It Could Happen Here Weekly 116

could Happen here, a podcast about it happening here. And in the original cadence of this website or website, in the original cadence of the show, that was a reference to a civil war, right, a new civil war. It could happen here. That's what season one was made a

big splash. Now, we kind of covered the dystopia beat in general, but today we're getting back to our mother fucking roots because the state of Texas has recently declared a big old fuck you to the federal government are having its National guardsmen deploy razor wire at the border and stop border patrol people from, for example, performing rescues of people who are trapped in the water drowning.

I don't know, twenty states something near to that. There may be more by the time you hear this, but something like twenty states have declared that they're in support of Governor Abbott's refusal to let the FEDS in and insistence that he's dealing with an invasion and must take on the border texas'self, and some of those states are now sending or at least claim they're going to send national guardsmen. So when this all started happening, we all

got a lot of messages. I got about a billion from people being.

of Rights, of numerous federal protections for their citizens. And this is kind of a way of being like, well, if they won't fuck with us over this, then we can probably start imprisoning journalists and you know, killing people that or at least imprisoning people that otherwise we would not be able to write like this is a right wing power grab and it's an attempt to see is the central government weak enough that we can get away with this stuff. I don't think they're all going to

start shooting at each other. I don't think Greg abbott is wants to get in a shooting war with the federal government over mostly the dimensions of the crisis are gend up and fake in terms of like what he is claiming it is. There is, in fact the humanitarian crisis at our border, but that's not what his issue is. So that's my quick take. We're going to get into

more of all of that. But James, you are our resident border correspondent porrespondent, and you have some very strong feelings on how all of this has been interpreted in the media, So I wanted to pull to you first and then we'll get to Mia and we'll just kind of round table after that.

been covered. It's hugely irresponsible and it's completely context free, Like there are people as there always are with the border, and there always are with the right who just tourists outside things that they understand and try and generate clicks by geeing up the fear of a civil war. And yes, I've seen dozens of people sharing headlines about national Guard deployments. So happened years ago. The National Guard have been deployed to our border for years. I see national Guard troops

every day. I had a National Guard guy shooting me and shoot at me, shout at me.

are state deployments. Both of those are distinct things. Something to know about the state deployment that is missing in the context free reporting that you're seeing is that these guys aren't getting any of their federal deployment benefits, so they won't be getting the tricare, they won't be getting the time towards their retirement, they won't be getting their GI bill, etc. So, like the Texas guys who are deployed on state orders are really the National Guard are

getting barked by Greg Abbott Like it's laughable that that, Like, you know, he's pretending that he cares about Texas while actively screwing over and Robert and I have spoken to some of those Texas National Guard folks last time we were in Texas. Did not seem to be super motivated to be They're the only military unit I've seen tried to form a union because they're not in the federal They're not in the federal orders, so they can attempt to form a union.

bringing their own firearms, yeah, which is great. Yeah yeah, and then us they can't stop them accidentally killing each other with their own firearms. Also, yeah, it's good stuff. A TG soldier did die trying to save a migrant from the river. Yes, he drowned. So like it has not like it is very boring but also quite dangerous deployment. You know, they have really high They wrote a manifesto a couple of years ago about how bullshit that deployment was,

which is really great to death. Yeah, So much of this has been reported without any context, right, Like, I think genuinely a lot of the people reporting on this are not aware there have been national their National Guard here in California. Like I say, I see them all

the time. They're not supposed to interdict migrants, but I see them doing surveillance, and I see them guarding open air prisons in Hiccumber almost every day, And I think that seems to have been missed by the majority of people covering this.

pro and anti immigration. It's like, no, there is a fight between whether you think these people should be killed incredibly quickly by accommodation of razor wire and rivers, or whether you think they should starve the day.

a lot of things. But the Biden administration's policy is to deter people by making crossing more difficult and more dangerous, which de facto makes it more deadly. Abbott is doing with his razor wire and his floating fence is a version of the same thing, like they are not distinctly different. When everyone was up in arms about three people drowning, that's a tragedy. At eight hundred and fifty people died crossing the border in twenty twenty two, that was a

normal day. Like the distinction is maybe in degree, but really it's an aesthetic between between Abbott and Biden and this and it's just two dudes chest stump each other trying to not look weak. There is not an option in the US system which allows you to vote for the party that doesn't want migrants to die, like like that, both of the parties are completely in lockstep on that.

decent treatment in decent lives. This is a fight that the left has lost comprehensively, mostly in large part because the left has completely given up on it, which is why you've got fucking a lot of these nasbol assholes saying shit like you know, this is we have like like saying basically protectionist, nativist kind of shit these yes, right, because I.

they don't have the language skills. There are people who have the language skills who who don't get these jobs, and are people who don't have the language skills and who don't have the understanding of how the border on the ground works as opposed to immigration policy in DC works. And you're going to see a lot of people who don't live at the border, who don't come to the border, writing about the border and yeah, that's how we got here, and that's how we're getting to this largely like a

giant panic about a nothing burger. But yeah, it's the reporting has been in continued to be responsible, and that is in some degree complicit.

He doesn't care, right Like, there's not actually substantive disagreement except over like whether it should be like some like a really stupid political stunt, over whether it should be like federal troops like on or federal agents like on the border, or whether it should be the razor wire like he doesn't care, you know.

dick measuring contest that goes too far. I just don't think this is the dick measuring contest. But to be fair, it will be something this dumb. Don't worry, folks, don't worry. If we do start shooting each other, it will be just as supid as this.

and we've covered this extensively. The Tree of Life shooting was in large part motivated by right wing rhetoric about a caravan of migrants. I was in Tijuana in twenty eighteen. I spent months of my life helping people down there. Like anyone who's scared of those people is paranoid at least, right that they were mostly fine, wonderful, very friendly people. I spent Christmas with them. But yeah, the twenty eighteen Tree of Life shooting came from paranoia about the border.

We're seeing that same paranora from right wing media and from liberal media now, and I think that it would not be unreasonable to have that fear of individual acts of violence and terrorism along the border.

their revolutionaries. Now, that said, what is the right thing to do, because, like the the what the Biden administrations seems to be doing right now is largely kind of ignoring it. I think at some point they will probably try to nationalize the guard and we'll see what happens.

I think when it comes to like what is a responsible way to report on this, I think you have to start by centering what's actually happening to the migrants, what's being done to them, as opposed to focusing on this dick measuring, because that's the actual harm here. The harm here is not that Abbott has been mean to the border patrol, and it's not that Texas and these other states, these rebel states, are raising an army to

fight the federal government. It's that there's this argument between the people in power in our country about like how bad should things be for people who are already desperate. And I think that's where you should center your focus. Also,

I've just noticed this on my other screen. This is a bit off topic, but you know that movie Rebel Moon by Zack Snyder, Oh god, An, there's an ad for the canned water company Liquid Death that just is showing a bunch of like imperial troops from that movie beating a man and then drinking Liquid Death water as they relax afterwards, and It's the most unhinged ad I've ever seen. It's like running a side a Vox article. I've never seen anything like this before. It's just like,

what the wait a second, what Zack Snyder? Come on, you can't do zax No, that fucking guy. Jesus talking of advertising, buy some liquid death.

A lot of these guys are like very clearly geeing up fears of civil war on the right so that they can sell people powder dry eggs like it's so transparent, Like it's in the same tweet. Yeah, sobiak Trump calls for all willing states to deploy National Guard to Texas border and start the deportations. And then as a special partner offer from my patriotsupply dot com god, which is the way to fuel your bigotry?

you know what you're doing. You can can stuff that is in season and get it really cheap from the grocery store. And you can pickle and do other kinds of can't pressure canning. It's really economical and it will last a long time. If you are going to spend a shipload of money on storable, freeze dried food, you're going to be spending a bunch of money anyway. Just go buy Mountain House. By Mountain House. It's the good stuff. It's tasty as far as I know. No right winger

advertises on them, and it's it's actually pretty good food. Yeah, that's what I keep in my car. Emergencies. You will not ship ever ever again. Yeah, you may never poop again. But the fucking biscuits and gravy breakfast selection there. Man, when you're alone in the mountains, that ship is fucking fire.

and you can't buy it from anyone else. But yeah, the idea that people are going to spend all their money like driving across the country's also just very like there's the meme right of the like the old white guy wearing Oakley wrap around or fake Oakley wrap around sunglasses doing selfie video in his car to rent about

like anything and everything. But like, I think it's very illustrative of how many of these people don't feel safe outside their vehicles and like need the activism to involve their theft.

which nobody participating in this fucking caravan does. So they this is like it's it's it's there. It's emotional support. Right, They're sitting in their truck, they've got their gun, They're not breathing hard because they have to like walk around the world, and they would desperately prefer that they can. That's where how their activism, that's how their participation in the Second Civil War will occur. Yeah, bunch of fucking wankers. Yeah, So I do want to get into kind of like

what we do feel is the actual threats of this. Again, I think the danger here is you've got a lot of kind of fights going down about like how far can governments take their anti trans legislation, How mean can they be to undocumented immigrants, Like how much violence can they deploy in deporting people? What can they do to journalists? What can they do to people speaking out or engaging

in protest without violating the Bill of Rights. You know, what can they do to marginalized communities about virrelating the Civil Rights Act?

to be. But I think there is real fear among the right that if Trump doesn't win this, they're not going to win the presidency again, right, And I think part of what they are doing is setting up all, right, then we will just take over and take increasing autonomy in our red states, and we will effectively govern them very differently and govern them in contravention of how the rest of the country and how the federal government of the Supreme Court says that they can be governed, because

we can't be cruel enough without that and I think that is what they are stepping up to be able to do. If you're asking you know, what do I think will be sort of like line crossings that could lead to to mass social violence in this country. One thing, I don't think they're going to take that leap while a Democrat is in control of the federal government in

the Defense Department. I think they will push for a violent crackdown on everything left of the far right if they win power again, because they talk about that repeatedly, because they've promised to do that, and I think that if they lose, there's an off chance. I don't think this is likely, but it's not impossible that protests and violence as acts of protest against Biden winning a second term could snowball into something that resembles an insurgency. Not impossible.

