Welcome to another episode of Civic Cipher. This is your host. Rams' job is Rams' job.
I am Qward. You are listening to Civic Cipher.
That's the truth. And here we are back in the studio. Good to be back.
Yeah, We've had an interesting couple of weeks that I'm sure you may know something about.
But you know what, at some point we will do a full recap.
There's a lot of moving pieces right now, and I know that everyone wants to know what it was like and everything. We see all the questions online. We appreciate that love and everyone's support. But you know, the story will be ready to be told when it's ready, and obviously we will be the ones to tell it.
So stay tuned.
But for now, we are going to revert to type, back to business as usual, so stick around.
Had a lot in store for you today.
We will be talking about a disturbing video that came our way about a black man was jumped by a group of police officers in a small prison cell.
You may have seen the video.
It's it's very disturbing, so we're gonna unpack that a bit. We're also going to talk about our current political client.
You know, we had an interesting midterm election season with a lot more favorable outcomes in my opinion, but the fact remains that this country is very divided, and in fact, it feels like we are subscribing to two different realities and it's deeply troubling and deeply unsettling because you know, this is supposed to be the United States of America and it's never felt further from that in my lifetime. So those and much more in store for you to
stick around for. But first and foremost, we're going to share some any excellence with you. How does that sound huge?
Shall we?
We shall so ebny excellence this week it is sponsored by Hip Hopic the Media. We will be talking about Capital B News. If you haven't heard about Capital B News, it is a media imprint that has just started up and it was started by two black women, and we celebrate black girl magic around here, so allow me to share a bit. Lauren Williams is a chief executive officer
and co founder of Capital B or. Starting Capital B, she was the senior vice president and editor in chief at Box, where she oversaw all editorial and business operations. She also helped positions of executive editor and managing editor there. Prior to Box, she was an editor at Mother Jones and The Root, which is where we source a lot of our material. Her first journalism job was in local
news at The Daily Press in Newport News, Virginia. And A Koto of Foriata is the co founder and chief audience officer of Capital B. She was previously managing editor at The Trace, where she was responsible for the award winning newsrooms, partnerships, special projects, and editorial operations. She previously held positions as senior editor at Essence Magazine and associate editor at The Root, and as a twenty fifteen John S.
Knight Journalism Fellow. And these two women.
Started Capital B because in the workplace, their former superiors were debating on how to speak to black issues but couldn't get passed whether or not to capitalize the B Wow right, powerful, Yeah, And so they're like, you know what, these folks don't really they're not speaking from our perspective. They're not prioritizing the things that you know, all these things you know your heart may be in the right place or maybe this is purely symbolic, but let's start
our own thing. Let's tell our stories, which is what we've done here on Civic Cipher Q and myself, and so we salute that as often as we can. So shout out to Capital b News. Be sure to check them out. We're going to love them now and forever.
Now and forever.
So, Q, you want to talk about the video for our listeners.
So I mean Ramsey said it, you know, back to form, back to type, back to unfortunately normal. And you guys who listen to our show, you guys have heard us say that we kind of share the emotional and mental burden of having to watch a lot of the videos that are submitted to us, a lot of the videos and stories that we come across, just because of the trauma associate with them, how difficult the subject matter is.
By share, you mean you'll take one story to watch one video, and then I'll take the next one so that we don't become desensitized to trauma against black bodies.
Yes, and we don't become overwhelmed emotionally. Please continue.
However, with this video, we both had a chance to look at it, and a lot of outlets, media outlets, newspapers, magazines would start this story with what the gentlemen did wrong? To end up in the custody of the officers in the first place. We believed that it's done with intent to take away the empathy, the sympathy to dehumanize or to remove the normal human reaction of caring for each other or not wanting to see other people be harmed,
in order to kind of take that away. These stories often start with them telling you how essentially deserving this person was of what came next. This person hadn't done such and such, they would not have been in jail or prison or in the custody of the police in the first place. So everything that happened from there, they kind of deserved it. Even if they don't say those words, it's implied just by leading the story off with that exactly. But what you will see in this video as a
man who was already in custody. We'll try to provide a link so you guys can watch this video, because maybe I might say the wrong number, but again, I don't want us to argue over semantics. Five or six officers is what I'm picturing in my head, because I'm not looking at this video right now.
