Freedom Of Information Act

Freedom Of Information Act:

This is a valuable tool in the fight for justice. Information has to be provided to you, and various agencies had lawsuits before because of their failure to provide information in a timely manner.
Take a look at this website. It provides information on the freedom of information act for each state in the US. http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/foiamap.html
Nearly every state has their own version of the freedom of information act and this site provides valuable information about each one.

A Shamful Problem

A Shamful Problem

Here is a problem that can potentially effect all of us. The Justice Department reported that one out of ever 32 Americans is currently in prison, on probation, or on parole. That is a huge number of people who are serving prison time. Our country, in fact, has more of its population in prison then any other country in the world! One would think a strange communist or third world country undergoing a civil war would imprison most of its population. Right? Nope. It is our own country, one that is supposed to be based on freedom and equality.
What is more interesting is the racial disparities of those who are in prison. 8.1 percent of those imprisoned are African Americans, making the statistics of African Americans who are now in prison one in 13.
Why this problem? How could this have gotten so out of hand? Are people committing more and more crimes?
Could be. But of all the offenses, 49 percent are drug related. Meaning, in a failing attempt to keep drugs off the street, people are thrown in prison for 10, 20, or 30 years or more for having a habit they cannot control, being with someone who had drugs on them, etc. Of course, some of this percentage consists of people who actually deal drugs, but there are far more people caught in the system and given long sentences for relatively small and innocuous offenses. The other reason is that those who go to prison are the poor, the disenfranchised - those who cannot afford to pay a good lawyer to provide them with a proper defense. They have little choice but to plea bargain and plead guilty to crimes, whether they committed them or not, or risk pleading not guilty with a public defender to defend them. Either way, the result is often prison. The last reason is something that many might not be aware of. The courts, towns, and counties make money from the system. It is in their interest to find as many criminal offenses as possible in order to get as much money as possible from fines and fees.
The end result of the above? Our country, which is supposed to provide us with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, is actually imprisoning one out of 32 people in its population!
An Important Article To Read:
Here is an interesting article I found on the internet, of interest to all who want to know why the above problem happens. I was shocked when I read it. See what you think.

