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A civil lawsuit against a school resource officer who threw a 13-year-old student to the floor after a minor disciplinary incident has been revived by a federal appeals courta rare denial of qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that often shields police from being sued over accusations of misconduct.

A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, voted 2-1 to revive a civil claim for excessive force on behalf of the 7th grader at a Kissimmee, Fla., middle school. The SRO at Kissimmee Middle School in the Osceola County school district, was Mario J. Badia, who pleaded guilty to a charge of battery after the incident.

The 11th Circuits Aug. 22 decision in Richmond v. Badia was a relatively rare denial of qualified immunity to a school resource officer. Courts grant qualified immunity to certain government officials, including police officers, school resource officers, and educators, as long as their challenged conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known. As Education Week has reported, the issue has gained attention in recent years amid high-profile cases of police use of force and because of critiques from U.S. Supreme Court justices and scholars.

The 2015 Florida incident involves a student who had arrived at school late one morning with his mother, and they went to the school office to check in, court papers say. The student was wearing a hoodie to conceal a haircut he didnt like, and his mother told him to remove it because hoodies violated the school dress code. The student appeared to push his mother in response, and a front-desk assistant radioed for the resource officer.

Badia confronted the student, cursing at him and pointing his finger, court papers say. When the student would not look Badia in the eye, the SRO grabbed the student by the face. The student reacted by trying to block Badias arm and stepping back, and the SRO then shoved the student in the chest and used an armbar technique to lift him off the ground, twist him around, and slam him to the ground.

Badia released the student after about three minutes. The officer was fired and he pleaded guilty to a charge of battery. He reportedly was sentenced to probation.

The student sued Badia on claims of false arrest and excessive force. A federal district court held that Badia was entitled to qualified immunity.

In the new decision, the 11th Circuit court panel reversed the district court on the excessive-force claim, though not on the false arrest claim.

We conclude that Badia used excessive force under the Fourth Amendment for three reasons, Judge Andrew L. Brasher wrote for the majority.

First, the officer had no law-enforcement justification for grabbing the students face and slamming him to the ground, the court said, adding that a video of the incident undermined the officers claim that the student had been explosive and aggressive. Second, the students potential crime of battery on his mother was at most a misdemeanor, and the student did not pose a threat or attempt to flee the officer, the majority said, and third, the student did not disobey any lawful commands from the officer.

The student remained passive throughout the entire encounter, never attempted to flee, never refused any lawful commands, and did not pose a threat to Badia or others, the court said.

Brasher said it was well-established that an officer violates the Fourth Amendment if he or she uses gratuitous or excessive force on a suspect who is under control, is not resisting, and is obeying commands. Thus, Badia did not merit qualified immunity, the court said.

Writing in dissent, Judge Elizabeth L. Branch said Badias grabbing of the students face was unnecessary and even degrading, but it was a de minimis use of force that did not violate the Constitution.

She characterized the student as having slapped away the officers arm. The students resistance allowed Badia to escalate his use of force against him, Branch said.

The force used against [the student] during the execution of a lawful investigation into a potential crime both before and after he hit Officer Badias hand away was minor, not egregious, the dissenting judge said.

Read more here:
New Court Ruling Allows Former School Resource Officer to Be Sued for Excessive Force - Education Week

ITHACA, N.Y.A federal lawsuit naming four Ithaca Police Department officers as defendants has been filed, alleging that their arrests of two people during an infamous incident in April 2019 constituted a use of excessive force.

IPD officers Benjamin Buck, Zachary Dorn and Gregory Herz are all named in the suit, which was filed in July in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York, as having used excessive force. Officer George DuPay is also named as a defendant, with the suit alleging he engaged in use of excessive force and failure to intervene. The suits were originally filed in July 2022.

In total, two lawsuits were filed, one each on behalf of Rose DeGroat and Cadji Ferguson, both concerning the pairs arrest on April 6, 2019, after an altercation on the Ithaca Commons. DeGroat was charged with two counts of second-degree attempted assault, an E-level felony, and a misdemeanor of resisting arrest initially; those charges were then lowered to misdemeanors, re-upped to felonies after being put before a grand jury, then eventually dismissed. Ferguson was acquitted on charges of disorderly conduct. The situation and its fallout prompted a press conference with Tompkins County District Attorney Matt Van Houten and then-Ithaca Police Department Chief Dennis Nayor.