He's recall it.
I got everything here, So five or six officers have this man again, already in custody. It looks like attempting to handcuff or further subdue again, already in custody, five of them or six of them, one of him, and then not ten seconds into this video that attempt turned into one of them striking him, and then all of them striking him repeatedly, one or two of them trying to hold them, three or four of them continuing to
strike him. And then, as a normal living being, what do him trying to defend and or protect himself, which, as you can imagine, causes them to go even harder with trying to harm him. And I'm sure in their head, yes, he hit back. So now we can really go in. And it's hard for me to watch any further than that because you only see videos like this when the person in custody looks like ramdis and I.
I want to ask you something, que please. I don't know if we've done this enough with these videos. We've definitely done it, but I want to ask you something. All right, Pretend I don't know the answer. When you watch that video, how did that make you feel?
There's multiple emotions?
Please? Sure?
Right?
The initial reaction is shocked even still when I see an officer wearing a badge punch a person not defending themselves, not protecting themselves or anyone else, a person who's already been apprehended, already subdued, already in jail, surrounded by again half a dozen officers. It still shocks me. And maybe after so many times, like you said, we should be numb to it or expected, but I still don't. It
catches me off guard every time. And I've seen comments where people are like, well, hey, what do you expect. I expect the person to have some dignity even if they broke a law, because in this great country of ours, you are not supposed to get beat over the head for driving your car too fast. I don't know that that's why this man was in custody. I'm just saying, we don't have a legal system that says this person broke a law. You guys should beat him up.
Okay, all right, so let me jump in.
I pulled the source material for this segment from the Black Information Network, where I also did an in depth analysis of this video. So please check out the Black Information Network Daily podcast hosted by Yours Truly if you want a little bit more in depth analysis of kind of the wise, but I'll kind of share them in brief,
all right. An attorney is calling for a criminal investigation after a video emerged of officers beating his client, the forty one year old black man from North Carolina, in a cell at a Georgia corrections facility.
I'm forty years old. Hellder you q forty one? Okay?
Civil rights attorney Harry Daniels said in a news release that the footage shows his client, Jared Hobbs, being mercilessly beaten. I think that that's fair. That's an accurate description, mercilessly beaten by officers at the Camden County Detention Center back in September. So that's how many months? So it was in.
November, you get it, all right?
That was according to CNN, Hobbs was alone when five officers, four of whom appeared to be white, entered his cell.
You know how big a cell is.
Right, Yes, a little tiny little box of the billion for six people. So five officers, four of whom appeared to be white, entered into a cell and began wrestling him, according to the video obtained by CNN. The video appears to show one officer grabbing Hops by the neck and others hitting him on the head. A second video released by attorneys shows officers pulling the forty one year old black man out of the cell and wrestling him on
the ground, with at least one officer kicking Hops. All right, So, if that were the whole story, which it isn't, I'm going to share a little bit more that was the whole story story. You might think if you are not accustomed or not learned insofar as how black people are treated by the criminal justice system in this country, that might shock you a bit, right, But this is something that is often the outcome when trauma's experienced, but it doesn't result in death.
Right.
There used to be a term in the early to mid nineties that we refer to as police brutality. And then after the militarization of the police, after Desert Storm and you know all the other things, all the equipment came back and police started getting tanks and helicopters and all kind of stuff, bigger guns, and you know, just
more militarized police force. Police shootings started to take center state in the media, and police brutality, police violence kind of is a less sensationalized topic, right, But I think it's important to focus on stories where a person doesn't
lose their life by a police shooting them. Because this man and his family even you know, and you could make the argument that his community, and I know that people like me and you that see that and have to watch and have to experience and then regurgitate it so that we can speak out against it. You know, there's a ripple effect to that problem, not just for him. And you know, there's something about this is the human
being in me talking. There's something about seeing a police shooting where it's like pop pop, person loses their life. It's awful, horrible, it's so sad. But because of how quickly it happens, you don't really think of the suffering. You just think think of you know, it's kind of an open, open and shut story. It's sad, it's tragic, and the life is over, heart stops beating, consciousness goes to whatever the next realm of existence is. Right, that
transition is incredibly sad. We deal with that regularly here. But when you see the actual suffering and the pain inflicted over and over again by every punch and every kick. And you see this black person with their black body and their black hair just getting tossed around in a very tiny closet sized space by a bunch of people. You know, and when you see this person ultimately, you know, imagine, imagine if it just hear me out, please imagine if
this is happening to you. Okay, your back is against three walls and then the only open wall there's five men attacking it. Right, And as you know we talk about this on the show, there is a panic response built into every creature on this planet with a nervous system. It's called fight or flight, right, So it means your your instincts will push you to either flee or to engage physically. Right, this is all you got every every Like, if you're a duck, that's what you got.