I don't think that's the likeliest outcome. But I don't see them starting to shoot at federal troops now while Biden is in the White House. For one thing, I feel like that's the thing that would really clinch it for Biden. If Texas National Guard trying to secede, well, you've made his reelection campaign easier, right, because now none of the red states. None of the states that secede. You can't also have an election where those states get to vote, right, Like, that's that's just not the way

it works. Yeah, so I don't feel like that's the likeliest thing I think this is. Yeah, I think I've made it clear what I think, and I think it's really clear that it's time for our second dad break.

is incredibly misleading. It's it's it's it's basically it's like a marketing thing, right, because like, yeah, and this is only thing we've talked about on this show for like literally since day one, is that like a civil war in the United States is not going to look like a bunch of states like form an alliance and then all they're fighting all of the other states. Like it's it's not going to look like that. It's going to look closer to Syria than it is going to look

like like the first Civil War. But people haven't shaken like the sort of like brainworms of a civil war is like sixteen states fight sixteen states, even though every single civil war that we've had, like in the intervening like one hundred like two hundred years, has not been that.

actually be a problem for the US. However, that does not look like sixteen states declaring themselves succeeded and going to because that's a conventional war. And you know what happened if Greg Abbott started a conventional war against the US. Greg Abbott doesn't have a fucking bunker, right like we could, we could, he could be he could.

it would be wonderful in some senses. Yeah, I don't think we're going to see a sheet word about It will be interesting to see how like Biden has screwed the pooch in terms of like his media management of this, I would say, And it will be interesting to see how hard he goes in response, Like if he goes back in response, I think the smart answer would be nationalize the Guard. If there's things that you can actually prosecute people over, prosecute them and continue to not deal

with it in the media. Like his instinct isn't bad in terms of not wanting to feed in directly to the right wing outrage loop, but you still have to You still have to go after them for this, right, And it's the kind of thing it's probably like too

much to hope for any real action being taken. But I would say that's probably the smarter option, right not to say anything of like what the most moral thing to do is, but the smart option is don't feed into the fundraising loop, because we should probably get in on that this is all a fundraising thing, right. In addition, to them testing the waters. That's the biggest dimension of

this is and that's why we talked earlier. All of these guys Timpoole and Jack Pisoviec, and I'm sure the Daily Wire guys are in it now, are like advertising their storable foods companies and shit. The point of all this, all right wing messaging, all far right messaging, starts as a grift. It all starts with a product to sell. That's, by the way, how guns became so enmeshed with the far right right. A lot of gun companies realize that like Americans only need so many guns for like reasonable

self defense and hunting and even even recreational purposes. There's only so many guns a man could shoot at a time. But you can really get people to stockpile shit like crazy if you convince them they're like preparing to be gorilla fighters in a future civil war. And so and a lot of these like gun tuber influencers, that's kind of where they increasingly went because that's where the money was.

And so this becomes more and more of a part of right wing politics because a lot of people on the right have a lot of money to be made in messaging this kind of stuff and selling this kind of stuff. The same thing is true with the civil warshit. It's true with these like fears that the government. You know, we can sell you storable food, we can sell you fucking bunkers. All of this stuff comes out of some sort of financial grift. And the biggest thing that most

of the people involved in this are hoping for. Fucking Jack Pisobiec doesn't want to be fucking hiding underground getting bombed by the US Air Force. Jack Pisobiec wants to make another million dollars off of affiliate sales of bullshit, Right, that's what And a lot of these people, these guys doing this caravans to the borders, they're not planning on spending their own money on gas. They're hoping that they

can crowdfund a shitload of money. And I'm sure one of them will steal all of it and run away, Right, That's what usually happens with this kind of shit. But that's what they're all hoping to do. And so that's kind of the over if you want to actually hurt them, if you're looking at where do we how do we draw a strategic victory out of this, find a way to damage their ability to profit off of this shit. And I do think part of it is not making this as big a story as that otherwise might be.

But that's not simply enough, because the right is large enough that just through their media hyping this up, they can make a decent amount of money off this stuff. So more complex solutions are needed.

the primaries. But if they don't make if they don't stick the landing with Trump, I think Abbot is waiting in the wings to make that perhaps the more competent fascists than Trump and make an attempt at running for the presidency.

go far enough. Part of the reason we didn't go far enough is a lot of people fucking a lot of very optimistic political groups, like including like PSL et cetera, et cetera, like hijacked a lot of these things and

pulled people off of occupations. But you know, there was actually there were there have been periods in my lifetime, like not that long ago, where there was actually forward progress being made about this ship to the point where like even that we're like the Democrats were trying to co opt it, and it doesn't fucking have to be like this, Like we don't. We don't have to have hundreds of people fucking dying at the border every year. We don't have to have people in open air fucking prisons.

It doesn't have to be like this. We can fight them and we can win, but it requires actually like it requires actually going and fighting, and you know, you have you have to you have to actually be willing to do this. You have to be willing to commit to the organizing. But if we don't, if we just keep leaving all of this ship to like just the literal howling fascists and then Biden who is like it, like on on the border doing the same thing but

not being but not like howling about it. Yeah, yeah, you know, like this this this, this country is going to go into fucking oblivion and we are we are going, like you're you're going to see in your lifetime the US government shooting people on the board like with machine guns.

And like, the way we get through to our boomer uncles and Facebook ants and stuff is by showing them that migrants are people with stories who are just the same as you, and they just want a chance to raise their kids someone where they're not going to get

fucking killed by a car bomb. And that the more human interactions more people going to have with migrants, and the more stories we can tell that's center migrants as people, artest numbers or tsunami or any fg humanizing gretoric like, the more likely we are to take the teeth out of this. And that's something that all of us can do. Yes, all right, So that's a good thing to end on.

Just bam baby. It won't happen, but it is a funny thing to think about.

blah blah blah blah. And then immediately after that, like like like the next day, when all of all of us we haven't even like we hadn't even really gotten into the weight hold on, He's going to do something else.

recommendations from a psychiatrist, an endocrinologist, and a bioethicist. And also all gender firmingcare in the state has to be reported to the government, and there's like other stuff too. So this is the technical term for this is this is extremely bad.

rules and regulations. And I don't think they're acting in good faith because when you actually like look up the details are like, well, this would basically make it almost impossible for anyone at any age to transition. But it's like you know, it's a very sneaky smart move right, like being like, oh, look, we're trying to find a compromise.

We're trying to make sure everyone gets good healthcare. And you know, unfortunately sometimes liberals and liberal media i'll just kind of eat that up without really looking at the details.

And you know, this is a this is a pretty good system. It still can be really annoying to navigate because of insurance stuff, and you know, like there's definitely problems with it, but it's a it's a much better system than exists in a lot of places. And you know, I think there have been two sets of comparisons about

what these restrictions look like. And we're going to get to the comparisons to uh tart restrictions on abortion in a second, But I want to talk about another thing that these restrictions strike me as very similar to, which is the British system. And the way the British system works is you get put on a wait list and then you die, or you go to our media like those are those are your options?

of them. And what this means is you have this enormous, sort of interminable British gender bureaucracy whose only job and only the only thing they want to do is stop you from getting healthcare. There's a very very good Philosophy Tube episode about this about what it's actually like to be in that system, and it's terrible, and this is a this is what the kinds of things that are

being proposed here are. In a lot of they're it's not exactly the same, it's the British system, but it's it's bringing it much closer to that system where it's

basically impossible to get healthcare. And the thing about the British system and about these restrictions where you know you have to have like a bioethicistant, a psychiatrist and endocrinologist and you have to like do all you have to jump through all of these troops, is that at every single point in the pri there is another gender bureaucrat who can just by themself decide that they're just doing

a trans healthcare band. And you know, every every individual person you put into the process is another person who could just say no. And that's what the bridge system works, is that someone in the process just says no and you die in a wait list. Yeah.

system sounds like nightmarish. People asking invasive questions about like your sexuality or your trauma history or for youth that often ends up like involving like genital inspections for some reason, it just sounds like a horrible, dehumanizing, violating experience. And then yeah, like a lot of people like spend years, years and years if they you know, and are lucky if they do it, are able to access care. A lot of people have to go private if they can afford to.

ender bureaucracy system. And one of the things that's been happening with this is, you know, Okay, so there's a lot of places where there's inspirations coming for this, and I think, you know, we mentioned it briefly earlier. One of the inspirations for this is obviously parp restrictions on abortion, where you have these like unbelievably restricted like basically these

targeted things. When before, before Roe v. Wade collapsed, there was you know, you could you could ban abortions by for example, you know, saying like passing a bill that says that, like, okay, if you want to do abortions in a hospital, the walls in the hallways have to be like exactly like this diameter, which is not the same diameter as like as as normal hospital walls are.

