✦San Francisco Chronicle: While San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland Police Department officers are required to wear body cameras throughout their time on duty, private security has no such requirements. Oftentimes, Bay Area police officers work both for the police department and in private security, oftentimes in the same locale, making enforcement of the rules and laws pertaining to their use of body cameras difficult.
*Code 4-1117: As an extension of the right of law enforcement personnel to turn off their body cameras in situations that present as highly dangerous, law enforcement review boards may also hold sealed the footage of all incidents that bring about citizen complaints. This right does not protect against search warrants for said footage in cases where felony charges have been filed against officers or in class action civil suits against police departments and/or their administrators.
✦San Francisco Chronicle: While San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland Police Department officers are required to wear body cameras throughout their time on duty, private security has no such requirements. Oftentimes, Bay Area police officers work both for the police department and in private security, oftentimes in the same locale, making enforcement of the rules and laws pertaining to their use of body cameras difficult.
*andrewjacksonslaststand010621: Attempts such as this show how deep the terrorist criminals take it b/c they will stop at nothing! It shows how committed we need to be to take them out By Any Means Necessary!!!
*andrewjacksonslaststand010621: This is America.
*andrewjacksonslaststand010621: We need this Man and Marciano! on the same ticket. We need them in the White House! If there has to be another insurrection then so be it.
✦Insurgency Alert Desk, Third Bureau: Ahead of Officer Colt Bergen’s public memorial service, there is major news in the search for a culprit. The state is announcing a single charge of premeditated first-degree murder against DeMichael Bradley. The state is charging Keisha Manigault, Ayesha Ali, and Copeland Cane V as accomplices to murder. Cane is sought as a fugitive from justice.
Jacqueline (Later.)
Copeland, despite that sudden end, did not disappear entirely. I made sure of that because I loved his story and, in a certain sense which I hope is not misunderstood, I loved him. I loved his truth, however complicated it may have been.
He told a few lies, that boy, but he held a lot of truths big and small. Small truth: About the encryption level of the Bahamas-based Presage app, he was not lying. Presage is impenetrable; in other words, Cope did protect me. He also left me with whole sole control over the recording.
I transmitted the piece as one gigantic audio file to my email inbox, and then from there I sent it to a Bay Area journalist, who sent it to a voice authentication expert, who sent it back to the journalist, who sent it to law enforcement while simultaneously posting a downloadable version to her outlet’s website so that the content reached the public and could never be controlled by authorities.
The forty-eight hours, two minutes, and seventeen seconds of his spoken word autobiography provided all that anyone could wish for either to support or to damn Copeland Cane V. Those who shared his vision of the world and those who wanted him shoveled underneath the prison’s foundation celebrated equally the mysterious appearance of the lengthy confessional in equal measure, believing it would bring about the legal result that they desired. More important, law enforcement took notice of the recording as well, which led to Keisha Manigault and Ayesha “Free” Ali having all charges against them dropped. Meanwhile, the investigation into the murder of Officer Bergen narrowed to just two figures: DeMichael Bradley, who remained in police custody, and Copeland, who remained at large.
While it is true that police found both DeMichael’s and Copeland’s DNA—trace amounts of blood, specifically—on several screws and on the barrel and the trigger itself, a fact which the Alert Desk was only too eager to report in the lead-up to trial, it was also revealed at trial that the fingerprints of two other people were found on the gun as well, those being DeMichael’s granny and another unidentified person. With that evidence entered into the record, DeMichael’s very ownership of the firearm and his access to it on the day of the shooting came under some question.
At trial, a lot of things came under question. The testimony of Copeland Cane never made it into evidence, but that fact didn’t really matter. By the time of the trial, every prospective jury member had already plucked the Cane testimony out of the cloud. Even though Copeland had maintained fantastically that he was a victim of Treasure Island radiation, even though he had been a juvenile delinquent with the priors to prove it, even though he was nearly expelled from high school for violations of athletic department rules, even though he said he didn’t see shit on the day of the shooting when in reality he probably did, there was a larger truth that his testimony pointed toward. Copeland’s words made people question the objectivity of his and his friends’ opponents. It didn’t help the prosecution’s case that they flew in a whore from Denver who gave ballistics testimony that inexplicably contradicted the coroner’s findings. It didn’t help that they leaked sealed juvenile records to the press in an attempt to bias the nation before the trial even got under way, or that they announced only half the forensic findings until they were under oath and had to tell the whole truth. I guess our recording wasn’t exactly objective either, but given what we were up against, it only served to balance the scales of justice.
Two separate juries hung.