The full depot of videos that were released by the City of Ithaca in the weeks after the incident can be viewed here.

The suits call both arrests unlawful and claims that both Fergusons and DeGroats treatment during the arrest was a Constitutional violation. It asks for at least $500K in damages for pain and suffering, punitive damages against each officer, an injunction against the officers from engaging use of excessive force and failure to intervene, attorneys fees and any other reward the judge decides.

Both Ferguson and DeGroat were taken to the ground by Ithaca police as they responded to a fight involving Ferguson and a third party on the Commons. Ferguson was tased, while DeGroat was taken down and then tased and pinned down, in part by her head, by three officers after she tried to intervene on Fergusons behalf (more details of the incident below).

When dismissing DeGroats charges in October 2019, Judge John Rowley stated this about the IPD officers involved in the arrest: Ithaca Police officers overreacted to the initial situation [] The police made no effort to defuse the situation or to simply separate the men while the conflict was sorted out. Rowley also called the snap decision to tase Ferguson inexplicable and the officers actions regrettable.

The police department conducted an internal review at the time, eventually determining that the police did not violate any procedures and would not be punished.

Contacted through their attorney, Ed Kopko, DeGroat and Ferguson did not respond to a request for comment. IPD Deputy Chief Vincent Monticello and Ithaca City Attorney Ari Lavine also did not respond to requests for comment. This story will be updated if any of them do respond after publication.

Ithaca Police Benevolent Association President Thomas Condzella offered a statement in reaction to questions about the suit. He said that the union stands behind each of the officers involved, saying they were all acting in good faith and trying to bring order to a rapidly evolving, chaotic and dynamic situation using only limited information available to them at the time. They are being represented by the City of Ithaca, with additional legal support from the PBA if necessary.

Condzella confirmed that the officers will remain on active duty, at least for now, while the lawsuit plays out. He blamed divisiveness and former Ithaca Mayor Svante Myrick for the tension surrounding the incident and for fomenting an anti-police agenda locally.

Had [the officers] simply done nothing, or taken more time to gather additional information before intervening in the out of control drunken brawl, they would have then been criticized for not acting fast enough, Condzella said. As Ithaca Police Officers continue to move forward in partnership and collaboration with our community towards meaningful police reforms, we all alsocontinue to try andrecover from the divisivenessof the past, this case is another unfortunate example of that.

The winding saga played out for much of the summer and early fall of 2019. After videos of the arrests began circulating on social media and in news reports, most notably in the Cornell Daily Sun, the City of Ithaca released body camera footage from the responding officers as well as surveillance footage from Commons cameras.

The body camera footage (all videos are available at the aforementioned city video depot) shows a chaotic scene as the bars let out on the Commons around 1 a.m. on April 6, 2019. It displays that there was clearly an altercation between Ferguson and another man, identified as Joseph Ming, that transpired after Ferguson felt Ming was acting suspicious toward Ferguson and his group of friends, which included DeGroat, according to the suit. One aspect that became crucial in the later criminal trials was that Ferguson initially claimed Ming had touched one person from the group sexually and nonconsensually; Ferguson later acknowledged he wasnt actually sure if there had been any contact between Ming and the unidentified person.

Regardless, Ferguson and Ming proceeded to fight in the middle of the Commons, with police stationed at the west end of the Commons running to interrupt the situation taking place about 100 feet away. They did so by running at the pair, with Herz grabbing his taser and pointing it at Ferguson while yelling for him to get on the ground. Herz trips, then after returning to his feet fires the taser into Fergusons back and Ferguson is brought to the ground by another officer, identified as DuPay.

Thats when a clearly panicked DeGroat tries to intervene on behalf of Ferguson, striking one of the police officers at least once before she herself is quickly taken to the ground. The most jarring portion of the video is when an officer uses his knee for an extended period of time to pin down DeGroat by her head while she is being handcuffed.