So now you can't do abortions in hospitals, And so they do things like this, right, and this is you know, and this has been a huge problem for a long time. Answer anti abortion activists have been talking about it for ages. The Democrat Party did nothing. So you know, that's I think, I think it's sort of like forwarding of where this is going.

is a wildly biased sample or just downright pseudoscience. Right, Like, they looked at the evidence base for the abortion reversals and it didn't actually work the way that they were saying it was, and it was actually coming from very very very.

listen to this. It's like that it's not what's happening. It's literally not a heartbeat. But these people, like they put a stethoscope to a women's chest and heard a beating and we're like, oh shit, it's the baby's heart. And it's like, no, it doesn't have a heart, Like wait, this is a fetus, Like what are you even talking about?

But you know, and this kind of stuff, right is you know, they're they're they're they're basically they're they're doing just scientific malpractice, right, They're straight up lying to people, and then they're using that as a justification for you know, actual legislation which has sort of material impact and like you know, carries the force of the law behind it.

reliant on ads to cover this stuff. So yeah, here's ads. Okay, we are back, and this is the point where we need to talk about the stuff in the Ohio story

that is very weird. Now. I think if people have been following the story of sort of anti trans bills, one of the things that's been happening a lot is there's been this sort of there's there's a network of people who de transitioned for various reasons I don't know, who have become very very hardline right wingers who have basically been doing like circuits of of the capitals of you know, like state capitals and like going to Capitol Hill and like telling their quote unquote stories to try

to get this to try to get like all trans healthcare bands. Now, so this is you know, this is something we've covered on the show in the past. What is very weird about Ohio is that you had a group of these right wing transitioners who specifically we're trying to get it looked like at very at least we're trying to get or trying to stop the like the actual uh like gender firming care ban from going through, and we're in favor of more of this restriction stuff. Is that is that?

She considers herself to be quote unquote libertarian. Now, this is a red flag for those of us who have done any sort of like real engagement with certain types of libertarians or political organizing or whatever in that if you actually pay attention to some of the arguments that are being made or the collaborations that are being made, you can generally tell which direction their politics are truly leaning towards right?

It's like one of the original like original anti trans people, like incredibly violent transfo like like both both in terms of like the career of her work, like physically like violently anti trans and yeah, yeah she is. She is connected to a lot of the modern anti trans groups and also the modern like the modern I don't know what you call them, people who are attempting to take away trans healthcare but who don't see themselves as anti trans.

you know, committing sexual assault against women just for existing. Yeah, Max and Kitty are also horrible transpasogenists to actually make I mean, Kitty makes a lot of propaganda tracking attacking transomen and trying to cast all trans women as predators and yeah, just not people you want on your side, because they're not. They're danger to all trans people. They're just like trying to find a way to influence trans

healthcare in a different way. And I mean, I I'm concerned that people will hear like, oh, look at all these deeds, like these supposedly trans friendly d trans people who testified against the SPAN, not realizing that these are actually like purse with an agenda.

for a BBC article that was released. I believe it was called something along the lines of we are being pressured into sex by some trans women, which is basically yes, that one right, Like so yeah, being into this narrative that trans women are sexual predators right into the British media when they were already having a massive influx of anti trans media that was again feeding into the demonization of trans people as a whole, but then also like

controlling trans youth and the likes. And of course this article not only did it end up originally platforming like an actual like serial rape.

that decided to go ahead and testify. Yeah, Like, well, I'm those of personally bring up Max and Kitty because like they were some of the people who helped like get the testimonies. Like I found a post on Kitty's Tumblr blog looking for d trans and Desisted women who were willing to testify against a ban, and then Max was the one who actually submitted the collective statement from

Arius and Wise. He also submitted an individual statement to So basically like they found a bunch of like de trans and desisted turfs on Tumblr to sign a statement and then submit to like the state of Ohio, which is.

opposition to it was the Gendercare Consumer Advocacy Network. This is the organization that I helped found in twenty nineteen prior to my resignation. They submitted this opposition after my resignation, but it is available on archives. Then in twenty twenty one and the twenty twenty two legislative session, there was the proposal for HP four or five four, which was another proposed ban on gender for main care for trans youth.

This time it was being sponsored by Representative Gary Klick, who was also the sponsor of the current bill that had recently been vetoed. And then the V two vtwed And in May of twenty twenty two, the Gendercare Consumer Advocacy Network or GCCAM testified in tentative support. The testimony was submitted by coronicone and included suggestions for amendments. These amendments are actually very important. One of the amendments that

she recommended was on data tracking. I believe it says here the second amendment would be a requirement for physicians mental health care providers and other medical healthcare professionals, mandating an annual report to the Ohio Department of Health the number, age and sex of minor patients who are receiving gender transition services of any type. This was what she originally proposed as an amendment to the bill. The bill again

did not end up passing. But now we are seeing HB sixty eight, which is the one that merges the ban on gender firming care for trans youth and a sports ban because I guess, you know, trans youth plane chess is somehow like threatening. So this one was again represented like sponsored by Representative Click, and this time, curiously enough, Karina had been working more extensively with Click during various portions of the.

Like the coincidences are racking up a little bit here, it might be good to ask some further questions about what exactly happened, because I have some questions. So you know, this happened in December of twenty twenty three.

the nature of the diagnosis. It applies to all ages. It was not originally restricted to trans youth, like the original testimony was from from gc CAN. The time range was also ended up being like it's shortened. He wants it every six months, not every year. But you know, very similar kinds of things, right in terms of what it is that he is proposing for this mass collection

of data. And a previous testimony was submitted to the Ohio Legislature in fact, Like, not long after that fact, representative clique ended up going on an interview with Tony Perkins of Family Research Council talking about the pending veto.

They originally did this interview on January ninth, and he noted that the data collection suggestion was originally included in a draft version of his bill, but was removed due to opposition, and so he's glad actually that that was included, although he wished that there would be even more restrictions. He actually was going to encourage the governor to also sign an executive order banning the use of puberty blockers,

not just surgery. As far as I can tell, that has not happened, but he did say that he was going to try.

of the ones that flip flopped. It originally opposed all bands, and then now all of a sudden, it's like, you know, the person that they are throwing out into these testimonies was arguing in favor of them, and then like you know the quote unquote are you asking why collective? And to be fair, Carrie Callahan have also been firmly opposed to full on bands and the Christian right pretty much from the beginning, though for very very very different reasons.

kind of Carrie Gallahan's take on things. And then like, I mean, yeah, a lot of the the more like the d transferfs, like the Robinson's or other members of our Usking Wives it's like, Okay, well they're opposed to the Christian Right, and they recognize that, like if the Christian Right gains more power and is banning things, that's bad not just for trans people, but also for you know, cis, lesbian and gay people and says women, and you know

it will end up hurting them too. So I mean, even from a self preservation stance, they understand like why they should be opposed to the Christian Right, but they're still if you actually read their testimony, a lot of them do make it clear that they're opposed to transition. Like one one person called it like compared medical like trans healthcare to like a hydra said that, like it would only be cutting off ahead like these aren't.

against a healthcare band. That's also like a kind of a classic strategy too. It is like they have a bunch of like dissisted people along mixed in with people who actually like transition and do transition to kind of like inflate the numbers.

And then you have kind of more like tricky Republicans like DeWine sort of like pretending to find some kind of compromise and be like, oh, we're just trying to work for like more comprehensive healthcare that is just so everyone gets what they need, and like sort of like using some of the language that was used by clinicians who are trying to fight against the and their testimony and you know, trying to claim make these claims, but if we actually look at the details, like the regulations

they're proposing would make it nearly impossible for anyone to transition,

you know, both youth and adults. And then you have like you know, these different medical professionals and kind of more liberal transphobic d trans people who want more gatekeeping and regulation and control over trans people and are kind of like using de transition and transition regret as a justification for that or praising being like, oh well, Ohio, their youth clinics are already really good because they're very cautious and they use therapy a lot more than they

actually allow youth to medically transition.

are fighting for reproductive autonomy. We can connect with like disability liberation activists who are fighting for better healthcare for everyone.

things that we believe are very popular. And you know, the amount of power that we can wield if we are willing to organize, and we are when we understand what we're organizing against is immense, and it is enough to drive these people into the fucking ground. Oh yeah, yeah, welcome to dig it up in here. This is Mia long back with part two of my interview with Kay and Lee from Health Liberation Now about the long origins of anti trans legislation and policy in Ohio. Let's get

right into it, Okay. So the next thing I wanted to sort of ask about is, so this is a very very long running I guess, sort of strategy and campaign of sort of right wing or right wing and turf do transition like groups advocating for trans healthcare bands. And I wanted to I wanted to talk about some of the older campaigns that happened, and I wanted to talk about specifically some of the campaigns to influence WPATH.

