What do you do when the police level your home?
Note: If you would like to contribute to the recovery fund for the Kalamazoo family whose home and belongings were destroyed by the police, click here for the GoFundMe.
vintage image of a bulldozer from 1944
It is December 2021, and I have made a trip back to Minneapolis and visited old haunts, including the home I sold the previous January. I am meeting a friend at an old favorite taqueria on Central, located at the intersection of 24th and Lowry. The townhouse I sold earlier in 2021 sits a mere two blocks away. Things have changed since I was last here. The alleyway that led past the small Catholic church was gone, the Dairy Queen and a few houses razed. It's all part of a church parking lot. The powers-that-be had erased a piece of the neighborhood's past since last I walked that street. Houses once familiar disappeared into the asphalt of a church parking lot. My now ex and I, every so often, had enjoyed walking down the nearby alley to the Dairy Queen at the end for ice cream, passing by the backyards of just-over-Lowry neighbors, mostly people from the black and Latinx community. Every good day of summer, it seemed like someone with a yard connected to that ally had a barbecue or birthday party happening. Some of those yards and families are gone now, consumed by the asphalt of the extended church parking lot.
Not erased from my memory is the day I planted myself in that alley and made sure two police officers knew someone was watching them aggressively search two black boys that I saw regularly biking through the neighborhood. My ex dismissed it - "how do you know they weren't doing something wrong? They have those backpacks all the time!" I ignored her and stayed planted, watching as they forced one kid to sit in the back and made the other kid place his hands on the hood as he patted him down.
I didn't quite have the nerve to hold out my phone and record, still a regret.
One of the officers, a tall blonde woman, saw me watching the search and said something to her partner. He stopped searching and released the boys, unharmed as far as I could see. They biked away as fast they could. I refused to leave until the police car left.
I walked past the barbecue that I had passed on the way to the Dairy Queen. The black family celebrating it being Sunday had been playing music and reveling. The music stopped when the searches started. They could see the boys and how everything played out through the oak fence slats lined their yard. We made eye contact without waving, a grim acknowledgment of what we just witnessed and what might have happened if I hadn't made sure those police officers knew that a white person could see them.
I didn't record it. But I did send an angry email to the police chief, stating that being black while being on bikes and being kids was NOT probable cause. A very pro-police friend begged me not to go to the meeting the then chief asked me to attend, convinced all I would do is make myself enemies. I moved to California the next year with my ex, and it became a moot point.
I witnessed this incident in 2012/2013. Police shootings, especially of people of color, happened a lot. There had been several failed attempts to address this in Minneapolis - I had, for the bare flash of a moment in 2003, served on the Civilian Police Review Board. In my scant two sessions there, it became clear that the city council selected the board to prevent justice from being served. All of us that lived in the Twin Cities for more than five years understood and accepted that the police force was unhinged and that there wasn't one hell of a lot any of us could do about it. We lived with the broken stair and tried to do a patch job metaphorically when we could stop people from being hurt. Most of the time, we failed.
Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Kalamazoo, Michigan are both midwestern cities, subject to the pains of winter. Both cities also have another problem, specific to urban life in the Midwest: the police have not-so-quietly waged wars on their BIPOC communities, and thanks to a cult-like mentality that has people within the force believe they are “good people doing good” and a total absence of self-awareness, these forces have zero ability to comprehend that yes, they can be and often are corrupt.
The corruption of the police in both cities - hell, nationally - is met with gaslighting and denial, in part because of police family culture. Almost anyone with a father, brother, sister, mother in the police force ends up signing on to the idea that this means that the police make no mistakes, and if they do make a mistake, it was just a mistake - not an absolute moral failure.
Yet Philando Castile, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor are testaments to their local police department's complete disconnection with doing right, acting moral, or living honestly. This problem is worsened by the psychology of evil - they are beyond convicted that they are doing right, thus causing them to reinforce their belief that the terrible abuses committed are doing the right thing.
If anyone within a police family questions the morality and rightness of police action, they face coercive control techniques to make Jim Jones proud. Enough to deny a terrifying reality: honest living has a much, much lower committing-murder rate than the US police have within their ranks.
The mentality that's nearly impossible to break, no matter how much of a reach, is similar to a situation I had in a college class decades ago. I stated that those convicted of rape should face capital punishment. The crime causes severe trauma that can impact a person's physical and mental health in irretrievable ways. It risks spreading disease and happens from a place of absolute self-centered moral narcissism - they are often proud of themselves for their perpetration. When I pointed this out, a woman in the class demanded of me, "Would you say that if someone accused your brother of rape?"
Two possible things were going on in her mind: of course, her brother didn't commit rape because it was her brother. Reasonable people can recognize that his sister had no impact on his ability to understand and respect consent. Love does not prevent someone from doing evil.