In trying to build the case that DeGroats and Fergusons Fourth Amendment rights were violated, the suit alleges that each named officer when seizing, arresting, and acting with force against [DeGroat and Ferguson], acted under color of law by using the authority vested in him by virtue of his employment with the Ithaca Police Department and that not only were the arrests illegal, but the manner by which Ferguson and DeGroat were arrested was excessive and unnecessary.

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Lawsuits filed against four IPD officers for excessive force during 2019 Commons arrests - The Ithaca Voice

As a crime reporter in San Francisco, I should have known better than to park my car under an overpass near the Hall of Justice, a nice stroller visible in the back seat.

And it couldnt have hurt to check that I didnt drop my keys onto the ground next to the vehicle as I scrambled to pay the meter and run to a court hearing.

Alas, the predictable outcome: As I sat in court taking notes, my phone vibrated with a text from my partner, Miguel, from our Oakland home. His phone was in communication with our Subaru Outback, which was moving.

The alarm of the car went off was it you???

I tried to respond but had no cell service in the granite-clad building. By the time I walked out of the courtroom a few minutes later, Miguel was frantic. The texts came tumbling out.

Please tell me you are in the car cause if not our car got stolen. What is going on??? So the front door is ajar now? I just hope you are ok.

My first text back to Miguel was a profanity.

That afternoon, I joined a growing category of San Francisco crime victims: Those who report a theft while simultaneously tracking what was stolen through location-based technologies such as Bluetooth and GPS.

The Subarus alarm had apparently sounded because the thief used the key rather than the key fob to unlock the door. Now, Miguel could see the location of the car through the MySubaru app.

Simultaneously, he could view the location of our car seat, which wed outfitted with an Apple AirTag in case of our childs abduction, and the location of the car keys, which also had an AirTag to prevent me from constantly misplacing them.

Standing in my now-vacant parking spot, I called 911. I told the police dispatcher that Miguel was tracking everything from Oakland.

Can someone please help me?

Megan Cassidys vehicle was stolen and then damaged.

That afternoon, May 19, was chaotic and humiliating, but it also presented a unique opportunity. For the first time in my career, I would be able to view my beat from the inside out.

In recent months, Ive spoken to many theft victims who were able to pinpoint the location of their luggage, bicycles and other stolen goods.

While this technology has been around for years, police say its spread particularly Apples introduction of the AirTag last year to compete with products like the Tile tracker and the Galaxy SmartTag has prompted a boom in calls for help like mine.

As the Washington Posts Heather Kelly wrote in an article in October, after tracking down her stolen Honda Civic in San Francisco, Apples marketing for the AirTag focuses on misplaced items and makes no mention of crime, theft or stealing in any of the ads, webpages or support documents. But in reality, the company has built a network that is ideal for that exact use case.

Tony Maozholds a gps tracker by his truck in San Francisco, Calif., on Friday, Aug. 19, 2022. Maozs truck has been stolen multiple times.

Kenny Franks holds a gps tracker next to his luggage which was stolen and later recovered in San Francisco, Calif., on Friday, Aug. 19, 2022.

Left: Rony Maoz holds holds a GPS tracker by his truck, which has been stolen multiple times. Right: Kenny Franks holds a GPS tracker next to his luggage which was stolen and later recovered. Top: Rony Maoz holds a GPS tracker by his truck, which has been stolen multiple times. Above: Kenny Franks holds a GPS tracker next to his luggage, which was stolen and later recovered.

Recent stories have documented similar recoveries in Memphis, Atlanta and Seaford Rise, a suburb of Adelaide in Australia.

In San Francisco, a city rife with gadget-lovers and plagued by high property crime, the technology would seem to be a game changer. But in reality, situations like my stolen Subaru can often be mired in unforeseen complications.

The response by police has at times been thwarted by legal constraints for example, an officer generally cant enter a home just because the Find My iPhone app says your cell is inside and at other times by what victims say feels like apathy.

Police officials say the reality is that a stolen phone, bike or even car is not as high a priority as a violent crime, so cops dont always have time to get involved and stay involved.