Oh boy, right, right, So we should we should start by explaining to people what WPATH is, because I think unless you're trans you probably don't know. You've probably never heard of WPATH.

unquote real trans person or not. And like things of Yeah, things have gotten like somewhat better over time, but there's still a lot of medical professionals in and especially like therapists in WPATH who like still want to require some form of gatekeeping, who basically still don't trust trans people to know, you know, who we are and what we need and are like okay, but we need to make sure they get therapy. We need to make sure we do like oh the SYPE tests, what if they regret it?

kind of got more more turphy over time. But like pretty early into my blog, about like three months or so in this gender therapist who worked for the San Francisco Department of Health like left a comment on my blog and was like, I'm interested in talking to de transitioned people because I think there are two Like well, she left to comment that she was interested in talking to de transition people and you know, talking to me, and then like we started emailing back and forth, and

she opened up pretty quickly and said like there are too many f to ms in San Francisco. It was like too many f to ms in the San Francisco Bay Area, there are too many like you know, Quoe unquote female PEP transitioning. I know, it's like, oh no, it's like, oh wow, there's It's like it couldn't possibly be that people are just coming to one of the most trans friendly areas in the country to transition because they think they'll have an easier time there.

Health like thinks there's too many people transitioning. How do we exploit this, Like how can we like use this as an opportunity to like cut down on the number of like people transitioning.

and she also wanted to try to develop psych assessments that could supposedly like weed out you know, who the real trans people were, who was going to benefit from transitioning and who would supposed to go on to regret transitioning and d transition.

internalized misogyny or some other kind of rad fem explanation for gender dysphoria. And like the thing is, like Devora also lived in the San Francisco Bay area, so you actually end up like meeting up with this gender therapist. His name was Julie Graham, and was like pretty open with her with her anti trans views. I mean, she wasn't like completely open with her like intentions like, oh, I'm going to use this person to try to like

work towards ending all transition, but she was. She did tell you know, Graham, but she didn't think anyone really benefited from it. And she told her that, you know, she said she knew people who have been true transsexuals who had de transitioned, and said like lots of really awful things about like trans women being fetishists and just like you know, all this very anti trans stuff. But then you know, I say, oh, but I think we

don't have to agree on everything. I think we can like work together, and like, you know, this gender therapist fell for it, like somehow like divorcing all this very anti trans stuff like making a close she was opposed to transition, saying like really nasty, trans misogynistic shit, like none of that was like objectionable enough for great not to like continue to like work with her, to continue to be like, hey, do you want to talk to these clinicians about what it is to do transition?

did this presentation at us PATH and she showed some videos of trans turfs, including myself, like I made one of I made a short video, and Max Robinson also made one of those videos, and Carrie Stella was the third person, and Carry Stella she did like she was another like d trans tumbler turf who did this survey. It still gets like it was a it was a survey monkey survey. It's gets cited by like anti trans

researchers about de transition yeap. Which anyways, so we so there were three of us who made these short videos, both me and Max Robinson by that point had gone like we had hooked up with these weird turfs who were Dianic witches and taken part in these kind of

weird neopagan x trans reclaiming femaleness rituals. We had been through this kind of like religious neo pagan like you know, conversion practice rituals, which of course that wasn't something that the USP like those are the people, you know, dos Path knew that, but we hit that. We just you know, I talked about how I thought I had transition due

to like internalized misogyny and trauma on all that. So I was sort of like spreading a more like kind of watered down terf ideology to the folks over at us Path.

and sort of absorb it into their general thinking and then how that's going to play out in terms of their changes or implementations of care in the long term.

and they don't start with that because I think, right, I mean, I I think I think there should be more skepticism of people who are like I got a vision from the Christian God or like the Abrahamic God that told me a t transition. I think thered be borced get the system of that. But that's not something that like, I don't know if if you if you walk into like W Path and you tell them I was given to vision from God, They're going to be like, what whereas this kind of stuff?

of in this battle against anti trands stuff. And it's true to a certain extent, but they're also like, this is an organization composed of a bunch of CIS doctors, right, who can be influenced and manipulated.

so so it's kind of like their tokens, right. It's kind of handy for like CIS medical professionals who want to like control trans people to have some trans people as like figureheads, you know, expressing those views because they're like, oh, well, you know, look this person's saying it and they're trans, so like yeah, I mean, I mean, like yeah, at the same like that the first US Path, I mean, just to kind of show how far things still need to come, you know, the same US Path where Carrie

did her de transition presentation. Ken Zucker was there and he got he got protested, I mean like there was a protest against him, and I did. I believe they ended up like canceling at least like one of his presentations. But yeah, so ken Zucker kind of the notorious like conversion therapist to focus primarily on on trans use like clinic in Canada, you know people I mean and like going after both like trans youth and gender non conforming youth.

They tried to like you know, prevent kids from growing up trans, but they also tried to make you know, non conforming youth like more gender conforming as well, with the justification, Oh well, it's easier to change individual than to like make society less bigoted. Yeah, yeah, but yeah, but he was the type of people, like he was one of the medical professionals that was like, you know, helping to create like the standards of care for for trans youth for decades, and it took a lot of work to.

It's like a lot of like I mean, and like when we talked about sort of like gatekeeping for health care, Like that was the like one of the original things was like, you know, one of the things that would happen very very commonly was you know, it's like okay, like if you if you want to get healthcare, like you have to let me rape you like that. That's

the thing that happened all the fucking time. And this is the and that's not something that's you know, extremely long ago, right, And you can you can look at like modern w path and be like, well, it's obviously like yes, it has come a long way from that shit, but simultaneously, yeah, like I don't know, that's that's something that you know, like there are living people who fucking experience that, right, and you know, and and when when you when you look at why these kinds of like

d trans campaigns, why why these just like like these the sort of d trans anti transactivists have been so successful in targeting this it's like, well, you know, it's it's it's it's I think I think it's a kind of similar thing to like, oh wow, I wonder why like the third KKK was successful in this South And it's like hmm hmm. Maybe there are things happening. I mean that that is slightly unfair as being a bit

unfair to them. But you know, there's there's still a lot of these sentiments that there's a lot of sort of like transphobic sentiments that are just kind of like buried beneath the surface. And I think a lot of what we've been seeing over the past you know, like like eight ish years, what is time hold on? Is that God, Okay, I've broken my own rule about not trying to do bath life on air. People don't figure

out that I can't do subtract. But you know, that's that's a lot of what's the topic of the last like eight years is that people figured out that there's still a lot of sort of lingering anti transceniment, and they figured out where you can target it in ways that are extremely effective. We need to go to ads were back in a second with less capitalism, and we're back Oh yeah.

the number of people transitioning. I'm going to find some like de transitioned women and then use their experiences. And you know that's what she tried to do. And like and I see this happening with other like clinicians too, like kind of going back to Ohio Scott Liebowitz, who runs he's a therapist who runs the Thrive Clinic in Ohio. And he's another one who has used like detransition to

justify like more psych assessments. And I mean he was actually one of the therapists featured in one of the New York Times articles that everyone a lot of trans

people got mad at, the one by Emily Baislon. Was it like I forget what it's called selfpies the general for gender therapy, where he's like kind of cast is this like this poor moderate position who's caught between the religious right that wants to ban all trans healthcare and these wacky transactivists who just want to let everyone transition. It's like he's just trying to find this nuanced approach and make sure that like teenagers don't transition and regret it.

And you know, yeah, you know he was like, I mean, like he was trying to stop the healthcare bands in Ohio by pointing out, like, oh look, you know we're we do comprehensive care. You know, most most youth don't go on to medically transition. Like like Carrie Callahan was also one of the you know, she and her testimony and in some op ed pieces that she wrote, she

was like praising his approach, calling it conscious cautious. You know, people who want to like restrict care implement more gatekeeping will use like de transition stories to justify that. And then of course, like you know, the religious right, who wants to completely wipe out all transition healthcare will also use like D transition stories as well. They'll have their set of D transition people that they they bring out, like Chloe Coole to testify for the bands.

a massive rollback in terms of accurate information. And part of this was actually captured by a white paper that was written by Kelly Winter's a trans woman.

bunch of anti transparents. But then within that chapter you also see the laundering of specific studies that are focused on predominantly de transitioned women, predominantly gender critical or radical feminists. These two papers were Litman twenty twenty one, which surveyed a lot of the kind of the old D trans turf groups that we had been connected with right around twenty seventeen or so, so this was before the ROGD

paper was published in twenty eighteen. But then there was also let's say, there's the Vanderbush study, which I believe that was published in like what twenty I don't remember what year that was published in the Vanderbush study, Now, this study was done by Eli vander Bush, who is basically post trans half of a gender critical detransition project, and it had a very similar kind of like recruitment

strategy sometimes an overlapping recruitment pool. But the difference is that this happened after the rog D paper dropped.

not going to be generalizable to basically any population. It's only focused on like a very particular subset of people who end up detransitioning and then develop some kind of like political belief it's connected to it, right, And then it's being used as legitimate data as part of standards of care that is supposed to be like yeah, yes, it's just it's particular absolus.

of de transmit. I think I already mentioned this before, Like a lot of us like talked about how like we had the same kind of dysphoria than any other transperson had and we're.

should transition. But again, like people don't. It's like people don't, Yeah, they only care about using D transition in order to reduce the number of trans people or prevent transition. They don't care about transition or d transition that you know results from transphobia either internalizing it, yeah, internalizing it an anti trans ideology, or you know, not being able to access transition because of living in a transphoba, coming from a transphobic family, you know, having to go into the

closet to find a job, that kind of stuff. Like it's never about like yeah, it's never about preventing due transition that results from from transphobia. It's just about finding excuse to control us and our access to healthcare. There's this perverse incentive structure here too, because you know, these doctors are trying to find you know, they're trying to find something that gives.

should be considered medical malpractice. Like they don't really care because again it's it's it's it's just this like loop because that's the thing that they need. So they'll they'll find whatever, like bank pseudo scientists just like cranking the stuff out and they'll use.

