Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Still broadcasting from the Civic Cipher studios. This is the
QR code where we share perspectives, seek understanding, and shape outcomes.
The man you are about to hear from. He is
the Q in QR in QR code and it is
a joy too the show with him every single day.
His name is qboard And then you.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Just heard from is the R in the QR code.
He's the boss around these parts, pay cash, He's the chain.
He goes by the name ramses Jah.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
And we want you to stick around because we're going
to ask a question in just a second that I
think is really potent and it goes back to, like,
you know, a significant part of our story. But stay
tuned because there's a big story we want to talk
about where an officer is holding a bat with the
(00:47):
in word on it and it says inward beater. So
we got a lot to talk about. But right now
it's time for Qboard's clap back and uh yeah, why
is homelessness now a crime?
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Q It's an interesting place to be man, as we
watch things that we know fundamentally why they exist the
way that they do and kind of have to pretend
that that's not the case. To really not slip into rage.
(01:27):
You and I saw some people on Beyonce's Internet posing
next to some signs in Florida, Kah the name of
a concentration camp that's being treated as a theme park,
so emerch and having people drive across the state just
(01:49):
to take pictures by the sign. A lot of people
have seen it. It's called Alligator Alcatraz. They even gave
it a cool, catchy theme park name. It's a constant
tradtion camp. And as they show us these things and
they laugh, and they bring their constituents there and trade
off votes for you know, signed merchant a tour of
(02:11):
this place. The cages are the point. The cruelty, you see,
is the point they've been telling us for years, politicians.
That is that they want to solve the homeless crisis.
They tell us that the streets aren't safe, that encampments
(02:35):
are dangerous, and that these people need help somehow. As
the great philosopher Tubac Yacurps once stated, they got money
for wars, but can't feed the poor. Billions, if not
trillions in dollars sent to other countries, and you know,
(02:56):
in addition to that, to fund our own larger, more
well found, more well funded, and more powerful military than
any other in the history of Earth military infrastructure, but
they can never come up with the money for those
who are here and less fortunate. I'm sure you've noticed that,
(03:19):
because Rams and I definitely have. But what I'm done
doing is pretending that this is not by design. This
country has always found a way to make poverty a
crime and the punishment for that a prophet. Initially, the
country's initial sin that they still have trouble acknowledging in
(03:40):
any meaningful way was slavery, then convict leasing, now the
prison industrial complex, and with the Thirteenth Amendment's loophole, slavery
is still legal if you commit a crime. We have
built a system that treats poor people and black and
(04:01):
brown people, immigrants, and anyone without power as nothing but
raw material. This is happening right now as we interject
more criminalization of homelessness. Cities are passing laws that make
it illegal to sleep in public, even when there's nowhere
(04:21):
else to go. As our government spends hundreds of millions
of dollars to build more concentration camps, they're conducting violent
encampment sweeps, and then where are they sending these people
not into some housing that they've created, to jail, to work,
(04:46):
to detention centers. All of this design to fuel a
system where poverty pays, just not the people who are
experiencing it. So when you see a headline about another
city banning public sleeping or passing new vagrancy laws, or
suspending and expelling children who they think are homeless, realize
(05:08):
that this is a supply chain. Even with the current
state of immigration, people being swept from the streets and
locked in sales, been told to work for pennies or nothing,
making furniture or cleaning roads, cooking prison meals, answering phones.
This is not compassion, This is not the law. This
is control cheap labor. And unfortunately this is not new
(05:34):
the evolution of American capitalism where cages have replaced plantations
and chains, and this is now policy and not just
the unhoused, because it's the same book, the same playbook.
I'm sorry that they're running on immigrants, and not all immigrants,
as you've noticed, just black and browns, white immigrants over
(05:57):
state visas violate labor laws. They even make enough money
to one day buy electric car companies. They go untouched
by ice, while Latinos, Haitians, Nigerians, and Palestinians get raided, detained,
or left to die in some cases. You want to
know who's being criminalized in this country, look at the
(06:20):
color of the people being round up and thrown into cages.
The goal is not order, its obedience, the labor of
poor people being extracted, the lives of marginalized people being discarded,
and people cheering it on, people cheering it on while
waving the Bible around rams. Know, the same people that
scream about government overreaching freedom will shout from the rooftops
(06:43):
about inflation or border security, but say nothing about children
being forced to carry pregnancies, Nothing about unhoused veterans being
jailed instead of housed, Nothing about corporations making millions off
of prison labor. Nothing about the fact that white nationalist
groups get police escorts to protest drag queens, while peaceful
activists gets shot with rubber bullets. Because this system was
(07:05):
never meant to serve everyone equally. It was designed to
protect the powerful and punish the vulnerable, and it's working
exactly as it was intended. So just know, they're not
trying to fix poverty. They're trying to farm it. They're
not trying to stop illegal immigration. They're just trying to
select who gets to be legal. And they're not trying
(07:26):
to save the country. They're trying to own it. When
they can steal your voice, they'll steal your labor, and
when they can't buy your silence, they'll set your sentence
and call it justice. So the cages were always the point.
