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Word on the street, William Camargo

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Because of the Fifth Amendment, no one in the U.S. may legally be forced to testify against himself, and because of the Fourth Amendment, no one’s records or belongings may legally be searched or seized without just cause. However, American police are trained to use methods of deception, intimidation and manipulation to circumvent these restrictions. In other words, cops routinely break the law—in letter and in spirit—in the name of enforcing the law. Several examples of this are widely known, if not widely understood.

1) “Do you know why I stopped you?” Cops ask this, not because they want to have a friendly chat, but because they want you to incriminate yourself. They are hoping you will “voluntarily” confess to having broken the law, whether it was something they had already noticed or not. You may think you are apologizing, or explaining, or even making excuses, but from the cop’s perspective, you are confessing. He is not there to serve you; he is there fishing for an excuse to fine or arrest you. In asking you the familiar question, he is essentially asking you what crime you just committed. And he will do this without giving you any “Miranda” warning, in an effort to trick you into testifying against yourself.

2) “Do you have something to hide?” Police often talk as if you need a good reason for not answering whatever questions they ask, or for not consenting to a warrantless search of your person, your car, or even your home. The ridiculous implication is that if you haven’t committed a crime, you should be happy to be subjected to random interrogations and searches. This turns the concept of due process on its head, as the cop tries to put the burden on you to prove your innocence, while implying that your failure to “cooperate” with random harassment must be evidence of guilt.

3) “Cooperating will make things easier on you.” The logical converse of this statement implies that refusing to answer questions and refusing to consent to a search will make things more difficult for you. In other words, you will be punished if you exercise your rights. Of course, if they coerce you into giving them a reason to fine or arrest you, they will claim that you “voluntarily” answered questions and “consented” to a search, and will pretend there was no veiled threat of what they might do to you if you did not willingly “cooperate.” (Such tactics are also used by prosecutors and judges via the procedure of “plea-bargaining,” whereby someone accused of a crime is essentially told that if he confesses guilt—thus relieving the government of having to present evidence or prove anything—then his suffering will be reduced. In fact, “plea bargaining” is illegal in many countries precisely because it basically constitutes coerced confessions.)

4) “We’ll just get a warrant.” Cops may try to persuade you to “consent” to a search by claiming that they could easily just go get a warrant if you don’t consent. This is just another ploy to intimidate people into surrendering their rights, with the implication again being that whoever inconveniences the police by requiring them to go through the process of getting a warrant will receive worse treatment than one who “cooperates.” But by definition, one who is threatened or intimidated into “consenting” has not truly consented to anything.

5.) We have someone who will testify against you Police “informants” are often individuals whose own legal troubles have put them in a position where they can be used by the police to circumvent and undermine the constitutional rights of others. For example, once the police have something to hold over one individual, they can then bully that individual into giving false, anonymous testimony which can be used to obtain search warrants to use against others. Even if the informant gets caught lying, the police can say they didn’t know, making this tactic cowardly and illegal, but also very effective at getting around constitutional restrictions.

6) “We can hold you for 72 hours without charging you.” Based only on claimed suspicion, even without enough evidence or other probable cause to charge you with a crime, the police can kidnap you—or threaten to kidnap you—and use that to persuade you to confess to some relatively minor offense. Using this tactic, which borders on being torture, police can obtain confessions they know to be false, from people whose only concern, then and there, is to be released.

7) “I’m going to search you for my own safety.” Using so-called ��Terry frisks” (named after the Supreme Court case of Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1), police can carry out certain limited searches, without any warrant or probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed, under the guise of checking for weapons. By simply asserting that someone might have a weapon, police can disregard and circumvent the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches.

U.S. courts have gone back and forth in deciding how often, and in what circumstances, tactics like those mentioned above are acceptable. And of course, police continually go far beyond anything the courts have declared to be “legal” anyway. But aside from nitpicking legal technicalities, both coerced confessions and unreasonable searches are still unconstitutional, and therefore “illegal,” regardless of the rationale or excuses used to try to justify them. Yet, all too often, cops show that to them, the Fourth and Fifth Amendments—and any other restrictions on their power—are simply technical inconveniences for them to try to get around. In other words, they will break the law whenever they can get away with it if it serves their own agenda and power, and they will ironically insist that they need to do that in order to catch “law-breakers” (the kind who don’t wear badges).

Of course, if the above tactics fail, police can simply bully people into confessing—falsely or truthfully—and/or carry out unconstitutional searches, knowing that the likelihood of cops having to face any punishment for doing so is extremely low. Usually all that happens, even when a search was unquestionably and obviously illegal, or when a confession was clearly coerced, is that any evidence obtained from the illegal search or forced confession is excluded from being allowed at trial. Of course, if there is no trial—either because the person plea-bargains or because there was no evidence and no crime—the “exclusionary rule” creates no deterrent at all. The police can, and do, routinely break the law and violate individual rights, knowing that there will be no adverse repercussions for them having done so.