But it's like it's really just kind of like transitioning again in a lot of ways. So it's like, well, if you can create resources to make transitioning easier, you could definitely create a lot of similar resources to make do transitioning easier.

hard to use those stories. Like you'll have less people who want to, like you know who you can kind of like, uh, you know, indoctrinate into these anti trans ideologies and then use them, you know, as part of the anti trans movement, but also just like I mean, if it's not scary anymore, if you just feel like, okay, like this is just an issue of like making people making sure people get the supports they need so they can just get on with their lives, Like you just

treat it as a practical problem that needs to be solved instead of using it to feed a trans panic. Like yeah, it's just like the the there's actually like less reasons for gatekeeping. I mean, I feel like like creating like basically you're kind of like creating a safety net for in case, like you know, in case something unexpected or negative happens. So you're like, okay, well, if you transition and things you end up changing your mind or things don't work out the way you think they would,

here's all these supports you can turn to. So I feel like that's kind of a better long term thing to work for It is, like, okay, like make sure there are supports for people no matter how their transition turns out, Like if then including you know, de transitioning, or if people like you know, face health complications, like make sure that there's like support some place for that. Don't use that as an excuse for gatekeeping.

or tools. Yes, and once you do, when you do that, right, like everything suddenly, you know, like who cares what happens to these people afterwards because you don't think of them as people. You think of them as just a thing that you're using to do another thing.

which made me want to do something. This is a very common narrative, right, It made me want to do something so that other people would not end up in the situation that I was in. And so I answered this call. Probably not the best of decisions that I could have made for myself, but I decided.

off very early on. So it was predominantly the four of us that ended up being the actual formal board at any point in the early stages, right, And so we started to draft a lot of this stuff. But like, over I was starting to wonder about two things, right, Like, after some exchanges with other board members about who it

is that we should be predominantly outreaching. Should it be clinicians or should it be people that are actually impacted, people who have gone through gender affirming care, regardless of how they identify themselves currently, Like, what is our main priority? The other board member at the time wanted to focus more on the clinician route.

I ended up taking a step back. My vision was still having problems, but you know what ended up making that a lot easier. Actually, it's funny, this is not something that was recommended to me by anybody that I had been talking to about this stuff who had been more exposed to anti trans rhetoric like I I talked to blind people. Yeah, I ended up talking to to blind people. I connected with folks from the National Federation

for the Blind. It was a group that was recommended to me by somebody I knew from a from a past job that I had, because she was the daughter of somebody who went blind later in life due to a genetic condition, and he was a member of the NFB right he was part of the federation, and so that was her recommendation to me. I hadn't reached out at the time.

or anything like that. A lot of it was focused on, Okay, these are the issues that you're currently dealing with. Here are some of the things that you can work on to make your life easier.

there was nothing there. I would have had to travel like over three hours to go to Boston for me to be able to see as specialist. Instead, like they were able to point me to people who had specializations in like retinal conditions, and so when I went there,

you know, they they did their usual tests. They ruled out some things that were known to run in my family actually, but they did ultimately decide that, like my retinas are not processing like correctly, and that it's actually likely genetic.

Usually it was only with migrains, but over time, like you know, that started to break out more where like even just like you know, there being too much sunlight was painful for me. But like some of this stuff, it definitely predated when I started my transition. But because I wasn't really given space to actually unpack any of this stuff, I didn't really have the ability to make those connections. Instead, what happened was, you know, I join

in on this organizing board. I connect in with three other people that were looking to advocate in very particular directions, and like my my story was not something that was meant to get support. My story was something that was meant to scare people. I was also nominated as the spokesperson, which meant I would have had the responsibility to do things like, you know, respond to the press or give

sound quotes or whatever. Right, I gave certain kinds of descriptions over to a like a democratic candidate that we had been scheduled to meet with Ryan Starzik at the time down in Arizona, and you know, give the whole spiel, right, you know, a visible trans person with a story that for a lot of people who, like most people, are very conne to their senses, whether that's hearing, vision, touch or whatever, they can't conceptualize a life without them, and

so it terrifies them. Right, But like that doesn't actually help the person be able to get to a point where this is a livable life, it's even a frame life. There are certain things that I can do that other people can't do. I can navigate inside the apartment without having the lights on because I know where everything is mapped out of my head, and I can rely on touch. I can pour myself a glass of water and not have to worry about its spilling because I can feel

where it like goes up. But that's not really something that like we're not even allowed to think about. We're not even allowed to think about, Like, Okay, so if this thing happens to you and there's documented evidence of it, not like something that's completely imagined, like my brain decided

it was, here's what we can do to help. That's that's the kind of things people really need to be able to access, right, you know, if something happens to you, these are the things that you can do to be able to work through this and live a more comfortable

life in the way that you are happy with. But I don't really see any of that happening to be perfectly frank well, no, Like I'm also thinking back about that, like the standards of care A because like you know, there's this you know, inclusion of aspects of regret and de transition and stuff like that into things like the adolescent chapter. But you know what, they don't include a chapter for de transition support. Yes, no, because they're not serious about that.

something like that. Like again, I very much believe that there's a connection between like a desire for more gatekeeping and psych assessments, control over trans people and not having support for like de transition transition either because there's not like I feel like there's even less talk or resources for people end up retransitioning after de transitioning, because no one's trying to figure out like, oh, like the idea that transition could just be temporary or that a lot

of people you don't go on to retransition later on or just confirms for them that they really are brands.

good life and being happy. They want me, they really do want me to be ruined and miserable forever because they can use like that's more valuable to them, Like my suffering matters more than my happiness to a lot of these people. Like you know, that was definitely one of those moments where I was like, what, like one of those things that eventually, you know, led me to get disillusion with the whole thing and be like you

know what I get myself involved with? But yeah, yeah, it's just it's it is really like sick and perverse. How how anti trans people like you suffering use both trans anti trans people suffering for their own agenda.

the New York Times, right mm hmm. And the way that this plays out for trans people and for de trans people is that like like the thing that these people that you know, the journalists also are looking for

is suffering. Like they don't really care, you know, like they like none of these people ever report stories that are just like hey, like I went to a gender clinic and it was great, Like nobody's gonna read like I don't think anyone's going to read that, Like I would read that because you know that's you know, that's great, but like like they don't care about that that there's there's no sort of sensationalism there. The sensationalism is like, you know, then this is why you get like the

Washington Post interviewing this light. You know, like these people who are just like, oh, like I was, I worked at a gender clinic, but I was secretly doing evil or like you know, or or or you get all of it. And this is why a lot of even protrans like media coverage is about things like suicide rates and about things like, you know, like how like how likely you are to die if you don't cut the health care that you need, because it's it's the same

as inra structure. It's the thing, the thing that's useful to sell to people is suffering and that I don't know what the solution is to that, because I mean, I don't know have have media that's not based on profit, I guess, but like you know, decommodify the news. But that's one of these things where it's like, you know, like as long as long as like every single like shitty local newspaper is making all of their money from

like crime scare stories, they're not going to report. They're not going to You're not gonna get active reporting about police because they need the police to give them, like feed them all of these shitty crime stories, right, And this is the same thing here where it's like you're not going to get actual good reporting about trans people and about people who do transition because nobody actually cares about that because the incentive structure is just suffering and

that trickles down through through the healthcare system and through you know, through through the legislative system, and it trickles down through our social networks and what support networks exist and don't exist. And it's a absolutely like if you were just to like ask someone how do you want a society to be run, zero people would answer we want it to be based on the production of suffering. And yet we have done this, but it doesn't have

to be like this. To sort of finish that David Graver quote, the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently. So let's go build a world that's safe for trans people. This has been nickeld happened here. You can find more of Lee and Kai's work a Health Liberation Now dot com. I recommend you go do it. It is great and go and make the world.

simply don't want to go to prison for it. And specifically, we're talking about all of that within the context of the state of Oregon, where I reside, because back in twenty twenty, the state of Oregon passed a measure, the first in the nation, decriminalizing all simple possession and use of street drugs. So heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana was already legal, but you.

in the grip of an escalating drug crisis. In twenty twenty, and again that's before the ballot measure passed, Oregon had the second highest rate of drug addiction in the country and ranked nearly last in access to treatment. From twenty nineteen to twenty twenty, opioid overdose deaths in Oregon increased

by about seventy percent. So that makes the case that the problem prior to the ballot measure was pretty severe and that the current state of affairs, which was everything was illegal and you could go to jail for possession of, say, heroin, was not working out for anybody. However, in the years since the ballot measure passed, overdoses have continued to rise in Oregon, and miraculous almost the drug problem did not solve itself overnight. Now we're gonna be talking about some

reasons for that. But now it is time for me to introduce our guest for the episode, Oregon Public Defender Grant Hartley Grant, Welcome.

get wrapped into the legal system. And one of the issues with our legal system is that it is based on compulsion, and so when someone came into the system with a drug problem, our first reaction is to compel them into treatment, to force them into treatment, even though we know that that is not effective, and you know at times it can be. And generally where you see the most success with it is where there's more hanging over the person's head, more leverage that the system has.