Over the course of those two trials, many in the public, myself included, concluded that neither Cope nor DeMichael but the still unidentified figure who taught DeMichael to shoot actually killed the cop. Possibly a member of law enforcement who sought to break up the protest or settle a score or both: sabotage by sacrifice. Few find the idea implausible since, of course, it’s not exactly a secret that they can get away with murder—see Miguel, as just one example: that murder case, which by chronology should have gone to trial before DeMichael’s case, was instead never even charged, and as a result it never made it to trial. The body cam footage, if it even existed, was never made public. The police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, Soclear Security, and a social media–generated defense fund claiming more than one hundred donors from California to Australia all backed Officer Enriquez. With his friends neck-deep in their own legal problems and his family too broke for a proper funeral, nobody backed that dead boy. And no, there was no protest movement made out of his murder. Nothing was made out of it but some flower arrangements, a preacher who misquoted Scripture, and an East Oakland burial. It isn’t 2020 anymore. Law enforcement knows what it’s doing. Cops know what they’re doing. The whole apparatus is better organized, better funded, and, as a result, more willing to fight in the courts and the streets and everywhere in between than ever before.
Cope’s street protest died almost before it was born, but his testimony lives on. The complete recording in its unedited entirety, I should say, is much, much longer than what’s been published. There was a lot more of me in the original. I talk about myself, Copeland talks about me; it was our story, not just his. But all that extra didn’t make it through edits—I made sure of that. I wasn’t trying to go from a journalism major to jail, after all.
I will confess that Copeland required a lot of editing. Raw and uncut, he’s such a mess of digressions and contradictions and hallucinations and obscenities and obscurities that I had to cut away the excess just to make him understandable. This is the Copeland Cane that I believe the public needed to hear. Of course, he simply couldn’t be contained—not by me, not by a murder, not by the ways that the media imagined him. Cope was his own creation, way beyond anyone’s identifiers.
As for me, I’m as invisible as ever, a disembodied female voice placed upon a made-up male sobriquet. Upon investigation into me, authorities uncovered that there was more than one black girl at our elite prep school. Imagine that. There are, in fact, a select few such girls in my graduating class, meaning that I could be
any one of us, or all of us, in composite sketch. Maybe I’m not exactly the girl who’s been described in these memories. Maybe I’m not tall and thin and light-skinned, maybe I never went to school in the Ivy League, maybe I’m not quite the girl you’ve been encouraged to conceive. For now, I’d like to keep it that way—deus ex machina, until I’m safe enough to tell my story.
The story, Walter Benjamin writes, “does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel.” I tried to preserve his handprints even though Copeland had surrendered himself to me as clay to do with what I would. I presented him cracks and all, but not uncut, not unedited. I took care in shaping Copeland’s narrative so that it conveyed that which I believe he most wanted the listener to hear. I took pleasure in each rambling, unnecessary digression that I deleted and each epiphany that my editing emphasized. Yes, I was his editor and his author in that sense, even if, in the end, I can’t say that I know exactly who he was or what he wanted other than to disappear.
I know he wanted justice, then he didn’t, then he did again. I know he wanted to bury his father inside himself. I know he loved us all and I know he left us to ourselves. I know he’s promised me that he’ll return if America can look itself in the mirror and I know that it cannot. I want to believe that America can change and I know that all change finds its opponent in fear. And I know that fear—faceless, blind fear—is really all that keeps Copeland at large—thank you, Soclear.
Actually, thank God that Soclear and law enforcement haven’t reunited with the Stolz Jungs movement and re-formed into a Mega-MAGA much worse than what we’ve already lived through, but even remaining as they are, even if they magically never move another tick toward takeover, they are already a horror show—multiple horror shows, in fact. It’s strange how we’ve simply gotten used to so much horror in America. These are the horror shows that we know, I suppose. Meanwhile, people like Cope, people who see these traditions of terror for what they are and somehow can’t make amends and just live like normal, they’re the ones who are called crazy.
After editing and releasing the recording, I took note of its reception. I listened to the discussions and roundtables and cross-examinations and closing arguments. I even read the study out of Clemson University authored by two tenure-hunting criminology professors, who advanced the idea that Copeland and Miguel were lovers and that Copeland killed Officer Bergen to avenge his lover’s murder, which might be a thing because I definitely do think they loved each other—except for the fact that it was not Copeland, not DeMichael, who murdered Officer Bergen, not to mention the disturbingly homophobic overtones of the professors’ analysis. Unlike the professors, I don’t want to speculate on the unspoken spectrum that is a boy’s sexuality. Leave love out of it, for the moment, at least.
I graduated from college and moved back to California and worked and fucked and ate and slept. Being a gentrifier is a strange thing. You don’t even realize that the job you take at the tech company and the rent you pay for your loft apartment and the money you spend at restaurants and rooftop bars are part of something you once criticized. It’s especially true when you’re of color and you’re used to color-coding the crimes of capital, and then suddenly you no longer can—you are amongst the criminals. Your university education in the humanity of white people has somehow resulted in a six-figure income and the right to expel another working-class black family from their neighborhood. People of color had obviously never been one people no matter how much the Democratic Party told us we were. But even black people were so obviously divided by our different wants and needs.