The result can be maddening for victims armed with case-cracking evidence. And while police say they always advise these victims against following their valuables into potentially dangerous situations, many people told me they felt they had no choice but to go cowboy.

Looking back at Miguels texts from May 19, its easy to see how the specter of danger immediately enters the equation.

Be careful!!!!! It says the car is on! There could be someone in the car. MEGAN DO NOT CONFRONT ANYONE.

Ill admit, the possibility of vigilantism had crossed my mind. But the SFPD jumped on our case, even though it had no idea I was a member of the media.

After I reported the Outback stolen from the street outside the Hall of Justice, I connected the dispatcher to Miguel, who relayed the cars path, turn by turn, in real time.

At about 4 p.m., seven blocks from where I stood, the car stopped.

Kenny Franks with his luggage that was stolen and later recovered in San Francisco.

A little more than two weeks earlier, on May 3, Kenny Franks didnt spot his suitcase at baggage claim at San Francisco International Airport. He figured it must have been misplaced by the airline, because an AirTag he had placed inside the luggage showed it was still tracking from SFO.

Franks filed a report with Alaska Airlines and left the airport about 7 p.m.

So when Franks saw the bag travel across town about 15 minutes later, he was disappointed to learn that an airline employee wasnt delivering it to him. Rather, a thief was on the move.

Franks called police, and in multiple calls, he said, dispatchers instructed him to fill out a police report rather than try to retrieve the bag on his own.

Franks submitted a report at San Franciscos Northern Station on Fillmore Street, but despite officials insistence, told police he would seek to retrieve the luggage with or without them. A dispatcher, he said, eventually agreed to send officers to a Super 8 motel on Lombard Street where the luggage seemed to have landed, and advised Franks to wait and not confront anyone.

When the officers showed up, Franks pointed them to the room from which his suitcase was locating. The cops knocked on the door. A man who answered the door demanded a search warrant, and the officers left, explaining to Franks that they couldnt enter without one.

Franks who eventually got the bag back after it was emptied and discarded said he understood and that he empathized with the fact that they have violent crimes going on that they also need to respond to.

If one of them had gotten hurt because of my silly luggage, I would have felt bad about it, he said. But it was very, very frustrating. I feel like there could have been more done.

I also spoke to Kate Stoia, a Noe Valley resident and candidate for District Eight Supervisor, and her husband, Rony Maoz, who resorted to following his stolen truck around for hours last September.

Because it had been stolen twice before, Maoz had by then equipped it with a tracking device made by a friends startup. Driving another car, Maoz followed the signal and found the truck in the India Basin neighborhood. He called 911 and told a dispatcher he had eyes on the vehicle.

But when officers arrived and tried to pull over the suspect with lights and sirens, he sped off, police told Maoz.

Because of the inherent risks of high-speed chases, city policy doesnt allow them in many circumstances. And Maoz said he was told by officers that they didnt have time to keep following the suspects digital trail as he drove around the city. But if the man got out of the car, they told him, please call again. Help would be on the way.

So Maoz spent the day in a cat-and-mouse game. Every time the suspect parked, he said, he would call the police, who would say officers were responding and then the man would take off again.

Ultimately, the thief abandoned the truck and Maoz got it back.

Rony Maozs truck has been stolen multiple times.

Most of the people I interviewed for this story stressed that the cops they dealt with were polite and professional.

But Stoia and other victims also described what they characterized as a defeatist culture in the ranks, with officers blaming prosecutors, policy, state laws or time constraints for not performing what seemed to be standard police work.

Though most of the victims ultimately got their property back, they often did so by putting themselves at risk. Almost everyone I interviewed said its only a matter of time before a property-crime victim goes rogue and meets a tragic fate.

The thing that is problematic is ... this cannot lead to vigilantism, right? But eventually it will, Stoia said. One entity needs to have a monopoly on the use of force. And if they dont use it responsibly, people are going to take action.

According to one person, this is already happening.

The man, who spoke on condition that I not identify him, said he traced his stolen bike to tents under a freeway on Division Street, but was told by police that they couldnt respond until the next day. So he committed a crime of his own.