And so, you know, somebody who has a substance use disorder and commits a robbery and is put on probation and they have a choice between going to prison and doing treatment, much more likely to engage in treatment. But when you have low level possession, where as a society we've deemed that should not be punished by prison, and

frankly that should not be punished by jail. The problem is is that the only tool that the system has is jail, and so if somebody says I'm not ready for treatment, the system says, well, we're going to put you in jail that and then they go to jail, they're what little they have is destabilized and they get out without any treatment. And as you mentioned in the opening, the biggest thing is just the incredible dearth of services

in our community. There is not nearly enough outpatient treatment, but especially in patient treatment, and that's that's important for those houseless folks, because you can't expect somebody to engage in outpatient treatment and then go back and sleep on the street at night and not use So I know that's I think the general gist of what it looked like.

more people, particularly more homeless people. It's pushed by a lot of business owners who have convinced themselves that the reason why downtown Portland has had such a hard couple of years is because there's too many homeless people and they can go after them and get them off the

street by having them arrested. This is all my opinion, not yours here, but there has been What is not up for opinion is that there has been an escalating campaign to portray the measure as a disaster and to portray it as the center of particularly Portland's ills, but also more broadly the state of Oregon's ills. And I think there's a number of reasons why that's dishonest, which we'll talk about. But where that's kind of culminated now is this year. There are two big pushes to get

rid of one ten. One of them is the push by a ballot measure or to put out a ballot measure basically repealing one ten as it exists, and the other is a push by the legislature. And you kind of have separate plans pushed by the DIMS and the Republicans to in the case of the Republican plan, basically put things back to the way they were, if not more severe in terms of your ability to arrest people

for possession. And the Democrats' plans is to re criminalized possession but make it all basically at the lowest level of misdemeanor. I don't think either of those are good plans, But I wanted to talk about kind of how you would characterize the backlash campaign against one ten and how much of it do you think is rooted in actual problems caused.

and needing to use the drugs in the street. And that is the same of business owners. You know, they call and complain that there's somebody on the stoop next to them using fentanyl, But is the issue that that person is using fentanyl or is the issue that that person is on the stoop next to them? Because there are no housing services in our city and so really Measure one ten is being scapegoaded for two huge issues, which is the influx of synthetic heroin or fentanyl into

our community and into every community around the nation. It is not restricted to Portland or to Oregon because we decriminalized, it is everywhere. And then just the houselessness crisis, which is tremendous in our city. It is so bad, and people are essentially arguing that because we decriminalize drugs, more people are on the street, and I just don't think that there is any data to support that.

in which it's criminalized. It's very frustrated to me when you look at like, well, we passed one ten in twenty twenty, and these problems have gotten worse since, and it's like, well, but these are all problems that have gotten worse everywhere, and they are problems that are not driven by legality or at least the fact that it's no longer criminal to possess heroin. It's driven by the fact that we had a horrible pandemic that traumatized people.

They lost loved ones, they lost jobs, they lost support. It's driven by the fact that the price of housing continues to rise. It's driven by inflation. It's driven by the fact that, I mean, to no small part, everybody's got brain worms from social media. That's not a zero percent factor in both people's anger at the houseless and in the fact that people are falling through the cracks.

it's hard not to die doing that. Like, rich people can continue to test their kids. People who are you know, have had the benefit of not just education, but a stable home in which to do drugs and sort of the resources to know and to be able to test their shit, will test their shit. But most street level

users don't have that kind of option. And it frustrates me that it's all getting scapegoaded this on this ballot measure, And so I wanted to talk a little bit about how they're attempting to go after one ten because it looks like right now the primary threat is legislative part, because if they push another ballot measure, Oregonians get to

vote and we'll see how they vote. But reversing it by ten, you know, almost a ten percent lead, is not an easy thing to do, and I kind of think Oregonians might surprise them in terms of not being willing to repeal this thing legislatively. We don't have really that kind of option against it. If they're able to get a kind of enough people behind an essential repeal, and they'll frame it as you know, we're just trying to tinker with the law to make it work better.

But if they can get enough people behind that, there's really nothing to do about it, right, Yeah.

misinformation that they've been spreading thus far. And I think that frankly, there are people in the legislature that don't want to recriminalize but feel that it is the lesser of two evils. And the unfortunate thing is that what we are essentially doing is delivering them a watered down version of that ballot measure. And they were intentional in that ballot measure. I mean, they made it as bad as could be. That it includes more than just recriminalization.

You know, it includes what is commonly known as lend bias law in federal courts, which is essentially that people who deliver a substance that causes an overdose can be prosecuted essentially for murder. And it is a archaic understanding of how the distribution of drugs works or the testing of drugs works, And so they tried to make it as bad as possible in order for the legislature to essentially go, well, we don't want that to happen. And

you know, I would worry about a ballot measure. I mean, I agree with you that it's a big swing, and I have faith in the voters of Oregon. But the fact is is that the media has portrayed this very unfairly. You know, there was an article recently from the editorial board at The Oregonian and they advocated for recriminalization, and in it they cited that they want a data driven approach. There was not a piece of data in that article. It was all based on misinformation. And the same is true.

I mean, law enforcement are the worst about this. You know, they're constantly saying, oh, well, we just want tools so that we can confiscate the drugs and so that we can refer people to treatment, because we all know that's all police officers want to do. And yet when you look at the E citations that came out of Measure one ten, those were meant as to be a referral tool. And that was one of the big mistakes of one ten is trying to use police officers as an ambassador

for treatment. There is a culture in the police community that it treats drugs as crimes. Right, you are a criminal if you are a drug user, and I am not. You know, I'm not saying police are a monolith. I'm

saying that is the culture that exists. And to expect them to change that overnight because the voters said they wanted to decriminalize was rather naive and it's obvious because just here in Maltnoma County, I think in basically a twenty four month period they issued something like nine hundred E citations or that was during a thirty month period,

excuse me. And during a twenty four month period in twenty eighteen and twenty nineteen, they arrested more than thirty three hundred people on PCs, and that is what nearly three times more than three times as many people when they were able to put handcuffs on the people that they were meeting with, and Maltnoma County was actually better than a most you look at Washington County, seventy one

e citations in thirty months. Seventy one tickets were given on this and the ticket was supposed to be the tool by which somebody is referred to treatment, and so you know, in some ways, Measure one ten had some serious structural and implementation issues, but that doesn't mean that we just go back to what the voters saw.

and there's a number of reasons for this, but like when they frame it as like will be decriminalized stuff, and all these problems kept getting worse, It's like, well, for one thing, they kept getting worse. They were getting worse when everything was illegal at a rapid pace. And number two, you didn't do what was supposed to be half of the measure, which was increasing the amount of care that people had access to.

hire people to do that. And what the opponents of one ten are doing, what the people seeking to recriminalize they're doing, and they're really praying on our collective impatience.

no treatment available to voluntarily engage in. And the idea that by making it criminal we can somehow fix that is actually counterproductive because we're taking all those funds that we could be putting into additional services into outreach, and we're instead putting it back into law enforcement or into probation, or into the jails or into the state lab to test these drugs.

of a couple of things. Number One, when people talk about how it's not working, the thing that you should bring up is like, well, what about the forty years or so of criminalization prior like that led us to this point and at which the acceleration in depths was highest. And the other thing to bring up is, well, there's these claims that, like public disorder, drug use, all this stuff,

overdose deaths have gotten worse since one ten. There's no evidence that that's the case, right, And there was in fact a study into this by New York University that found no evidence of an association between decriminalization and fatal overdose rates in Oregon and Washington. And I want to

read a couple of quotes from that study. So, first off, quote, publicly available calls for service data were used to compare Portland's use of the nine to one one system to Boise, Idaho, Sacramento, California, and Seattle, Washington, before and after one ten. This was between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty two. Public initiated calls for service did not change after BM one ten was

enacted in Portland. Portland's nine one one calls for service data align with comparison cities for property, disorderly and vice offenses with similar seasonally fluctuations. So, for one thing, what you'll notice is that a lot of the articles about one ten started to hit both when we would have winter weather come in and summer weather come in. Both of those lead the surges in overdoses and drug use.

Because the weather's shitty, right, people have less to do, less options, and actually, if you're living outside it's one hundred during the day or it's twelve, maybe you want to do drugs more because you're uncomfortable. Right. Yeah, So again I think that it's important. There's this study from New York University on one ten and you know, it's lack of impact on this stuff. That shouldn't be the

final word on this. I'm certain there will be more studies, but that is a word on this, and they simply have no data.

of one ten and how it was going. As you might imagine, officers didn't think it was going well and they said, oh, well, violent crime has increased and property crime is increased in overdoses are increased in all because of one ten. And what this report found is that is not true. There was an uptick and property crime, but we cannot say that that has been a result of one ten for years. You need a lot of

data in order to look at that. And so, you know, this idea, and I mean, the ultimate finding of that study was that it is too early to recriminalize. It based on the data, it is too early to recriminalize. And so but again, you know, I think that instead what we are relying on is people's fear and what people see in the street. And you know, I think it's also this idea. I mean, the reason we are having this discussion, in my opinion, is two things. One

is public use, right, individuals using the street. It's in people's faces. Nobody really cares when someone is in the warmth of their own home using fentanyl. It's when they're on the street.

it there. That saves them money based on doing nothing, because when they do nothing, people break into houses and cars, et cetera, and boats because it's the Netherlands in order to steal shits so that they can not get dope sick, and just giving the dope to them winds up costing a lot less per addict.