The second, more probable and much more concerning reasoning is that it didn't matter if he raped someone because he was her brother, and family mattered more than the harm done to an apparent stranger. This concept that family matters more than the outside world is absolute immorality, often upheld as a moral right. I believe it is the root of many of the evils we see in police officers and their families now. If the family fails to have a moral core that includes accountability to their community, the community should ostracize them. In the case of police, we instead rely upon them for protection without the caveat that they treat everyone with the same respect.
So the unquestioning of the police by their own families is, ultimately, perpetuating evil. Add that "well those are the other people," racism to it, and you have a continuous, nasty, impossible to sort out the cluster. As is often pointed out to me, the police have a high-stress job, and it shows in their high incidences of domestic violence, PTSD and substance abuse. Some of this is very much the job - but the role of police culture itself in the levels of disease and distress should not be overlooked. Their moral system posits the police as the “good guys” and everyone not in their favorite demographics as “bad guys,” and now we have a legally-endorsed murder rate on our hands, let alone the other abuses of power happening on the daily.
Even when there's no loss of life, the immorality of the police can climb to epic proportions. Of the villains of the police world, the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety may be, comparably, the Dr. Evil to the Lex Luthor of police forces in larger cities. Even so, the events of November 9, 2021, highlighted a weird mix of moral failing and cartoonish ego that led to one unfortunately unavoidable death, one family rendered homeless, and one landlord wondering what happened for six days.
To be clear, the death that resulted from police action was NOT the result of police abuse of power - it was everything else they did in that situation. They were absolutely doing their job in attempting to apprehend a violent criminal. The question of competence, morality, and goodwill comes out around the enormous amount of collateral damage that came with attempting to apprehend the criminal.
I composed the following list of facts gleaned from several newspaper articles, all collected at the end of the article. All Fox News sources were eliminated as a trustworthy source because of manipulative language. I began to link to the citing articles, but it became cumbersome.
The Big Picture
The family was not allowed to retrieve their belongings or the family pet even after the shootout. Police cited this as safety reasons - after destroying their house. I was not able to locate whether the police sought an expert on building construction to determine this. That doesn’t mean that they didn’t, but there is nothing on public record about it that I found.
Not stated: not-so-recent technology exists, that the SWAT team could have borrowed from a nearby city or purchased outright, to handle this situation that would have stopped the extended shootout and made the property destruction and rendering a family homeless unnecessary - with equipment that costs far less than the average price of an armored vehicle, of which the city owns at least two.
Rawls and the StandOff
Alex Rawls, 35, had a record for domestic violence, breaking and entering, and was wanted for attempting to murder his ex-girlfriend's sister after shooting her five times in the back in November of 2021.
On October 24, Rawls assaulted his ex-girlfriend and threatened to kill her.
At some point, a friend of Rawls’ asked his girlfriend to give Rawls a couch to surf on after Rawls’ break up.
Between 10:45 am - 11:30 am trained negotiators attempted to persuade Rawls to come out. Family members (unclear whether Rawls' family or the household's) attempted to persuade Rawls and failed.
At 11:56 am, Rawls shot at the police officers. One officer was injured indirectly by glass shattering from the armored vehicle.
Other officers exposed to gunfire were protected by the SWAT's armored vehicle.
The SWAT team, through the afternoon, deployed "non-lethal agents" to get Rawls to exit.
SWAT used fifty sets of chemical agents. This was, most likely, tear gas. While the KDPS was told they overuse chemical agents in a review released on August 10, 2021, the amount used is not atypical for a hostage/shootout situation.
The SWAT team decided to apply "porting" - a method wherein doors and windows are opened/removed to determine someone's location in a home.
At some point in the evening, the SWAT team removed first-floor support structures to get a clear visual of Rawls on the second floor.
At 2:53 am, Rawls fired shots at the officers.
At 2:56 am, a KDPS officer and a Kalamazoo Sheriff's deputy fired back; at this time, someone got a non-fatal hit on Rawls.
The police used a drone to determine Rawls' location to view him through a hole in the roof.
Just before 3 am police claim they saw Rawls turn the gun on himself; they confirmed him dead at 3 am
Rawls did not directly hit any officers during the standoff.
The officer and deputy who fired shots were on paid leave as part of a routine investigation into the use of force on November 12.
The House
The police, after the shooting, proceeded to raze the entire home.
According to Police Chief Coakley, the damage done in removing the first floor supports made the whole house unsafe, and they had to knock it down.
Coakley claimed he did not want to send his team into a "hail of bullets." "Property is always secondary to human life."
The Family
Single mother-led household, with five children ages 4-17
Rawls did not live at home. Rawls was friends with the boyfriend of the head of household and sometimes slept on her couch, and had been since November 2, the day he shot his girlfriend's sister.