If you have a nervous system, if you're a fish, that's what you got. Okay.
So you see after him getting tossed around, punched, you know, beat up, that he tries to, you know, fight back, and it doesn't look like anything other than what it is. A person who looks like he's about to die and his flailing arms attempting at saving his own life. Okay, Now, mind you, at that point in the video, we've seen it. At that point in the video, he's already been getting beat up on by that point, right. So for those people who look at these things and say, well, he
shouldn't have hit back, there's nothing. There's nothing that you can say because he already was getting hit and didn't hit back, right.
But not hitting back did not make the outcome better. It's not like they were like, Okay, he's not quote unquote resisting, he's not fighting back, so stop punching him.
Nope.
And then once he did, you can see them again kind of get excited.
Because they're like, oh, now we're justified. Yeah, now we're justified.
And you know how the story went right because they wrote that he like assaulted them. I'll get to the details in a second one. They wrote that he assaulted them. Wow, when we know that they just barged into the cell. So so let's get to that. Let's get to that.
So first, why did he end up in there in the first place? Okay, and then.
We'll go to why did the officers approach him in his cell?
Okay? So I'm glad you brought up that.
He was brought in or a suspended license, guessing he was pulled over for speeding. They found that he had a suspended license, and the other charge says that he had a drug possession okay, while you were speaking, and then they said something from like twenty fourteen that he was on probation.
Okay.
So, as you know, the media tries to paint this sort of strange picture of like long standing criminal behavior and charges, you know, trumped up charges, as you would say, Q, which is exceptionally unfair because you and I both know, and perhaps some of our listeners know about this infraction that is valid in this country, and it's called being black and nearby.
Yeah, okay for.
Those who are unfamiliar with the infraction of being black and nearby, it's exactly what it sounds like. If you were close enough, then melanated enough, you can get himmed up in some stuff and they have nothing to do with you.
Right.
We talk about this on the show quite a bit, but suffice it to say that you know, anything can happen. You can get arrested for something, placed in jail. You know your trials three four months out. You know you can't bond out. You can't bail out because you don't have the money to bail out. You might be innocent. These are stories that we talk about on the show. I'm just walking you through this. So you take a plea so you can leave. Say, if you plead guilty this,
it'll be time serving your back on the street. Now you have a criminal record, even though you didn't do anything, just because you were poor and couldn't you know, pay for a lawyer.
We were just too close to whatever.
Right, Now that you have this criminal history and you have your own probation or whatever it is, you know, whatever you This is one example. This happens in many different variations. But now you have a criminal history. So from twenty fourteen your probation, you managed to make it, but almost nine years. It's almost a decade, right, And then you get pulled over for speeding. I probably shouldn't
admit this on the radio, but I got a speeding ticket. Now, I was driving a Corvette at the time, but I was going fifty one in the forty. That's not speeding to me, but it's speeding according to the law, right, So technically that's breaking the law. Right, So you get a speeding ticket.
Any But this happens to everybody.
You know how easy it is to get a suspended license and not even know about it. Okay, so a suspended license, you get pulled over for speeding, and then what's the elephant in the room. Possession of a drug. Now they don't say what this drug is. This could be a bottle of pills with someone else's name on it, that it was a my grandma's medicine, or it could be you know, something more serious and sinister, if that's where your brain goes. But the fact is that in
this country, we've talked about this one. In this country, we treat drugs. Then this wasn't intent to distribute. This wasn't you know, trafficking drugs or anything like that. This was possession, right, you.