I mean, there are numerous studies that show that when you put somebody in housing, their likelihood of using drugs drops, their likelihood of committing crimes drops. And yet we are focused on this recriminalization rather than trying to house these individuals.

twenty years. Like they have a significant amount of data on it right, and Oregonians, the people who were pushing for one ten, cited it specifically as like a reason

why this was worthwhile. There was recently, I think last year, some state officials and whatnot went to Portugal to look into the system, and so as a result, you've seen like attacks on the Portuguese drug system, including there was a recent Washington Post article about how Portugal is starting to regret it, They're going to recriminalize maybe, And the reality of the situation is that there was has been a recent surge in illicit drug use in Portugal from

seven point eight percent in two thousand and one to twelve point eight percent in twenty twenty two. That is an increase. It's still below the average in most of Western Europe. It's lower than France and Italy. I believe it's lower than the UK, It's lower than like most of Western Europe. And I just kind of pointing out the fact that Portugal is also dealing with an increase

in drug use. Again, saying that that's because of the culture of decriminalization seems silly when there have been corresponding surges everywhere where it's illegal. But beyond that, it ignores the fact that there have been really significant benefits that we do know our benefits of decriminalization because of how long we've been looking at it. From two thousand to two thousand and eight, prison populations in Portugal fell by

almost seventeen percent. Overdose rates dropped because in part they funded rehabilitation, which Oregon still has not really done. There was no surge in use, and in fact less people seem to die when the system changed, right. What has

increased is some drug de related debris. Particularly most of the surges have been in the last literally the last couple of years, which again makes me think it is tied to the global trends that have made a lot of people more miserable and living in a more difficult situation and at more risk of drug addiction. What happens in Portugal politically hard to say, but overall, decriminalization we have a lot of data for seems to have largely been success.

although I don't think that that's inevitable. And this gets us to what I think is kind of the most dangerous point that the opposition, the people who want to recriminalize make, And it's dangerous because it seems like they have a good point, which is people shouldn't be people with families, just regular people should not have to see folks using hard drugs on the street as they walk around town. And I agree it is not reasonable to expect people to walk with their kids to school past

somebody shooting up heroin or smoking crack. It's fine, and you're not like a some sort of like nark or party pooper if you don't want your kids to see that. But that's already illegal, because it's like it's illegal to drink a beer on the street in Portland. The problem is not that the cops can't do anything about it, it's that, again they're choosing not to do anything about it.

of that. And frankly, the system would have a better argument for punishing public use if we had safe use areas because we have put so many people on the street. Yes, somebody who has no place to be and is desperate and it is addicted using it a place where you can see them is understandable. Somebody who has options for places to be and is choosing to do it in front of people, that's a bit of a different case. And again I also want to just really, because I've

encountered this in arguments about one ten with people. It did not make it legal to do drugs in public. That remains illegal. It's illegal to drink beer in public. Absolutely, Yeah, public use is I mean, but again, these are sort of the narratives that are being perpetuated by and a lot of it is law enforcement. And honestly, my take on it is that law enforcement doesn't really care about recriminalizing possession.

on our protected privacy interest has always been drugs. It has always been the criminalization of drugs has eroded our privacy interests. And and that is that's what's really at play here because I don't I don't think the officers I mean, and this is again not a monolith I'm saying, I don't think in general law enforcement really is that concerned with, you know, getting individuals off the street and

into treatment. If that were the case, we would have seen far more of those e citations, you know, we would see the officers doing there. There is a statute that allows them to transport people to detox, right, we don't see that that often because really, what is that issue here is the ability to search people based on probable cause that they possess drugs.

was in the New Yorker, it's great. Yeah, there's a

I'm pulling it up right now. There's a great New Yorker piece, a New Drug War in Oregon, that was published just this month, probably the best major outlet piece I've seen on it, And yeah, it's It talks a lot about the STAB and Wagon, which is a kind of independent although they've now should at some point theoretically be getting a significant amount of funding, but like they provide drug users not just with naloxone or narcan, but with safe use materials like syringes and stuff that are clean.

This is down in the south of Oregon, in a place called Medford, which has both one of Oregon's worst

drug problems and also is much more conservative area. So obviously these people are very controversial, and I will say, you know, one of the things this article does well is they get at, even within people who are supportive of one ten, the conflict between kind of traditional addiction recovery resources and organizations and some of these often these new organizations are either started by or run by people who have or do currently deal with addiction, and I

think covering that conflict is valuable. There's some stuff that frustrates me about it, and this is I think there's a lot of negativity towards stab and Wagon and its founder that's unfair. I also think some of the things that she has said about traditional addiction recovery resources are very unfair from her point of view. And I think when I look at the problem, the only comprehensive solution

is multiple options for different kinds of people. Because I know a lot of people who have dealt with addiction and recovered and no two of them did it the same way.

You know, as a public defender, I don't get the benefit of the prosecutor or the court to or probation to wield power and to make my client do what they should do. Because I'm holding power over them. I have to build trust, right, I have to have a relationship of trust with them, and I have to find out what motivates that individual and and try to utilize that to encourage positive steps. Right, And that's true of our our case managers and social workers that work with us.

And that's that's what the system doesn't have, right. The system is just trying to use the threat of incarceration in order to get individuals who are not ready for recovery to engage in recovery, and that that's detrimental. I mean, we need both harm reduction and we need traditional treatment. We need culturally competent treatment. You know, there needs to be wrap around services. And that's one of my concerns here is that you know, we know that the criminal

legal system has worked. One ten past, we had a drug court that dealt with low level possession and its graduation rate was around seventeen percent, so seventeen percent to people, and graduation meant ninety days of sobriety. And that was seventeen percent of people. That other eighty three percent if

they fail out a program. Again, the only tool the system has is jail, and so all they did was did not hook them up with services and instead eventually punish them for not being ready for treatment, and that is not how we get people into recovery.

How do I argue against it? And my answer was like, well, you don't really You make it clear, like, hey, I don't really believe this, I don't find this compelling, but like you know, I love you and I'm always here to listen if you want to talk about this kind

of stuff or you want to talk about whatever. And that is the same if someone's starting to get pulled into a cult or if they're dealing with drugs, because, as you noted, if they have a pathway out, and they're not going to have to It's not this kind of thing where you've been yelling at them and may and then they they have to come to you with their head tail between their legs and like I was wrong,

I fucked up. That's a barrier. If like, well, this this person cares about me and is always going to be like willing to you know, talk with me like no matter what, well, then that's less of a barrier.

a system locking them up because of their addiction. And you know, we all need to recognize that, you know it that falling into that lifestyle. You know, whether whether it is because of you know, where you were raised, how you were raised, you know, whether you got addicted to pills because your doctor prescribed them. There's a lot of reasons, whether you had childhood trauma, there's a lot

of reasons why people get an addiction. And you know, to simply assume that somebody, because they're addicted to drugs is a criminal, a bad person, you know, it is making them the other. And it's so much easier to be punitive when you're just seeing.

these days sometimes it feels like less bad is the is the goal that we need to strive for.

have lived experience with addiction, consider becoming a peer. It is so impactful to have individuals who have struggled with substance use go out in the community and engage individuals who are currently struggling with it. And that is the best trust building that it's the best way to get people into recovery, not through handcuffs in jails.

go to a few panels. Now, panels are really interesting because you get to hear people who are working inside industries talk about stuff that they don't usually really publicly talk about very much. And on the first day of the convention, I went to a panel about drone technology. Half of the panel was about how Walmart is launching new delivery drones in Dallas, Texas. The other half was

about police drones. And that's what we're going to be talking about here today, how the police are using drones, why they're using drones, and how you can probably expect to be seeing a lot more drones up in the sky piloted by either an AI or a police officer. So let's get started. Cheula Vista is the southernmost kind of medium sized city in California, with the population of

two hundred and seventy eight thousand people. Cheulavista has a police force of two hundred and eighty nine sworn officers, as well as one hundred and twenty civilian employees. On top of their nearly three hundred officers, they operate a drone fleet ten hours a day, seven days a week, launching high deff camera mounted drones from four locations throughout

their small city. I'm going to quote from an article from the MIT Technology Review, which did a deep dive onto Cheulavista's police drones back in February of twenty twenty three.

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

the goal of having an unmanned aerial system or drone be proactively deployed before an officer is on scene. Now we'll hear from Chief Roxanna Kennedy of the Cheu La Vista Police Department talking on the drone technology panel at CES.

much longer flights in restricted airspace. Chula Vista Pedi was the first department to get a BEVLOST waiver. The MIT Tech Review estimated last year that roughly two hundred and twenty five more departments now have one as well.

We're very proud of that that they trusted us enough for us to be the organization that brought forward all these these ideas that are now being utilized in law enforcements. Now.

why police drones are so important. In one video on their website, this guy from Skyfire Consulting was talking about how police may not have had to kill Ta Mirror Rice if they simply had a drone watching beforehand so they could see that it was a toy gun, which is a ridiculous thing to say, because in the nine one one call that jump started this entire police interaction, it was expressed that the caller thought the gun was

probably a toy. And this notion that is simply if police have more ability to surveil, they'll be able to respond safer and apply less deadly force, I think is a pretty suspect premise. Now, the effectiveness of drone technology

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

from using drone technology. I was able to find some data on cvpd's website talking about how many drone initiated interactions resulted in arrests, but quantifying additional arrests seems to be a little challenging.