Prison Nation
by Sasha Abramsky
Toward Freedom magazine, October/November 2001

There is a prevalent image in the US of a violent lumpen underclass, what the
Victorian journalist Thomas Wright, describing 19th century London's
slum-dwellers, termed "The Great Unwashed," controllable only by punishment. It
is an image that influential conservative criminologists such as James Q.
Wilson, urging a far more expansive recourse to imprisonment, pandered to back
in the 1970s and 80s, when the groundwork for today's massive prison system was
laid.
And, to a degree, its true: The country does have a phenomenal number
of murders and murderers, gangsters, mercenary drug pushers, kidnappers,
rapists, and armed robbers. Arguably, since the very birth of the
nation-complete with the roving gangs of brigands in Appalachia and privateers
off the Atlantic seaboard-it always has had. And, like all things American,
violence here, whether it be the gang violence associated with illegal drugs, or
the urban upheavals of the rioting poor, happens on an epic scale. At the height
of the crack wars of the 80s, more than 25,000 people were being killed
annually. Parts of inner-city Los Angeles, Washington, Detroit, New Orleans, New
York, Chicago, and several other cities, are, indeed, virtual war zones.
No
two ways about it, but there are an awful lot of angry, brutal, and
trigger-happy men in the US. And there are an awful lot of weapons available to
these people to carve out their twisted realities on the national landscape.
Super-maximum-security prisons such as the notorious Pelican Bay-nestled in
the coastal Redwood forests of California's northernmost county, surrounded by
two high razor-wire fences and a lethal electronic harrier, and more escape
proof than the island of Alcatraz in the San Francisco Bay- house thousands of
men, many of them mass murderers, rapists, kidnappers, and other seriously
disturbed individuals.
But no matter the hysteria, there aren't nearly
enough US psychopaths, enough real-life Hannibal Lecters, to justify a prison
and jail population that now hovers in the two million range, incarcerated in
hundreds of facilities across the 50 states.
In fact, for the first time in
history, most US prisoners-over a million people-have been convicted of
nonviolent, often victimless crimes:
offenses, just as marijuana possession,
that hurt nobody but the person arrested. Hundreds of thousands are now serving
ten-, 15, and 20 year terms for crimes that in Europe or Canada would generally
result in noncustodial sentences and commitment into drug rehab programs. And
so, in addition to housing the violent menaces that they were intended to
incarcerate, maximum-security prisons have seen an increasing number of
nonviolent inmates pass through their phenomenally secure gates. Meanwhile, in
many cases, the big-time criminals go free: trading information, snitching on
subordinates, hiring million-dollar attorneys who will do anything possible to
limit the years their clients spend in jail. The land of the free has become a
place where rural backwaters-catapulted into economic collapse by
deindustrialization and the oft-vaunted global market -now bid for the privilege
of building new hightech prisons to incarcerate the urban unemployed, and the
urban addicted. People like Lillie Blevins.
Lillie Blevins is a diabetic in
her mid-50s. She has chronic high blood pressure, back problems, knee problems.
A couple of years ago her appendix ruptured. She is scheduled to spend the rest
of her life in Carswell Federal Medical Center, inside the Forth Worth army
base, just outside Dallas, Texas.
Her crime was conspiracy to sell crack
cocaine, allegedly head of a family operation involving three of her sons and
her brother. The evidence against her the word of a snitch who was friends with
her drug-dealing sons, along with three grams of crack cocaine found in her
Mobile, Alabama house by federal agents. her status is a nonviolent, minimum
security federal inmate, no prior time served in prison, no money, and hence no
lawyer working on her case; at the time of her sentencing, her husband was in
jail on an unrelated charge.
An African American woman born in Selma,
Blevins was pulled out of school in the third grade to look after her seven
brothers and sisters. Her father had just died. Her mother, Pearlie, was in the
fields all day, picking cotton. Lillie had her first child, a boy, when she was
14, and moved south to Mobile, on the hot, sultry Gulf Coast, shortly after.
Over the next decade and a half; six more sons followed. Lillie was an active
member of the Shallow Baptist Church. But in a world of grinding poverty and
limited horizons, no amount of religion could prevent some of her boys, and at
times herself; from being tempted by drugs.
In the early 80s, the police
arrested her for growing what she terms a "reefer bush" in her garden. Later on,
she was hauled in for possession of crack. Neither arrest resulted in prison
time. Then, in 1990, three of the Blevins boys, now living in an apartment away
from Lillie, were caught up in a federal drug sweep turned in by a friend who
bartered 25 names to federal agents in exchange for probation. For good measure,
the friend, who had once lived clown the road from Lillie, added her name to the
list. One morning, when Lillie was at home, the agents knocked on her front
door. She opened it, and they stormed into her house. They found three grams of
crack-and carted the 42-year-old woman off to jail. The snitch said she was in
charge of the family operation. Her sons denied she had any knowledge of their
actions. Their denials counted for little: Blevins was sentenced to life
imprisonment in a federal prison.
As of summer 2000, 144,750 people were
serving time in federal prisons-convicted in the federal courts for crimes
ranging from the murder of a federal employee to drug trafficking across state
lines to simple drug dealing in a place where the state police passed the arrest
on to federal agents. The latter had become common practice, because federal law
allowed for the local police to keep a high percentage of any moneys or assets
confiscated from drug suspects in federal busts.
As long as the courts
judged a law enforcement officer's suspicions to be justifiable, you didn't even
have to gain a criminal conviction in order to seize a person's car or cash or
even, on occasion, their other property and bank accounts. And, as a result,
agencies had fallen over themselves trying to take advantage of their easy new
source of revenue. Asset forfeiture was proving such a bonanza that even the
Bureau of Land Management had set up their own anti-drug SWAT team. Six in ten
of these inmates were serving sentences for drug crimes. Fully 56,238 were
African American.
The sentences handed down by the federal courts are
staggering: 33,168 have bought five-to-ten; 21,439 are serving ten-to-15; 10,057
are doing 15-to-20; and 10,731 are locked up for over 20 years. According to the
Rand Drug Policy Research Center, these sentences "reduce cocaine consumption
less per million taxpayer dollars spent than spending the same amount on
enforcement under the previous sentencing regime. And either enforcement
approach reduces drug consumption less than putting heavy users through
treatment programs."
Warehousing millions of people for petty crimes has
become the number one US Public Works program, what the radical sociologist Mike
Davis calls "carceral Keynesianism." The reference is to the economist who urged
governments to spend their way out of the Great Depression, through throwing
vast sums of money into public works programs and providing the unemployed with
enough spending money to rejuvenate depressed local economies. Now, Davis
argues, instead of dams, roads, and great public buildings, instead of rural
electrification programs and hospitals, the public works of our age are the
sprawling concrete prisons. Nowhere is this more true than in California.
California's incarceration industry is big business. Super-hi-tech prisons
are sprouting up across the state, no money spared. Take a drive down any rural
highway and you will pass a new prison. Local newspapers advertise job fairs at