This is Qward's clap back. Stay woke, stay loud, as
Ramses would tell you, and stay free.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Well done. All right, m let's have some dialogue. I
know you, maybe you sent this one to me. I'm
not sure where this one came from, but we're talking
about it today. It was a couple days ago when
we first came across it. By the way, a lot
of stuff that comes our way we don't get to
talk about it ends up on the cutting room floor,
(08:10):
just because there's so much stuff to talk about and
so little time. But this one we did circle back to.
An officer is holding a bat with inWORD beater written
on it. Okay, so I'm going to just paint this
picture that's from the Black Information Network. A white jail
employee has been suspended after a viral video that showed
him holding a bat labeled with a racial slur. Per
(08:32):
the root. Brian Davis, an employee at the a Leegeny,
I think that's how I say. This County Jail in
Pittsburgh since twenty eighteen, was caught in a now deleted
video wearing a Patriots sweatshirt and holding a baseball bat
wrapped in barbed wire. The words inward beater were etched
on the bat, sparking outrage from the public. Quote. I
(08:54):
really really am afraid to think of it. That bat
has been used before. Unquote. Tanisha Long, an organizer with
the Abolationist Law Center, said in a statement bees Hot
to say he needs to go. He needs to do
some soul searching and figure out what it is about
black people that he does not like. But I also
think we need to talk about every single person in
that jail who is who has had an encounter with him.
(09:16):
Black inmates make up roughly sixty seven percent of ag
acj's population. In Wake Up the Incident, ACJ said in
a statement. Quote the ACJ administration from Morden wingerd Down
expects professionalism from all jail employees. Jail does not tolerate
racist or abusive language or behavior. The employee and question
has been suspended, and we are investigating the situation unquote
(09:38):
all right now. Normally, Q and I wouldn't just cherry
pick individual instances, instances or examples of racism, So we
don't typically talk about you know, there's a viral moment
of a lady getting called the N word working at
a burger king or something. That's stuff is like we got.
(10:02):
We try to deal with systemic issues, not individual issues,
and this is definitely an individual issue. It's one individual
at a facility who's in charge of black folks. But
every so often we'll take an individual example and use
it to paint a better picture of a systemic issue.
(10:25):
And so if you will permit me a little bit
more time, I want to paint this picture. I'm going
to share a bit from NACDL dot org or the
National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Okay, again, if you
want to check this out yourself with all the data
and all the charts and all sort of stuff, it's
in a CDL dot org. And then of course they
cite their sources because they're compiling a lot of data
(10:48):
to draw these conclusions okay from the National Association of
Criminal Defense Lawyers. A recent report by the Bureau of
Justice Statistics on interactions between police and the public found
that black residents were more likely to be stopped by
police than white or Hispanic residents, that black and Hispanic
residents were more likely to have multiple contacts with police
(11:08):
than white residents, and that when police initiated an interaction,
they were twice as likely to threaten or use force
against black and Hispanic residence than against white residents. According
to a report from the Sentencing Project, black Americans comprised
twenty seven percent of all individuals arrested in America in
twenty sixteen, about twice their proportion of the total population. Further,
(11:31):
black youth made up thirty five percent of juvenile arrests
in twenty sixteen, despite only accounting for fifteen percent of
the total use population in the US. The authors argue
that main drivers of these disparities include disproportionate levels of
police contact with Black Americans, residential segregation and concentrated urban poverty,
continuing broken windows policies in many cities, and revenue driven policing.
(11:56):
Local level data provides more insight into policing across the country.
Study of traffic stops in San Diego between twenty fourteen
and twenty fifteen found that black and Hispanic drivers were
more likely than white drivers to be searched following a
traffic stop, even though white drivers were more likely to
be found with contraband. Similarly, in twenty sixteen, a Chicago
(12:16):
police accountability task for US found that black and Latino
drivers were searched by police four times as often as
white drivers, even though police found contraband on white drivers
twice as often. And their source is the Vera Institute
twenty eighteen. So I could spend all day throwing data
and statistics at you and whatnot, but suffice it to
(12:38):
say that police tend to be more aggressive when it
comes to black people. Black people are overpliced, and the
blue wall of silence insulates racist behavior, aggressive, abusive behavior,
(13:00):
abuses of power. You know, bad, bad actors, bad apples. Right,
So what we have is a system that and we've
did a whole study on the recruitment tactics, tactics for officers, right.