Nearly thirty percent of Chula Vista's drone deployments are for what's categorized as disturbances, Almost fifteen percent are for psychological evaluations, ten percent are for quote, check the area and information. Over seven percent are for welfare checks, six point five percent is for quote unknown problem, and over six percent

is for suspicious person and another six percent for traffic accidents. Now, some drone of deployments do results in patrol units not having to be dispatched, but CVPD also says that drones have assisted in thousands of arrests. And I'm really not sure if having a drone following someone around is the best thing for a fifty one to fifty psych evaluation.

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

drones and paying dedicated operators costs money. Now it's unclear to me how many drones to LEVISTAPD currently has, and on their website they list ten different drone models currently being in their fleet, most of them really expensive DGI drones like the DGI Matrix, the DGI Inspire, the DGA Phantom, the dj Maverick, as well as drones from a few other random companies. But nevertheless, Chief Kennedy is very grateful for their local Police Foundation for heading up the funding

for their DFR drone first Responder program. Let's hear from her.

challenges beyond that of funding. So we don't have huge budgets that are abouted for drone programs, and so we've had to be very, very creative at our police department, and we were very blessed to have a police foundation that has taken on the responsibility to help us really start our drone program and continue going forward. So funding is always going to be a challenge and dependent upon the.

with encrypted software programs that are on private servers. But you'll see that there's a lot of discussion about drones and what drones we.

million dollar operating budget. Back in twenty twenty, the Loprenza newspaper revealed that departments in San Diego County had secretly been getting hundreds of millions of dollars in high tech police equipment, including armored vehicles, facial recognition and phone breaking software, license plate readers, drones, ria gear, among other miscellaneous technology as a part of a DHS grant program due to

their close proximity to the US Mexico border. Chula Vista was one such department, and as of twenty twenty, so four years ago, they had already received over one million dollars in grant funds from this DHS program, titled the

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

map from a comfy office building. Issues around this ease of use was pointed out by Dave Moss, the director of investigations for the privacy rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who was quoted in the MIT article saying, quote, up until the last like five to ten years, there was this unspoken check and balance on law enforcement power, money You cannot have a police officer standing on every corner

of every street. You can't have a helicopter flying twenty four seven because of fuel and insurance is really expensive. But with all these new technologies, we don't have that check and balance anymore. That's just going to result in more people being pulled through the criminal justice system.

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

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

the camera never actually stops recording. She just claims that it tilts slightly upwards in between nine one one calls, but it's still capturing footage up to three miles away the entire time it's in the air. Police in Cheulavista have flown over eighteen thousand missions with their drowns. That's

a lot of footage. When talking about the privacy concerns had by some residents of Chewulavista, Chief Kennedy really emphasized how much her in the department really care about listening to community feedback and how data transparency is so important to CVPD.

the concept and the possibility of drones. And I laughed with Chancel, said George Jensen, because that's my story that I used to and I love it.

Despite the chief's emphasis on the police's commitment to transparency and the importance of listening to community feedback, even going as far as to consult the ACLU when developing their drone program, for years now, the Cheu Livista Police Department has denied all FOYA and public records requests for any drone footage in response. Are Turno Castnares, a Teulvista resident and owner of the local bilingual newspaper Loprenza filed a

lawsuit against the city. CVPD argued that all drone footage should be categorically exempt from the public records requests on the basis that the footage could be used for a

future investigation. Just last December, only a few weeks before Cees, the California Fourth District Court of Appeals ruled that this blanket exemption is invalid and that not all drone first responder footage could be classified as part of appending or ongoing criminal investigation, pointing to examples such as nine oh one calls about a roaming mountain lion or a stranded motorist.

And police were not happy about this ruling. I'll talk about their reaction at the end of the episode, but controlling the narrative about the drone first responder program has been of the utmost importance to Trulavista Police, as the chief herself expressed at the panel.

places like people's homes, backyards, or public protests. And that's why this recent ruling and the legal precedent it sets is a huge win for actual transparency and marks the first step towards the public finally getting a look at how these drones are being used in Scheula Vista. With drone first responder programs is spreading to police departments across

the country modeled after the one in Chula Vesta. Combined with the increasing presence of stationary street level cameras, the ability for police to be watching everywhere without the need for on the ground officers creates what the EFF refers to as quote, a fundamental change in strategy, with police responding to a much much larger number of situations with drones, resulting in pervasive, if not persistent, surveillance of communities unquote.

Speaking of persistent surveillance, Near the end of the panel, the Chief announced that to Lavesta, PD is planning to expand their ten hour a day drone first responder program to a constant twenty four hour a day drone surveillance program.

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

But from the four different locations that we fly on each of the rooftops, we have what's called the piloting command and thatlot in command is contracted through a company and we and they just have visual awareness of the sky and they working in coordination with our drone pilot

that's inside our operations center. But that's a huge expense for us to pay lead for each site right now with the operations that we have to paint abut one hundred thousand dollars per year, So that's four hundred thousand dollars for four locations beyond all the other processes here. And so if you can get expensive, my hobe is

that and we keep hearing about it. We've seen some of the testing and we've been testing it as well in our area or what's called drone in the box or there's some of the systems that are out there right now that organizations are using that are a toonaments and so we're getting there, but we're not quite there because it's very different when you're dealing with flying over people and you're flying.

launching and being piloted by themselves. You wouldn't have to train random police officers to become FAA licensed pilots, and you could just have the whole thing in the box like it's called drone in the box. And these are

only going to become more common and cheaper. Imagine having ten of these throat a city, launching from like ten different rooftops, being able to fly around by themselves, constantly going around in communities, constantly going to GPS coordinates linked to the nine one one calls creating a whole wealth of footage instantly available to police, live streamed from the air.

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

as quote rapidly escalating. Jula Vista likes to market itself as a pioneer of the smart city movement, which consequently makes them able to receive a whole bunch of grant funding.

have many many consequences. But anyway, back to drones. According to a twenty twenty article in the newspaper Loprenza, cities in San Diego County like Chula Vista, have received equipment such as tethered drones used for stationary surveillance poll cameras, license plate readers, and cell phone cracking technology used to circumvent passwords from the Urban Area Security Initiative DHS grant program.

A lot of these technologies have use in the Smart City Idyllic plan for data collection to automate city services. After the drone panel was over and I was walking around the show floor at CEES, I couldn't help but notice all of the smart cameras and AI image recognition systems being advertised for law enforcement applications. Software that can almost instantaneously scan through a wealth of footage and track people's movements, run facial recognition, and identify every article of clothing.

Versions of this type of software are already in use by many police departments, and they will only get better, cheaper, and more common. In effect, what this does is remove a lot of the detective legwork. Instead of having to manually map someone's movements and track down what niche etsy shirt someone's wearing, these aisystems can now do this all automatically. To quote the MIT Tech Review article on cvpd's DFR

drone program quote. As the technology continues to spread, privacy and civil liberty groups are raising the question of what happens when drones are combined with license plate readers, networks of fixed cameras, and new real time command centers that digest and sort through video evidence. This digital dragnet could dramatically expand surveillance capabilities and lead to even more police interactions with demographics that have historically suffered from over policing.

recent lawsuit she just lost over hiding drone footage. And I also threw in a question about drones at protests. Let's take a listen.

been using drones to surveil first amendent activity stuff. And I know you recently lost a court case regarding the availability of drone footage, so I'm curious about kind of what the rationale for that footage is and how that plays into this idea of trying to be transparent with the community for how these drones are being used.

there was if it turned into a riot. So if people were out there and they have the ability to to speak freely to share their concerns, and if it's in opposition, our goal is to make sure that we keep it safe for all parties involved on either side. So my hope is that other people look at it the same way that we do, and hopefully I've been able to answer it as much as I believe me, I'm dying to give you more than I can't.

did lose the case. The Fourth District Court of Appeals ruled that claiming exemption from the Public Records Act was unlawful and sent the case back to trial court to hammer the details of how much footage is subject to public disclosure and figure out a process for standardizing the release of the footage. Now. The same day I attended this panel in Las Vegas, January ninth, the city of Chula Vista requested an appeal to the California Supreme Court

to prevent the release of their aerial video footage. There is a sixty day waiting period where the High Court will decide whether or not to take the case, and if they decline finally, it will go back to trial court to decide on the process of how selected drone

footage shall be made publicly available. The police are now currently claiming that make DFR footage adhere to the Public Records Act would violate the privacy of Chula Vista residents captured in the videos, which perhaps demonstrates that the aerial videos should have never been captured in the first place. I'm going to read a press release from the city's communication manager. Quote, the city declined to provide the copies

because doing so might have violated individual privacy rights. The city would have to manually review and redact every video recording to protect information considered personal, such as the images

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

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

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

whether or not they're going to hear this case. If they decline, then the president will be set statewide against this exemption of the Public Records Act by hiding drone footage, So that will be really cool, And then hopefully within the next year, we'll finally be able to see what some of this footage actually looks like, how good their cameras are, how much they can zoom in, all of the details of how much of the city they're capturing, all this kind of stuff, how often the drones are

in the air, all of those types of things that it will be easier to highlight once we can actually take a look at the footage.

to actually force the police to be transparent. And if you want to read more, I'd recommend checking out the website to Loprenza dot org, as well as the MIT tech review piece, which provided some really really useful information to fill in the gaps between my own research.