which these institutions seek out the local talent and local politicians trumpet
their achievements in bringing such employment into the district. Each prison
costs hundreds of millions to build, and guards, represented by the politically
powerful California Correctional Peace Officers Association, are attracted to
the industry by the relatively high salaries. Says Bruce Gomez, the community
resource manager at the 1.7 million-square-foot super-maximum security Corcoran
prison (home to, along others, Charles Manson and Bobby Kennedy's assassin,
Sirhan B. Sirhan) "a correctional officer, with a high school education's
starting salary is $2,500 a month. Their counterparts round here [in a remote
agricultural region in the Central Valley] make $1,200 to $1,600 a month
outside. So it's a real sought-after job."
Behind the razor-wire fences, the
deadly electronic barrier (covered with netting to stop the birds from flying
into a nasty surprise), the computer-operated gates, and the watchtowers, a vast
complex is laid out. Low-lying under the immense blue California sky, concrete
blocks-each one housing hundreds of prisoners, each either confined to a private
cell or double-bunked with another inmate- lead onto large exercise yards,
watched over by gunners ready at the first hint of trouble to set the red alarms
off. Deep inside the complex, a series of "pods" contain the Secure Housing Unit
inmates - men, like Charles Manson, who are segregated from the general
population and kept in conditions of near isolation. Even deeper inside are the
workshops-a dairy, a metal-working unit, a furniture shop. There is a medical
facility and a mental unit, convenience stores, and a gym-currently being used
to house overflow prisoners. In a real sense, this is a town, albeit a highly
autocratic, violent sort of town, unto itself:
California s Department of
Corrections estimated in the late 90s that the state's prison numbers might hit
300,00() in the not-too-distant future; although recently the state's prison
population has given some signs of stabilizing, and possibly even declining
slightly. Since it costs over $20,000 per year to incarcerate one person,
$35,000 to incarcerate them in solitary confinement, and over $60,()()0 to
incarcerate and provide medical care to elderly inmates, the Rand corporation
and other researchers have concluded that over the next 2() years, California's
investment in its once-vaunted public universities will dramatically wither away
as the state struggles to find money to pay for new prisons and staff existing
ones. Already, the state s elementary school system is in such disarray, partly
as a result of two decades of spending cuts, that its fourth graders scored
second to bottom in the country in a recent study of reading ability.
Over
the past two decades, California's Department of Corrections, along with those
of Texas, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and handful of other states, and the federal
prison system s facility at Florence, Colorado, have perfected the panopticon, a
control mechanism dreamt up by 18th century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham.
The panopticon was a space in which a person in a central room could see into
every nook and cranny of the institution, thus denying inmates even the barest
modicum of privacy. California s computerized prisons, built as a series of
bleak concrete cell "pods" radiating out from central control rooms, watched
over by gunners, surrounded by razor-wire fences and lethal electric barriers,
offer up as little chance of escape as Nazi concentration camps. New "level
four" institutions at Corcoran, Pelican Bay, and High Desert-a prison deep
within the mountainous landscape north of the preternaturally blue Lake
Tahoe-have been built specifically to house the worst of the worst, according to
Pelican Bay's Deputy Warden Joe McGrath; to isolate predatory, dangerous
prisoners, people ''who preyed upon other prisoners and were assaultive." Since
the new prisons were created ten years ago, violence within the prison system as
a whole has indeed declined.
In Pelican Bay, a huge camp in the rainy north,
just south of the Oregon border, on ground that used to be lumber land, 40
percent of the 3242 inmates are lifers. At any one time, between 1300 and
1500-those deemed a threat to other inmates, those with known gang affiliations
-are housed in a Secure Housing Unit (SHU). There, behind perforated orange
metal doors, they remain isolated in their cells, eight feet by ten feet,
approximately 23 hours per day. When they receive visits-which is rare, since
Los Angeles, where most of the prisoners are from, is a 16-hour drive to the
south-they visit through a bulletproof glass window. Anybody from the outside
admitted onto the SHU has to don a bulletproof vest to guard against sharpened
debris being launched through the perforated doors.
Most inmates are there
for an "indeterminate sentence," often for years on end. They eat and they shit
in their cells. They exercise, alone, in barren concrete yards ten by 20 feet.
In some SHUs in the US, even the showers are built inside the barren cells. This
is, says Lieutellant Ben Grundy, an African American and an ex-marine, no
picnic. We don't want to make this a fun place for them."
Although the
prison now has an extensive mental health program -a safety valve that is
noticeably missing in Texas's enormous supermax prisons such as
Huntsville-senior psychologist Dr. David Archamballlt says that at least one
person a month has some sort of psychotic collapse inside the SHU. When the
mental health unit first opened, more than 100 prisoners were removed from the
SHU with severe mental disturbances. Many isolated prisoners routinely
self-mutilate as an expression of impotent rage at their confinement, slashing
at veins and arteries until the spurting blood has covered the walls of their
cells in a spectacular mosaic of deep red slime. Oftentimes, inmates "gas"
guards through their doors with a pungent mixture of urine and feces. Violence
feed on violence here, and the guards themselves have been known to abuse
inmates in return.
In Corcoran in the mid-90s, guards routinely organized
"gladiatorial" combats between rival gang members in the small triangular
exercise yards. The guards would then proceed to shoot the antagonists apart.
First rouncd, wooden bullets. Second round, for those who didn't stop fast
enough, high-impact explosive bullets. Seven inmates were killed and numerous
others injured over the years before the practice was eventually exposed, and
the prison's administration was overhauled. Yet, despite grainy black-and-white
videotapes of' the incidents that were captured by the security cameras, juries
in California refilsed to find any of the of ficers responsible for the deaths
of these inmates.
In Pelican Bay, an African American inmate who had gone
mad in isolation and had covered his body in shit, was dropped by guards into a
tub of scalding water, and held down in it until the skin boiled off his legs.
"Nigger, we're going to scrub you until you're white," the guards were quoted as
telling their victim.
Few Californians know about Pelican Bay and, according
to McGrath, even if they did, hard time stories generally wouldn't concern them.
"The average person out there in society isn't very concerned about the
criminal," he asserts. "They just want to he able to conduct their life without
becoming a victim." Somewhat pensively for a prison official, McGrath goes on to
say that "the things, like family, that have held us together as a society are
breaking down, and we now expect prisons to socialize people. There're a lot of
things we need to be working on as a society and a culture to treat the illness
rather than just the symptoms."
But, 21st century US is showing no signs of
a new War on Poverty. And so, the prison numbers continue to rise. How many
prisoners is too many in a supposedly free society? "I guess I'd have to ask the
question: what is the alternative?" McGrath answers slowly. ''I'm somewhat of a
utilitarian on this. I'd weigh the cost and I'd weigh the benefit. I'm a civil
servant and I'm here to serve the state. If that's what the people want, I'm
here to implement that."