Some some are jail officers like in this story. Some
are you know, beat cops, like most of the ones
we talk about were black people and brown people so
(13:21):
far getting shot and abused. Where the recruitment tactics are
geared toward people most likely to be violent, most likely
to harbor prejudicial sentiments, if people most likely to feel
overly patriotic and feel like this country belongs to them
(13:44):
and the rest of us are taking it from them, right,
And you know, you see like the punisher logo associated
with a lot of police officers, that's something that's been
co opted by these fringe groups. Maybe they're not fringe groups,
these are it's pretty common like that. That brand of
let's call it systemic race is pretty widely circulated in
police circles, right, particularly among white male officers, which comprise
(14:07):
most officers, right. So or that's the largest group of officers,
I should say, in terms of sex and race. So
this story about an officer holding a bat that has
the word inward beater is no surprise to qu into myself,
(14:27):
but I think it helps to give listeners insight into
some of the things that we're talking about. So, this
person was an officer for years in charge of, you know,
keeping the peace and what is supposed to be a
rehabilitation center. Facility, where the truth of the matter is
that poor people are criminized for their poverty, although they've
(14:48):
never been given a proper economic base to lift themselves
up by their bootstraps. And if they had one that
they created, it's always been smashed to bits by this
government or the people of this land, and they've never
been fully supported by this government. And we have this
cycle that perpetuates poverty, which has a direct correlation of criminality,
(15:11):
and we have a separate cycle that perpetuates white supremacy
and racist behaviors. And the intersection, you have victims that suffer,
like police shootings, and you have people that take advantage
of all of the insulation, like people like this because
of the Blue Wall of silence, right, So they get
to police black and brown bodies unchecked for years, and
(15:35):
it's only when we find out that they had a
bat in a video that were like, oh man, the
whole time he might have been abusing people and further
creating this mistrust between you know, black and brown communities
and the police. I know, I spent a long time
painting in that picture. I did want to say those things.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Cue anything here, it's more of the same, Yeah, And
things like this don't shock us. We're not like, oh
my god, this was happening. It's like, yeah, we remember,
we told you this was happening for years. Maybe this
is a little bit more evidence that we weren't tripping
and being crazy, and we weren't race baiting, we weren't
playing the victim. Like see, it's not like, oh my god,
(16:15):
look what we found. It's like, hey, remember what we
told you. This is what we were talking about. So
these examples are not things that catch us off guard
or that you know, blow us away or blow our
minds or we're like, oh my god, I can't believe
this is happening. It's like for those who have made
up their mind that we've been it's been our imagination
this whole time, and that again we're playing the victim
(16:37):
and playing the race card and just finding things to
be upset about. It's like, no, man, the people who
are in charge, the people that make the rules, the
people that get to tell us that we're breaking the law,
they get to tell us that. They don't even have
to determine that it's true. They get to tell us
that and in real time enforce the law that they say.
(16:59):
We broke rather we did it or not, and they
make us a part of this system where we're now
subject to the system and the way that it moves
and the way that it treats people, and we're spit
out by it and trampled over by it, and in
often cases there's nothing that we can do, because if
you don't have the resources, if you don't have an
attorney on retainer or a powerful parent or the money
(17:19):
to pay a bail, you can end up being held
without trial and being treated this way by people who
willed weapons that read in word was it in word
beater on them? Yea wrapped in barbed bire or something
really really cruel? Was that the description rams was like wrapped.
So it's like, yeah, this is a real thing, and
(17:42):
this is not one bad apple, Yeah not at all.
This is not an isolated incident. This is a system.
And oftentimes the people who are the victims of this
system look like me and you.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
Well, that's unfortunate. And you know, the last you know
pro police, police aren't racist article that I could find
was from nineteen ninety two. Every like major one everything
else since then is like, yeah, police are racist. Policing
(18:18):
systemic issues there, So obviously we're going to talk more
about this. That's kind of what the show is based around,
but for now that's going to do a rush here
on the QR Code. Today. Show, of course, was produced
by Chris Thompson. If you asked one I thought you'd
like to share, use the red microphone talkback feature on
the iHeartRadio app Wality.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
There.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
Be sure to hit subscribe and download all of our episodes. Also,
be sure to check us out on all social media
at Civic Cipher. I'm your host ramses Jah on all social.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Media, I am Qward on all social media as well,
and be sure to join
Speaker 1 (18:43):
Us next time as we share our news with our
voice from our perspective right here on the QR Code