Nothing indicated that the head of household knew anything about Rawls' situation specifics until the police showed up.
The family exited the house at 10:45 am.
At the behest of the police, they encouraged Rawls to come out and turn himself in.
The family did find temporary housing but did not have clothing, personal care items, or food because the police demolished all of their belongings when they destroyed their home.
Tree of Life School organized a collection for them.
According to Coakley, they will receive a fair market value for the destroyed belongings they were not allowed to claim from the house. (Fair market value does not necessarily mean equitable or enough to replace losses.)
Kalamazoo Mayor David Anderson stated that the city committed to moving the family into new housing. (https://www.news10.com/news/familys-home-demolished-during-standoff-police-defend-actions/)
While the family has received assistance, literally EVERYTHING THEY OWNED EXCEPT WHAT THEY HAD ON THEM WAS DESTROYED. There is still an active GoFundMe running to help them recover at this time, as of January 8, 2022.
The Landlord
Gary Apps, the landlord, was never alerted by the police that they planned to tear the house down.
Apps got a call at 2 pm that Monday asking that he come to the site and draw a map for the SWAT team of the home's interior.
Police removed walls between 6:35 pm and 9:38 pm.
Apps found out about the police tearing down his house when he saw it on the 11 pm news.
According to Coakley, the police chief, Apps will receive a fair market value for the destroyed building. (Fair market value may not be as fair as it sounds.)
Owner Gary Apps, didn't hear from the police about demolishing the home until the police held a press conference six days later.
Before I unhash the massive abuse of power - and "kids playing with toys" clearly demonstrated by the Kalamazoo police and sheriff's department, I want to point out something that the general public may not know.
Porting - the SWAT action that led to the excessive and unnecessary destruction of a family home - is, like many police methods, completely unsupported by scientific understanding or research. Ripping off walls is a shock-and-awe method of coming at a group of people - usually envisioned as a terrorist cell - hiding behind a wall by removing the wall. It is meant for use when law enforcement or military faces multiple shooters, such as when a random militia group completely loses its grip on reality. I am not an expert on extraction tactics, but it seems to me they had other options for one guy hiding behind a couch.
One guy, as far as I can see, no matter how awful (and if his police record is true, Rawls qualified as objectively awful), does not a terrorist cell make. No matter how the police tried to shape it, I can’t quite see the need to huff and puff and blow the house down.
There is no question that the police needed to arrest Alex Rawls for the public good. He had a track record of attacking his romantic partners and their support system, and the police stepping up and intervening on a domestic abuser that had started spreading his violence is commendable. The police in the United States have a history of ignoring domestic violence, especially in black families - and it may well be that Rawls finally hit an extreme that no one in KDPS could justifiably ignore. Police pursuing someone for attempting to murder a black woman is a refreshing change of pace.
Yet even while doing the right thing, the KDPS found an epic way to do the wrong thing.
My issue, and the issue of many others, is the abuse of power that led to zero attempt to control for collateral damage. Kalamazoo’s Edison neighborhood is close to 50% black, lower-income, and densely populated compared to more affluent areas of Kalamazoo. A culture has grown around the neighborhood where the people know their own and, with reason, are suspicious of outsiders.
It’s hard to imagine Kalamazoo SWAT deciding to use the same tactic if there were a shootout in the highly affluent West Main HIll. Those houses are too new, and the tax base is too high. The chance of a lawsuit or worse would be all but guaranteed.
This situation is especially appalling because equipment exists to solve the one-guy standoff problem for less than half the cost of a single armored vehicle.
Recon Robotics in Minnesota, among other companies, designs military-grade robots with a camera attached, designed to roll into a building and give a full visual report. They go where drones can not. These robots cost around $17,000 - less than the armored vehicles (average cost around $50,000) used by the Kalamazoo police. The police and sheriff's department could have handled the situation without destroying a home and displacing an entire family. One robot rolling in could have shown them everything they needed to know.
There is no denying that Rawls needed removal from society. His police record showed someone violent, misogynistic, and actively dangerous to the community. While negotiators and family members attempted to persuade Rawls to turn himself in, yelling or saying "Turn yourself in," to a guy who knows damn well he's guilty isn't exactly the tactic to use on someone probably determined not to go back to prison.
There’s a lot I don’t know about the people immediately involved in the incident
The family and landlord caught in this crossfire deserved far more respect and support than police or city have given them. The public only knows what's on record for why Rawls was staying in that house - and I don't know if the family knew why he needed shelter. The black community has a long, storied, and still-necessary history of giving each other support, no questions asked. The tradition continues because abuse of power by the police going back to the days of slave extradition. Issues between BIPOC and the police continue to this day. Injustice is up in there somewhere as a given, making it a moot point whether or not someone abides by the law.