Sasha Abramsky, a TF contributing writer, is currently a media fellow of the Open Society Institute's Center on Crime, Communities and Culture. This article i.s an edited excerpt from his upcoming book, Hard Time Blues: How Politics Built a Prison Nation, to be published by St. Martin s Press in January, 2002.

The Witch Hunt Trials of the 21st Century

The Witch Hunt Trials of the 21st Century:

It started in the 1980’s. At various daycares across the country, workers and daycare teachers were accused of crimes they did not commit. Parents and prosecutors accused them of sexually molesting children, of sticking things like forks and even a sword into little girl’s vaginas, of licking peanut butter off of little boys’ penises. Not only were the charges extraordinary ridiculous, something that any normal person could see as nonsense, but there was no physical evidence to back the charges. None of the “abused” children had any damage in their vaginas or anuses. None really even knew what “sexual” abuse was. They were questioned incessantly by prosecutors and social workers, who psychologically convinced them that the abuse happened. The people who were put on trial were convicted and sentenced for 30 or more years in prison. One of them even served 5 whole years before common sense was seen and her conviction was overturned. In fact, its entirely possible that there are still daycare workers in prison who were part of this wave of accusations. Here are the similarities between the Salem Witchcraft Trials and the Daycare Witchcraft Trials of the 1980’s, as out lined on this site: http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mcmartin/salemparallels.htm

1. "Both the Daycare Abuse Trials (McMartin, Michaels, and others)
and the Salem Witchcraft Trials placed heavy reliance on the testimony of
children. In both sets of trials, people urged others to "believe the
children." In practice, that generally meant, "believe the children when
they are making remotely plausible accusations, but ignore the inconsistencies
in their stories."