Likewise, the police can lie under oath, plant evidence, falsely charge people with “resisting arrest” or “assaulting an officer,” and commit other blatantly illegal acts, knowing full well that their fellow gang members—officers, prosecutors and judges—will almost never hold them accountable for their crimes. Even much of the general public still presumes innocence when it comes to cops accused of wrong-doing, while presuming guilt when the cops accuse someone else of wrong-doing. But this is gradually changing, as the amount of video evidence showing the true nature of the “Street Gang in Blue” becomes too much even for many police-apologists to ignore.

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/7-ways-police-will-break-law-threaten-or-lie-you-get-what-they-want

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Back in my hood, Anaheim :)

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Jaay in Back of The Yards, Chicago

2018 

Medium Format Film

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Hermanas, Santa Ana, Califas 2017

Medium Format Film

William Camargo

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I Walk into Every Room and Yell Where the Mexicans At

by Jose Oliverez

i know we exist because of what we make. my dad works at a steel mill. he worked at a steel mill my whole life. at the party, the liberal white woman tells me she voted for hillary & wishes bernie won the nomination. i stare in the mirror if i get too lonely. thirsty to see myself i once walked into the lake until i almost drowned. the white woman at the party who might be liberal but might have voted for trump smiles when she tells me how lucky i am. how many automotive components do you think my dad has made. you might drive a car that goes and stops because of something my dad makes. when i watch the news i hear my name, but never see my face. every other commercial is for taco bell. all my people fold into a $2 crunchwrap supreme. the white woman means lucky to be here and not mexico. my dad sings por tu maldito amor & i’m sure he sings to america. y yo caí en tu trampa ilusionado. the white woman at the party who may or may not have voted for trump tells me she doesn’t meet too many mexicans in this part of new york city. my mouth makes an oh, but i don’t make a sound. a waiter pushes his brown self through the kitchen door carrying hors d’oeuvres. a song escapes through the swinging door. selena sings pero ay como me duele & the good white woman waits for me to thank her.

[via poets.org]

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I Miss the Hood

I miss the hood,

I miss how the streets are not paved,

so you know which potholes to avoid by heart.

I miss waking up to the police sirens,

as they arrive to harass my cholo cousins.

I miss the hood.

I miss the senora selling 

tamales and champurado on the street corner.

I miss the corridos and cumbias blaring from astro vans and the

apartamentos,

on a loud Sunday morning, as mamas yell to their kids to wake up

for church on that Sunday morning.

I miss the the sound of mi tia yelling from her downstairs apartment, 

and most importantly

I miss the homie

who was killed on the other side of my street,

the homie who was shot by police, and the homie

who was killed by the hood I miss.

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Tagging’s reimagined, Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood

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My new work in the New York Times Lens Blog.

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Anaheim By Night by Jesus Cortez

The old woman looked out the window

expecting divine signs to appear

before her eyes; the shadows

of midnight broken by blinking

helicopters, and then the inevitable

siren; she had wished to give him

a better future, if only she could

get him to live through his present—

she remembered the songs he

would sing as a child, or when he proudly

showed her his latest drawing,

even when she was too busy to smile, too angry

to see his; and now as she caresses

her rosary beads, she wonders

why her child chose the night over

a home broken by more than one

tragedy, the answer was in her

question—and yet she kept hoping

that the door would open and her boy

would appear through the door so

she could hold him tightly and give

him all the kisses she missed at

his kindergarten play, and the smiles

at his first communion—the silence

returned as she fell asleep, whispering

to god and the city to let her boy

live another night, maybe even another day.

[williamphotography]

Join this Saturday at 12pm at Plaza Tenochtitlan in Pilsen, Chicago.

To march for our hoods, people from all neighborhoods welcome. 

Gentrification is Violence.

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Rough edit of "Los Mandiles Que Usaba", 2017 #chicanoart #chicanx #makeportraits #vscocam #vsco #california #contemporaryart #contemporaryphoto #mexican #mediumformat #filmisnotdead #chicanxart #chicano #back2thebase

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Llevame al Baile

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The Life of A Sombrero

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Follow me

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Announcing the zine "The Uneventful Life of a Chicano Boy" coming out in mid March. These are a collection of banal moments in my life and portraits that depict Mexican/American and Mexican life in the United States from Los Angeles, Santa Ana, Anaheim and Chicago. Designed by the great @attitudeseven. #vsco #vscocam #zine #cover #cholo #mexicanamerican #mexican #shootfilm #everydaylatinoamerica #makeportraits #chicanoart #art #igers #chicanx (at Southwest Side, Chicago, Illinois)

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Reblog if Black Lives Matter to you

Where are those woke white people at!?