The thing that is problematic is ... this cannot lead to vigilantism, right? But eventually it will.

I went out with a baseball bat, he said. Found it and trashed the guys tent.

Officer Kathryn Winters, a San Francisco police spokesperson, said police strongly discourage anyone from confronting a suspect over stolen property.

The best thing they can do is stop and meet with us, Winters said. If their items are tracking, then we can take over the investigation.

However, Winters said, unless the victim reports a serious crime like an accompanying robbery or assault, rather than a relatively low-level theft, police dont always have the resources to dig in.

And if the item tracks from inside a residence or hotel room as in Kenny Franks case Winters said Fourth Amendment protections require police to get a warrant.

Theres a very high probable-cause standard that we have to meet to be able to get a judge to sign off on it, Winters said. And if we simply just say its tracking to this location, unfortunately a lot of times thats just not good enough for a judge.

Car theft victim Tyler Smith experienced still further limitations. When his Chevy Spark was stolen from the Mission District on April 8, he reported to police that he was tracking it via the cars OnStar system. He said police instructed him to go to the location and call them back when he spotted the vehicle.

The tracking app led Smith to a homeless encampment under a South of Market freeway overpass.

It was a tiny one-way road, Smith said. I was pretty sketched out.

Smith said he shuffled by his car quickly, trying to peer inside.

But then (police) kept asking me questions like, Can you see whos in it? What do they look like? Can you confirm the plate? Smith said. I was like, No! I walked by, I saw it was there, and I cant believe I had to do that.

As Smith waited anxiously around the corner, he said, police arrived within about 20 minutes.

The officers and Smith approached the car again. They opened the door to find people living inside. The officers politely asked the occupants to leave, Smith said, and didnt attempt to question them.

They said they werent sure who stole the car just because those people were in it doesnt mean that they stole it, Smith said. So they couldnt do anything.

Anas Gragueb also became her own sleuth after her electric bike was swiped from her apartment buildings garage last year, and she tracked it to an encampment near City Hall.

She said she begged a dispatcher to send help, but was told there was no guarantee.

I felt like, if thats not a moment in my life where Im justified in calling the police the moment where I know Im going to be faced with somebody whos committed a crime, when are the police going to be useful?

So Gragueb borrowed her wifes bike and rode alone to the address, where she came upon a man doing drugs on the pavement next to a row of slick new bikes. Gragueb had promised her wife she wouldnt approach anyone, so she rode a little farther along, until she saw a group of construction workers.

Im so sorry, she said she told them. But theres my bike. Its right there. Im scared to go. I dont see it, but I know its there. Would you mind just being next to me while I ask questions and ask for my bike back?

Gragueb had an image of the suspected burglar on her phone, taken from her garages security camera footage. The construction workers, she said, recognized the man as someone who had vandalized their site, and one offered to escort Gragueb back to the scene.

After a brief confrontation with the suspect, Gragueb said, she spotted the tip of her bike wheel peeking out from under a tarp. With the construction workers assistance, she carried it back to the construction site and called police, who ultimately arrested the suspect.

I felt like, if thats not a moment in my life where Im justified in calling the police the moment where I know Im going to be faced with somebody whos committed a crime, Gragueb said, when are the police going to be useful?

Winters said she wasnt able to track down information on these specific incidents, but said, anecdotally, that they appeared to illustrate some of the complexities of such investigations.

Within 10 minutes of putting Miguel in touch with police, allowing him to relay information about our stolen Subaru, I received a call back from a dispatcher. Police officers had found my car, unoccupied, about four blocks away from where I had left it.

An officer waited at the location for me to arrive, and stood by as I surveyed the damage. Some of the contents of my car littered the street, including my infants tiny floral sneakers.

The stroller was gone, but the car seat which is admittedly tricky to remove was spared. Nothing else of value was there in the first place, but that didnt stop the thief from making off with a car charger and some pennies he cut out of a soda can that we shake to stop our dog from barking.

And in the few blocks of his joyride, the thief also managed to sideswipe something sturdy enough to dislodge my bumper. Im still working that out with insurance.