Without being there to know, it's hard to say whether the police took the attitude that the family were accomplices or innocent bystanders. Still, the overall pattern of behavior points to the former treatment being more likely.
Gunfire was exchanged and police officers were injured. These circumstances are enough to spark an internal review of the incident. The problem: internal affairs means that the police have no oversight, no check or balance, except from other police who are part of the same problematic culture. Internal affairs are in and of itself a corrupt system, the opposite of accountability. Police officers that violate conduct standards and are then reviewed by internal affairs are akin to eBay allowing sellers or their friends to leave themselves feedback.
While I fully believe that the police should be brought up on an EXTERNAL review board, it's unlikely that a structure to give such support can come about anytime soon. The one time I attempted to serve on the Minneapolis Civilian Police Review Board, a body intended to give such oversight, the members themselves had so much administration dumped on them that it rendered the board essentially toothless. For those that read the link above, there’s a history of Minneapolis city officials working to keep the police from having oversight.
Someone benefits from the corrupt status quo. Social justice advocates have spent a lot of time analyzing this, and it comes down to profits, prisons, and keeping them stocked. Disadvantaging the disadvantaged gives more bodies for that pipeline. Also, situations like the one in Kalamazoo where they focused on the perpetrator for the right reasons - while still abusing power in the process - is hard to sort out because of the mind-blowing brazenness of the abuse.
Meanwhile, the police may do their job corruptly, they still do it. I certainly didn't want to be the one hauling an unstable, woman-hating shooter to holding and arraignment, nor am I equipped to.
But I also do not believe that the police prevent crimes. The burden of prevention goes to social workers, teachers, clergy, and community members. All too often, the police impede the very people attempting to alter the circumstances that lead to crime - such as the arrests of organizations attempting to distribute food to the homeless.
We don’t have good answers and solutions yet, in part because the right answer for one region is NOT the right answer for another. In regions that use community-based policing, many of the severe issues disappear because the police become part of and partnered with the communities. The dynamic shifts from control to cooperation, and the police cultures change for the better as a result. The shift to this model, however, takes police department willingness - and again, they benefit from the status quo.
However you look at it, and wherever you live, we need something better than the overarching, homogenized police culture that has blasted into the 21st century.
So what's a concerned citizen and urban magician to do?
A few things.
These are my recommendations. If you would like to learn how to do these things and haven't got your own methods worked out yet, I am working on a Patreon campaign for teaching them. You can likely go forth and find several ways to go about this until then.
Create a servitor or egregore to police the police. Essentially, have some directed energy to make sure the appropriate and reasonable consequences apply, not the deep-seated messed-up ones that currently get applied. There are several caveats with this - cultural and social values inevitably change every five to ten years. So having a "system update" and stewardship is a tricky and necessary part of such a work.
Advocate for cooperative models of policing. Ask that the police get out of their cars and meet people in the community. Write a letter to different organizations that can coordinate with the police, offer them trainings, introduce the officers to cultural specifics in different communities, and get them to see people they live with, instead of a herd to control.
Internal healing on a community and personal level is a need everywhere. The more you do to heal yourself, the more ripples and changes things for others. No, not everyone will like the change - so working concomitant protection magick with your healing work to account for these people will help.
Create a "who benefits" map - when the police act in an unethical manner, who down the chain of justice benefits? Who suffers? Use that map as a baseline for redirecting and purifying all that energy so that it pours out healing and prosperity on the people currently suffering the worst.
Police do not prevent crimes. They show up after the fact - that's their entire role. Working with land, buildings, city spirit, and neighborhood to create harmony/dynamic peace is a project in and of itself. Some people have tried peace meditation groups, and have found some pitfalls alongside their results
Cultivate a justice altar in a public space that includes actions that lead to check and balances of police and community power. This in itself is a complex practice that may require working with land spirits, communal ancestors, and even buildings.
For policing to change, the collective communities need to change what they want from the police and bring that to their governing bodies. Right now there’s clear racial and power division over what and who gets protected - it’s hard to imagine the police chief making claims about people over property in an affluent community where property is intrinsic to the people’s identities. It is a sad state of reality that the following point needs made, destroying a home isn’t people over property - when it destroyed the functional lives of an entire family, giving them a financial setback of enormous proportions that would be hard enough to recover from without a pandemic.
What can you do right now? Perhaps contribute to the Young family GoFundMe.
References
The information about the incident was assembled from the following articles, last accessed on 1/15/2022:
https://www.news10.com/news/familys-home-demolished-during-standoff-police-defend-actions/
https://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/national/article255739996.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/kzoo/comments/qrywkl/kalamazoo_police_tightlipped_about_why_familys/
https://wkzo.com/2021/11/09/update-kalamazoo-standoff-with-police/