Remarks on the Federal Government’s Ongoing Presence in Minnesota
“It is a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government." So record it.
Minnesota is experiencing unprecedented ICE action — which is a kind of punch-pulling euphemism for what has felt like an all-out fascist invasion that has included murder, kidnappings, toxic chlorine gas set off in city streets, and ICE officers staking out stores and businesses, sometimes arresting the staff at restaurants they’ve just been eating at.
In the midst of this, Governor Tim Walz made an address where he accurately described it as an occupation. Remarkably, he also asked his constituents this:
“Tonight, I want to share another way you can help: Witness.
Help us establish a record of exactly what’s happening in our communities.
You have an absolute right to peacefully film ICE agents as they conduct their activities.
So carry your phone with you at all times.
And if you see ICE in your neighborhood, take out that phone and hit record.
Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans – not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution.”
We’ve seen crowdsourced footage and citizen journalism before — most pervasively during the Black Lives Matter protests five years ago — but I can’t think of a time when the Governor of a State, or anyone in a similar position, has asked citizens to record and save footage so that it can be used to prosecute the authorities for its atrocities.
If we look beyond the obvious shock that this is where we are now, there’s an interesting infrastructure problem here. It’s worth asking: if you were designing a system to gather footage of ICE brutality from Minnesotans, while protecting their safety and ensuring the sanctity of the dataset, how would you do it? Knowing that there will be people who want to make the database unusable, or prevent people from submitting, either directly or through intimidation?
It’s essentially a whistleblower (or journalism tips) use case. Rinse and repeat for the whole country. Some newsrooms have built their own forms, and Letitia James released a portal for submitting ICE footage in New York, but there’s a strong case to be made for a central repository for all ICE abuse, for which sifting through all that video is a problem in itself. There will be a lot of it.
And what if there doesn’t remain a strong government entity at the State level to bring about a case?
There’s a strong argument for sharing to a central repository that can be used and browsed by multiple entities, including governments, advocacy organizations, civil rights lawyers, and newsrooms. When this information is distributed across States, newsrooms, personal Instagram accounts, and more, it doesn’t form a body of evidence that can help bring about more impactful cases and determine patterns of activity. So someone should consider centralizing it — but then mirroring it, Zurich protocol style, so that nobody can hide the evidence and cover the tracks of their abuse.
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