I got the car towed, because the officer couldnt wait for my partner to arrive with the spare keys. He also didnt want to leave me there alone, in case the thief came back. I understood.

Before we parted ways, the officer did a quick search for my keys, which were tracking from the same block. He poked his head into a tent and talked to a few apparent witnesses, but said the keys might have been inside a nearby building and, if so, he couldnt go in.

I felt relieved and thankful for the officers swift response.

The next day, Miguel and I returned to the scene. The keys, or at least the AirTag affixed to them, seemingly hadnt moved since the day before. We debated asking police to escort us, but figured they probably had better things to do.

A group of people was smoking on the curb. We feared what might happen if we sent a signal to the tracker and it beeped from inside someones pocket. We tried anyway and played dumb, saying wed dropped or keys in the area. Had anyone seen them?

Fortunately, the alert instead led us to a tree. There were the keys, hanging from a branch.

Originally posted here:
SF police and car thefts: What they can and can't do to help you - San Francisco Chronicle

As an Alabama high school student, I was chosen to travel to the Soviet Union for the People to People international student exchange program, as part of the first delegation from my home state. It shocked me to see the oppression and hopelessness of the people and their lack of choices and freedoms that most Americans take completely for granted.

That experience, at such a young age, shaped my worldview and deepened my love and appreciation for the United States. After three long weeks in a communist country, when our plane touched down at John F. Kennedy Airport, the first thing a few of my travel companions and I did was get down on our hands and knees and kiss the ground! I had never been so grateful to be an American.

So why should you as a Christian care about this, and how does socialism deviate from Christian values?

For a start, socialism destroys religious freedom. It destroys creativity, innovation and ingenuity. Today, most Americans do not know the history of the death and destruction communism caused in the twentieth century. Most American college students can answer correctly when asked how many Jews died in the Holocaust. They know it is six million people because they have learned this in our schools, through popular movies, stories like The Diary of Anne Frankand because of ongoing campaigns from organizations like the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, the Holocaust Museum, and others, who remind Americans about this history.

But if you ask the average American how many victims communism has claimed, very few would respond with the correct answer. Some sources report that it is over 100 million.

Many young people today seem to be confusing socialism with social justice, even though the two are completely dissimilar. Socialism in most countries does nothing to help the poorit often actually creates more poverty!

The people who fought for our country to establish the freedoms we enjoy today suffered enormous hardship. Many of them died fighting to protect our religious freedom especially. If you are a Christian, the choice that faces you is not whether you are willing to fight for what you believe. Instead, it is this: Do you want to fight right now while it may be uncomfortable and unpleasant, but you will be fighting to preserve what freedoms we already have? Or do you want to wait and fight later to regain what we had before we lost our freedom?

Long hours volunteering on a campaign, giving up a little extra money each campaign season, taking time out of your busy schedule to attend town hall meetings and dealing with the unpleasant nature of politics pales in comparison to what people who fought in the Revolutionary War and other battles for freedom endured. Never before in our nations history have we been so close to adopting a way of life that will eventually lead to everything we hold dear being completely stripped away. Socialism is a political and economic system with roots in the ideas of Karl Marx. In socialism, the government owns all means of generating wealth, but individuals can own property. It is often thought of as the period between the overthrow of the capitalist system and the implementation of communism.

Communism is the full implementation of government control and exists when there is no class, no money and no private ownership whatsoever. The government runs everything, and all property is communally owned. All one needs to do is look at how their local US Postal Service office or their DMV operates, and then imagine that style of service applied to every single aspect of life. It is beyond imagination how anyone could think that this would improve things in our country. If the United States were a communist country, the iPhone would most likely never have been invented because all of the government regulations and lack of incentives would most likely have stifled someone like Steve Jobs and the rest of his teams creativity.

Under free-market capitalism, there is free competition and no government regulation or interference. Entrepreneurship, hard work and innovation are incentivized, and people are free to own property.

The recent rise in socialism coming from the fringe Left should be deeply troubling to all because at its core, socialism is about replacing God with government and freedom with tyranny. America is the greatest land of opportunity the world has ever known because Americans are free to practice their own beliefs, speak their own minds, protect their own lives, pursue their own dreams and enjoy the fruits of their own labor. Socialism directly opposes the American dream.