2. "In both sets of trials, accusations multiplied over
time. At first just a few persons faced accusations, but as the hysteria
spread, so did the accusations. Often, the new targets of accusations were
those who expressed skepticism about charges or who came to the defense of an
accused person."

3. "Both sets of trials had their origins in behaviors or
statements of children--behaviors or statements that could have been given an
innocent interpretation, but instead were interpreted in the most omenous or
threatening way possible."

4. "In both sets of trials, "experts" found meaning in unlikely
places. In Salem, for example, the presence of a mole on the body of an
accused person was seem as evidence that the "familiar" had an entry (or
sucking) point on the accused. In the daycare cases, for example, the
drawing of hands on stick figures was seen as evidence that the child who drew
the figure had been molested. In another example, a child's dislike of
tuna fish was seen as evidence that the child had been exposed to vaginal
smells."

5. "In both sets of trials, the investigation itself was the
source of many of the problems. Investigators in both instances employed
leading questions, and effectively put the burden of proving innocence on the
accused. In Salem, accused persons were asked to explain how their
presence could trigger such bizarre reactions in the allegedly afflicted.
In the daycare cases, the accused were confronted by the suggestion that the
children would not be talking about penises and the like if they hadn't been
molested--when in fact their frequent use of such anatomic terms resulted from
the investigation of the alleged crime."

6. "In both sets of trials, the extent of the injustices was
increased by the unwillingness--or fear--of enough persons to step forward and
say, "This is crazy!" People in both instances feared that by doing so
they might either face accusations themselves or hurt their standing in their
communities--be it the church community in Salem or the journalism community in
the daycare cases."

Here is some more information for those interested:

http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mcmartin/mcmartin.html

http://members.shaw.ca/imaginarycrimes/timeline.htm

http://www.religioustolerance.org/ra_fells.htm

Who are These Poeple? - McHenry County

Who are These Poeple?

I’ve driven past Rt.14 and Main Street the other Thursday and noticed a whole bunch of people dressed warmly for the weather, holding signs protesting the war in Iraq. They stand right by the bicycle tunnel on Main Street, next to King Wok.Who are they?The McHenry County Peace Group, which is dedicated to protesting the war in Iraq. Their common goal is:

“ Working for peace through a dedication to social justice, compassionate
action, and nonviolent expression.”

It is an honorable enough goal and interesting. The group now has its own website: http://www.mcpg.org/ and a $20 fee in order to join, which will involve participation in discussion groups and a chance to stand out on Rt.14 to hold up a sign with like minded other people protesting the war in Iraq.I have talked with a former member of this Peace Group. It is interesting that we have groups like this in our otherwise very conservative county. This particular group is indeed very peaceful. They do not believe in any confrontation. When the group was barred from holding signs in last year’s Gala Parade, instead of standing up for their right to do so, they settled this “peacefully” by not holding up the signs in next year’s parade. They are not, as its founder Libby, stated to the person who was involved in the past with the group, confrontational, but believe in only peaceful methods of settling conflicts. They also seem to have little interest in matters that concern us in this county. I think there are many injustices and wrongs in McHenry County, many people who need someone to stand up and protest for them, but this group has only concentrated its efforts on the Iraq War, which, while an interesting and relevant issue, is one that is unlikely to require courage or confrontation of any sort in our County. Had this group tackled issues like the abuses of the court system, poverty, and discrimination, at that would involve confronting people who might then get angry in their desire to maintain the current situation, the result might have angered many people, changed minds, and caused situations which would require courage and, yes, conflict, to resolve. That would indeed not be acceptable. So, while I admire standing up for a cause, I think that it is far more important to tackle local causes and issues before moving in to national and international ones.

McHenry County Illinois - Marengo

McHenry County Illinois

Does your county, town, or city have a problem with police, the justice system, or the courts? Email us and we’ll get your issues out there. We can open up a section having to do with your local issues, just like this McHenry County, IL section and write about an injustice that might be effecting your town or county.