Said it trumped up?
What else can we add to it?
Exactly so, And as you know, they will find substances in a car. This happened to us, will almost happen to us. They will find a substance in a car and it will register on their tester or their dog will tell them something. They will just claim it as a substance even if it doesn't exist, and then boom, you're in handcuffs and jail. This happened to us in Mississippi, or almost happened to us in Mississippi.
No, it's happened to us. We didn't end up arrested. But the officer said, with the period not a question mark, the dog found something.
Yeah, exactly, And then they have testers that will test stuff for any number of things, and if it registers anything, you're under arrest.
Right at some point of context, I just bought a new car. Neither of us have ever sold or tried or tried drugs, and we never drank alcohol. And the dog, I guess we're lying.
Yeah, so this is this is this is a real thing. Now.
This was day one of the new car too, by the way, so it's not like we had friends in the car that may have had something. Nope, we picked it up and we're driving. That's why we're in Mississippi. We're driving back.
So yeah, we were driving from Florida back to UH to the west coast and we got pulled over in Mississippi at night.
It was pretty intense.
Anyway, we've shared that story before, I'm sure we will again.
So possession right now, what I was going to say is this country treats drugs like it's a criminal issue and not like it's a health issue.
Yes, right, when you look like us there you go, right, stuff a pandemic or an epidemic when it's the opi order crisis and the people who are suffering the most at the hands of this drug don't look like Ramses and I you call it the war on drugs when you look like Ramson.
I yeah, and just imagine why folks.
Might take drugs.
I share a little bit about this on the Black Information Network Daily podcasts. But in brief, there's a study that I'm familiar with about rats, Right, and they put rats in a cage, and they put a water bottle that had like some drugs in it, and then a regular water bottle, and the rats overwhelmingly drank from the.
Water bottle that had the drugs in it. Right, But the rats were in a cage.
When they took the rats out of the cage and put them in a different environment where they had like a wheel to run on, and they had a maze to play in, and they had other rats to play with, and they had you know, space to spread their legs and do rat stuff.
They overwhelmingly just drank the water. They hardly ever touched the drug water. And so again a health issue, not a criminal issue. Those rats aren't criminals, you know what I mean.
Or I mean, if you want to go apples to apples, then you have to say that the rats are criminals too, and then you sound stupid.
Right, So this is.
Why he ends up in jail. Okay, Now, why do the officers come to his cell?
Okay?
So according to five of them, according to the reports, when we set a health issue, according to reports, he was kicking the cell door and refusing to stop.
Okay. Now to me, that means there is a mental health issue, right, And we've talked about this before too on the show. The intersection of you know, the criminal justice system and mental health issues is where we find a huge amount of problems with all of our communities. It doesn't matter which color are.
These people are not equipped to handle this sort of stuff, and they have this bully mentality, this gang mentality, as we've seen in the video, and you end up with folks who are responding to a person who's perhaps having a mental health crisis, kicking a door, refusing to stop.
Five officers show up. They beat this.
Man on one video, drag him into the hallway and kick him a bunch of times on another video, and then drag them away. And then the worst part about this is that they've launched an investigation into themselves to see if there was any wrongdoing. Oh wow, isn't that crazy? So I think it's again important to talk about this. Not only was it very disturbing to watch, but I think that this shows exactly what the evil You know,
there's no panic when a person is in prison. He doesn't have a gun, you know what I'm trying to say, And if you just don't enter the sale, there's literally no danger to anyone, to anyone, right. And they're of course trying to say that he assaulted them when the video one of the officers hurt his hand, I want to say, And the video shows the officers like swinging and missing and punching the wall all great, so they
want to charge him for that. And then another one said that, you know, when he swung back, he like hit him on the side of the head. So and of course, you know, he's got to go through his lawyer to you know, see if there's any sort of restitution and they have to wait until they investigate themselves to determine whether or not there was any wrongdoing or if that shouldn't have happened.
And so I'm sure they won't even find calls to press charges against themselves.
Yeah, so, you know, for those that know, you already know. But for those that don't, this is a glimpse into what it can be like to be a black person interacting with the criminal justice system.