Advocates for socialism see Christianity as a threat and therefore believe it must be silenced, canceled and eliminated. Socialism has been tried all over the world and has never worked, but somehow people keep getting deceived into adopting this approach. The truth is, in socialist countries, most people of faith suffer tremendously. One of the greatest ways they suffer is by having God stripped out of everything.

Right now, in America, socialism is on our doorstep. As one major donor at a fundraising event recently said to me, My husband and I can either get involved in politics now and give away some of our money to help get the right kinds of candidates elected, or we can wait, hold on to our money and then risk our kids having nothing to inherit. If our country gives in to full-scale socialism or communism, the government could easily come in and just take it all! This may sound extreme, but for anyone who remembers what happened in Cuba when Castro took power and converted them to full-scale communism, or if you have studied places like Venezuela, there are horror stories of things just like that occurring.

We as Christians and people who love God, love our country and love the very things that make life precious must rise up. We must choose God over government and faith over fear. If not now, when? If not us, then who?

The preceding is excerpted from chapter 13 of Terri Hasdorffs book, Running Into the Fire (Charisma House, Sept. 2022). For more information on Running Into the Fire, or to order the book, visit shop.charismamag.com.

Terri Hasdorffis a former congressional candidate and an executive-level leader with over twenty years experience in government and politics. She began her career in 1991 in what is now called the White House Office of Public Engagement, where she had the honor of working with faith leaders from across the country. She later served on Capitol Hill for six years, then ran for a seat in the US House to represent Alabamas second congressional district. She has a bachelors degree from Samford University, is a graduate of the senior executives program at Harvard Universitys John F. Kennedy School of Government and is currently in the executive MBA program at Oxford University.

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The Dangers of Socialism: Is It Coming to America? - Charisma Magazine

These remarks were delivered by Christoph Vandreier to the Seventh National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US), held from July 31 to August 5, 2022.

Vandreier is the national secretary of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei(SGP), the German section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

Read the full report on the Congress and the resolutions adopted at it.

I am very pleased to bring to this Congress the revolutionary greetings of the Socialist Equality Party in Germany. The Congress is a truly international event. Not only because we have large delegations from all sections and groups, but above all because this Congress is based on an internationalist perspective that arms the working class around the world and guides the work of all sections.

That the Congress is dedicated to our unforgettable comrade Wije Dias is a testament to this perspective. As Comrade David North noted, Wijes life represents the historical depth of our world party. Starting from the struggle against the betrayal of the LSSP, the RCL/SEP based its work on the historical and political principles of the International Committee. This can be seen in the extremely strong statement of the Sri Lankan comrades intervening in the explosive situation and giving leadership to the working class based on these principles.

This is the essence of what we have called the fifth phase of the development of the Trotskyist movement. Our historical principles intersect with the growing class struggle internationally. And as Comrade David North put it, the more intensive the class struggles break out, the more significant is it to base our party on our historical heritage.

Every single report on the extremely strong resolutions showed how we are basing our analysis on exactly this heritage, a very fundamental understanding of our epoch and a decades long analysis. All the central issues we were discussing over the last days are fundamental features of the development in every country in the world.

As far as the pandemic is concerned, Germany is a hotspot of the BA.5 wave. Infection rates, hospitalization and death rates are rising rapidly, clinics are at their absolute limit as thousands of doctors and nurses are down due to infection. Even the Minister of Health, Karl Lauterbach, is warning of a collapse and catastrophic development, but at the same time has thrown all protective measures overboard. The government is pursuing a deliberate policy of mass social murder and destruction of the public health system.

While millions of workers are threatened with death and illness in order to increase the profits of the banks and corporations, radical real wage cuts are being organized with inflation. The same nurses that fought two and a half years at the forefront against the pandemic are getting now wage cuts by 10 to 20 percent!

All social spheres are now subordinated to the war against Russia. In Germany, natural gas prices have tripled. And now the government has also passed a law introducing an additional levy to protect the profits of the energy companies. Workers are to be forced to freeze in order to be able to wage the war against Russia.