This article has been reposted with permission from: Marengo Gazette Online, Marengo Gaztte Blog

Corruption

There is something truly wrong with the judicial system in our county. I am sure all who read the Gazette also read the message board, so they can see some of the articles that are posted that indicate this. But it's a lot more than that. It goes down to the very marrow of how the court system works in McHenry County. Here are some examples I personally know of, which illustrate some of it:

1. Someone, I'm not going to say who, drives five miles over the speed limit and gets a traffic ticket for doing so. A minor thing, but I guess they broke the law, so no complaint there. They go to court. What's there? Why, tons and tons of people for traffic tickets. Most for really small, stupid offenses, like sitting too long at a traffic light or not making a left turn in the right place. Clearly, little towns here are looking to raise money.Well, that's still sort of alright. But then this person, who took a day off work to go to court, decides to plead not guilty. Well, you see, its not that easy. Your not supposed to do that. Because if you do, then they tell you that they'll set up an another whole date for you to go to court, so then you'll miss an another day of work. So, what do you see? Everyone, almost no exception, pleads guilty to their traffic ticket. Even those who don't feel they did anything wrong.

2. Someone else has a teenager who was falsely accused of trespassing into someone's yard. He decides to plead not guilty and, in fact, the owner of the yard drops all charges and will not go to court. So, he arrives in court with his parent. The prosecutor comes up to him and asks him how he'll plead. Not guilty. Of course. The prosecutor then starts warning the young man that he'd better take a plea bargain and just get off with a small fine, otherwise if he is found guilty it will be much worse. The young man's parent intervenes and says they will plead not guilty and explains that the owner didn?t even show up in court. The prosecutor practically insists the young man should still plead guilty. They plead not guilty, sure enough there's no owner, and the charges are dropped. However, the parent stays a while to watch the system at work. Person after person goes up and pleads guilty after being told by the prosecutor that they HAVE TO do so or it will be much worse. Most of the other young people there do not have a parent with them and are not aware they even had a choice, which is what the parent finds out afterward after talking to a few of them. Many also had cases where they did nothing wrong, and no one showed up for the complaint, yet because the prosecutor insisted there would be dire consequences unless they plead guilty, they go and do so.

3. Finally, the police. There are many cases of police misconduct in McHenry County. Police falsely arrested and interrogated a teenage boy in Crystal Lake last year and forced a confession out of him for a crime he did not do. It didn't get far from that point because as soon as the boy left the interrogation where he falsely confessed, he committed suicide. Later on the real culprit was found by the police. Then there's police who stop people as a form of revenge in Marengo, and those related to them or visiting them. Which is clearly a form of police abuse. Add this in to the other factors, and they are a picture of corruption rivaled in few places.

Learning More About Law Practice

Learning More About Law Practice:

One thing that you can do when confronted with a problem like some of the ones above is to learn more about how prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges operate. Learn investigation techniques and how to find things out. There are computers that have information about criminal and civil past records for anyone, including bad cops, prosecutors, judges, and others. Learn how many of the prosecutor’s or judges cases were turned over on appeal. Also, its very useful to just know the law oneself, it might be helpful and, in any case, will also allow one to see what is going on. A person I know hunted through craiglist.com and found a set of lawbooks that were given away for free. He drove over 60 miles to pick up these otherwise very expensive books and spent hours reading about trial techniques, ethics, and other issues a lawyer would learn in law school, in order to be better aware of how the system works and how judges and prosecutors might think, as well as to provide himself with detailed knowledge of the law and how its conducted. I think anyone facing the issue of problems and accusations will do him or herself a favor if they did the same thing.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Conducting a Protest

Advantages and Disadvantages of Conducting a Protest:

This is something that we should all consider. However, in considering it, we encounter the first problem with it. Its hard to arrange. If one wants to protest the local police, State’s Attorney’s Office, or other such entity, one will find that few people will be brave enough to want to join you in this risky venture. No one wants to get arrested and have a problem themselves, after all. Or get on the bad side of th local town governments and the police by protesting against them. However, those kinds of protests were conducted before in large cities, standing up against police brutality and other issues. So, it can be done. How to do it? I would start by putting out notices about the issue that’s effecting you in every bulletin board in town. There are community boards in town halls, boards in hot dog stands and doctors’ offices, boards in coffee shops, grocery stores, etc. Its surprising how many places have a bulletin board. I would include an email address or phone where you can be contacted at, and the information needed about the protest and what you are trying to get together. Interested individuals then might have a chance to contact you. After this, I would contact various area organizations and Peace Groups that might be interested in getting involved when given the right reason. The downfall of this? It might work in a really large city, which would have many such groups, as well as individuals, but not in a small town or county. In that case, the effort might well fail. Even if it doesn’t result in a protest, though, I think its still worthwhile posting the notices up on bulletin boards, as it will result in people being informed of the situation effecting their area.

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