
“Ultimately,” he wrote, “I would like to avoid having my name or any personal information attached to this as I’m not looking for that kind of exposure.”
The jury deliberated for parts of four days before announcing it couldn’t reach a verdict on May 8 on either the murder charge or manslaughter. The juror said the final vote was either 11-1 or 10-2 for acquittal on the second-degree murder charge.
“We didn’t even really discuss manslaughter much because of the fact (that) we couldn’t agree on the primary charge,” the juror wrote.
Either way, it led the judge to declare a mistrial.
Target 8 tried talking to other members of the jury: some could not be reached, some declined comment and others did not respond to our requests for interviews.
The death of Patrick Lyoya led to marches and protests and visits by civil rights leaders, including Al Sharpton.
But the juror said race was not part of the deliberations.
“For what it’s worth,” he wrote, “even with a diverse jury, the white/Black narrative was never something that was even considered in our conversations. It was more about the training/policies than potential political tension.”
Three members of the Grand Rapids Police Department, including two captains, testified that Schurr followed his training and department policies.
The juror also wrote that the testimony of Schurr helped sway some.
“I do believe, based on being around all of the other jurors and with discussion with them throughout the trial, that Chris taking the stand provided clarity for some of those that remained on the fence about their vote,” he wrote.
Schurr testified that he feared for his life as he and Lyoya fought over his Taser.
Lyoya family hurt, Schurr relieved by prosecutor’s decision not to retry, advocates say
Article
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — A Kent County commissioner who has stood with the family of Patrick Lyoya since he was shot and killed by a then-Grand Rapids police officer says the family is heartbroken knowing the criminal case is over.
“(The Lyoya family is) very hurt, still trying to understand the American justice system. They don’t see any excuse for this verdict or for the person who shot their son in the back of the head to be free,” Commissioner Robert Womack said. “We’re going to continue to work them on the healing process.”
Kent County Prosecutor Chris Becker announced Thursday that he would not retry Christopher Schurr, whom he had charged with second-degree murder in the April 2022 death of Lyoya, a 26-year-old refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo. After years of appeals, the case went to trial in late April. On May 8, the jury deadlocked.
Schurr’s attorneys, Matthew Borgula and Mark Dodge, said their client feels relieved and vindicated by Becker’s decision.
“But certainly not celebration,” Dodge said. “As far as the last three years, it’s never been anything to celebrate for Mr. Schurr and his family.”
“The prosecutor got this right here, that a retrial wouldn’t be good for anybody because at best it would’ve ended up in another hung jury,” Borgula said.
In a Facebook post, the Fraternal Order of Police State Lodge of Michigan commended Becker’s choice not to pursue a retrial.
“This decision reflects a recognition of the complex and split-second circumstances law enforcement officers face in the line of duty,” the post read.
The attorney representing Lyoya’s family in a civil wrongful death suit against Schurr said in a statement that the decision not to retry meant the family would never see justice in a criminal court.
“The Lyoya family has not only lost Patrick, but now the hope that former officer Christopher Schurr will ever be held criminally accountable for taking Patrick’s life. With today’s decision, what was once a pause in justice has now become a permanent reality. This is not a verdict nor the outcome the Lyoya family sought,” attorney Ven Johnson stated. “We will continue to stand with the Lyoya family in their pursuit of truth, accountability and justice for Patrick, and are awaiting our day in civil court.”
Womack praised Becker’s work on the case and takes the prosecutor at his word that a guilty verdict would be difficult to achieve.
“I think the jury is reflective of the community 
, that we are split in half when it comes to this situation here in Grand Rapids,” Womack said
Greater Grand Rapids NAACP President Cle Jackson and Urban League of West Michigan President Eric Brown feel differently.
“My initial reaction was anger. I’ll be candid. It was anger then it moved to disappointment and devastation. I could not believe this was the decision he came to,” Brown said.
They say Lyoya’s family and the community deserved another chance.
“It’s devastating. It’s devastating. We had an opportunity to again to go back, retry and try to get it right. Patrick deserves that,” Jackson said. “The Lyoya family deserves that opportunity to retry. Just like the ex-officer Schurr had an opportunity to due process.”
“We had the opportunity to get it right, didn’t make it, but we had another opportunity to do even better, to try even harder. I think that was justice disserved,” Brown agreed.
They argued the leader of Michigan State Police, the Grand Rapids police chief and the Grand Rapids city manager all should have been called to testify as expert witnesses, and questioned why a woman whose husband is a police officer was allowed to remain on the jury.
Jackson and Brown say they have reached out to Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, urging her to take up the case.
Womack said his goal now is to continue to fight for reforms to policing in West Michigan.
“This just gives us more motivation to fight for better police and community relations. That’s only going to change with policies, training and laws being changed that will protect our community from incidents like this,” he said.
Jackson, the NAACP president, noted the Grand Rapids Police Department did make some changes to policy after Lyoya’s death, said those changes don’t have any teeth.
“There’s no level of enforcement and oversight embedded in policy,” he said.
In statements Thursday, Grand Rapids city leaders said they are committed to ongoing dialogue and reforms.
Was very lucky to have the chance to visit the Balkans recently, and it warmed my heart to find ACABs all over the place in Šibenik and Zadar. idk what the local vibes are nowadays/if these are just remnants from 2020 -- also saw a handful scattered in other cities, including a non-Balkans rest stop; as well as some pro-Palestine graffiti though I forgot where -- but it was just one of those unexpected little things that "spark joy". Something you'd theoretically expect to see more of in the area I live in *gestures vaguely* but sadly actually don't (though I don't go out much post-covid so my impression is probs skewed), so it genuinely put a smile on my face when I encountered my first one and then realized it wasn't an isolated novelty. Figured peeps here would appreciate it too.
Only snapped one of them in Zadar but I spotted a few more:
Another one from Šibenik:
Spot the 1312s
Bonus pics
Tito's former villa by Lake Bled (now a hotel, I didn't visit)
Cold War era hotel in the Plitvice Lakes National Park (actually still government-run I think? amusingly, some online reviews complain about the quality/vaguely attribute this to the hotel's history + management but in reality the quality was on par with most of the places I stayed at and straight up better than one particular higher star franchise hotel lmao...)
Not sure if this is the best comm to post this but oh well.
INWOOD, Manhattan (WABC) -- Two NYPD officers have been suspended after they allegedly left the scene of a fiery crash in Manhattan before the driver died.
The officers, both assigned to the 50th Precinct, are accused of failing to report the crash of a Honda CRV on Dyckman Street just before 5 a.m. on Wednesday.
Sources tell Eyewitness News that the officers had followed the vehicle, which was reported stolen, southbound on the Henry Hudson Parkway from the Bronx into Upper Manhattan.
When the driver exited the Henry Hudson Parkway and crashed, the officers are believed to have turned around and returned to their Bronx precinct without reporting what happened.
whenever i see people posting their own “ACAB includes ___” posts i get PTSD flashbacks to 4 years ago when i posted a police car themed children shopping cart and a segment of twitter genuinely got enraged at me for it