Under these conditions, Comrade Will Lehmans campaign is also arousing great interest among German workers. This is because the trade unions have completely backed the war policy and are enforcing the wage cuts and price increases against the workers. With the war against Russia, the German Labor Front is also coming back.

In point 15 of the resolution against imperialist war we declare, The conflict with Ukraine has provided German imperialism with an opportunity to implement the largest rearmament campaign since the collapse of the Nazi regime.

This is very true. Seventy-seven years after the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht, German tanks are rolling again against Russia. By tripling the military budget, the ruling class in Germany is pursuing the declared goal of once again building the largest military power in Europe. All restrictions imposed on Germany after the greatest crimes in human history are being stripped away and the whole society is being militarized.

The same arms companies that supplied the total war and earned their profits with forced labor and in the concentration camps are now again multiplying their production and mass-producing weapons for the war against Russia. After the German government has already delivered weapons worth 600 million euros to Ukraine so far, an additional 100 self-propelled howitzers worth 1.7 billion euros are now to be sent.

We had already shown in 2014 how this return of German militarism goes hand in hand with the trivialization and ultimately the justification of the crimes of German imperialism. This has been more than confirmed. The falsifications of history by Professors Mnkler and Baberowski, which we pointed out and fought against, are today the official government line.

For example, the Social Democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz has called the Russian invasion of Ukraine a war of extermination and a breach of civilization, terms that were so far in Germany exclusively used for the Eastern Campaign and the Holocaust. Using these terms for the war in Ukraine is an incredible trivialization of the Nazi crimes. The daily newspaper taz even claimed in an article that Stalin had planned the Second World War before Hitler had even come to power. The old Nazi lie of a preventive war and thus the justification of the war of extermination is now being revived in the house paper of the Greens.

With our struggle against this falsification of history, we have linked ourselves to the historically deeply rooted opposition to war in the German working class. This was only possible on the basis of the decades-long struggle of the International Committee for the Defense of Historical Truth and the struggle against subjective-idealist ideology. Based on this, the SGP is the only party in Germany today that opposes militarism and arms the working class with a socialist perspective. As Johannes pointed out yesterday, the Greens are the most aggressive pro war party today and also the left party and its pseudo-left satellites are supporting the war against Russia.

As comrades have already explained, the same applies to all central questions of political development. Our World Party is the only political tendency that has a progressive answer to war, mass social murder in the pandemic and to the danger of fascism.

This is also the reason why the German state is waging its furious campaign against us under the banner of anti-communism. The Verfassungsschutz, the German secret service, makes it clear that it views the SGP and ICFI as the standard bearers of contemporary Marxian socialism, as comrade David North put it in his opening report to the SEP (US) Summer School in 2019. They put us on the list of extremist organizations because they understood that our program has the greatest objective significance.

The government justified naming the SGP explicitly because we agitated against nationalism and militarism and argued for an egalitarian, democratic and socialist society. It developed an argumentation that declared any criticism of the state organs, and especially of the army and the secret service, to be anti-constitutional and illegal. Two courts have since blessed this scandalous revival of the Nazis Gesinnungsjustiz, which is why we have now filed a constitutional complaint.

Our complaint is not a defensive act and is certainly not based on illusions in the Federal Constitutional Court. Rather, with our complaint, we are going on the offensive and putting the Verfassungsschutz on trial. We put ourselves at the forefront of the struggle against the radical right-wing conspiracy in the state apparatus and the return of fascist methods.

The ruling class is turning to authoritarian and fascist forms of rule all over the world because its policies of war and social attacks are met by enormous opposition in the working class. The fight against fascism is therefore inseparably linked to the fight against war, the pandemic and the social attacks. The only way to defend democratic rights is to mobilize the international working class on the basis of a socialist program.

This perspective is now very concrete. The class struggle is developing rapidly, and the interventions of our party are of the greatest objective importance. These interventions must be based on our living historical principles and experiences in order to actually bring to bear the objective power of the working class. This congress is without any question an essential step in this direction.

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The revival of German militarism and the fight for socialism - WSWS