I always wanted to have a great mind, to understand my world in large and encompassing ways, but the more I lived, the more granular everything became, most of all my understanding of myself. I understood that I was a complicated woman. The contradictions that had so irritated me when I found them in other people I now saw in myself. I had adult relationships where sex, companionship, love, and betrayal made their imprint upon me. I began to see my own faults and shortcomings in the failings of others. The feelings that I had held for and against black boys and black men like Copeland eased in that self-reflecting prism, and I started to see him specifically as less epic and less catastrophic and more human in his impacts.
I found myself engaged to be married to a black man, but it fell apart for reasons that I won’t get into here, reasons that don’t make black men any easier to love. Anyway, I ran away from that reality and went to law school. I ran away to and from a lot of things. In those years studying in graduate school, I thought I had left behind not just the mystery of the murder but the whole idea of whoever Copeland was. I guess in relegating him to my past I was mimicking, however faintly, what the world around me had done with him. Like the discarded things that make up the landfill that packs the Bay Area’s islands, Copeland was buried alive by the news cycle, which moved on to other events, and by the processes of the justice system, which classified his case cold and moved on to other murders. Officially, he remains a fugitive. But the Insurgency Alert Desk that serves as America’s public record of crimes against itself rarely reports on him. New threats have emerged amongst us; new wars have been declared against ourselves.
During my 1L year in law school, word reached me that Copeland Cane IV, Cope’s father, had passed away in Antioch in the apartment— they could not afford to keep the house—that he shared with Sherelle Rowland, Cope’s mother. I did not attend old man Cane’s funeral and do not know if a young man who knew everybody, yet who nobody knew, watched quietly from the back row, but I do know that when I got the news on social media I exploded in tears for the father, for Ms. Sherelle, for their son, for the tragedies that bind us more tightly than love. I saw Tulsa in my tears. I saw a neighborhood a hundred years older than ours burnt to the ground, boys born guilty and men shot and women widowed and wounded, and trauma encoded in our blood. I saw that community breaking apart into the pieces that put Copeland on the run and put me, well, here, where I can write all this. I decided not to mourn but instead to do something easy with myself. I cleaned, or I read something trashy, or I called up a friend. But behind the mop and bucket and bleach, behind the novel, behind the man inside of me, I saw the helical ghosts turning loose inside our bodies, I saw our bodies unbound from one another by history, brought back together in deception and infiltration and incarceration in a new world where the Greenwoods and Rockwoods are not even a memory anymore. I want love, I want marriage, I want children. But I want a world to love them where whatever we have is not under investigation, or at risk, or subject to sanction; where life’s death sentence is an abstraction, not your naked hand on a hot coal burning.
I applied to doctorate programs in Europe and Australia only to find, like my ancestors, that America would not let me go—a job offer came along that was too good to sensibly refuse. I work in fin-tech or entertainment law or something like that, something with a salary that would allow me to house and feed three families in Kansas if I lived in Kansas. I live on the East Coast somewhere, in a big city full of people and money and power, and nobody cares where I came from or why I’m here.
Even though I live far from the Bay Area, I keep tabs. Social media, like death, is inescapable, so I am well aware that Douglas Deadrich is now the principal at Piedmontagne Prep, Kennedy having been ousted after revelations about his multiple sexual affairs with teachers directly under his supervision. Deadrich has also gone into business with Michael Guzzo; ironically, and unwittingly, it was Copeland himself who brought them together. And now, together, the two of them have built hundreds of units of low-income, government-subsidized housing on Treasure Island. The apartment complexes have social justice–themed names, which is kind of cool, I guess. Perhaps Deadrich and Guzzo see this as the last best means to alleviate the Ba
y Area’s housing crisis, and they are simply unwilling to allow the perfect and unpolluted to be the enemy of necessity. Maybe Cope and his father were wrong, maybe no lasting harm will come to the residents of that island. But I have to side with Cope on this one: something about that place just is not right. At any rate, I hear rental units on the island are in constant demand. Business is booming.
In his time in our common world, Cope faced an array of authorities who thought they knew him better than they did: Principal Morgan, Judge Khan, that warden woman, whatever her name was, and Mrs. Greenberg and Principal Kennedy and others. Most of these people must be either retired or at least eyeing their pensions by now. Maybe at such a stage in life no news is the best news. Even the notorious Sarina Jayachandra Campbell-Zayas managed to land on her feet after the demolition of Rockwood, the closure of its high school, and the termination of her visiting lecturer position at the university. Ingeniously, Campbell-Zayas has enacted a move down the colleges and up the ranks, recasting herself as a community college president in one of those California desert towns where there are more prisons than schools and anyone smart enough to lie about having a college degree probably deserves to preside over the education of others.
But I don’t think all of Copeland’s acquaintances and associates have fared so well as these privileged few. I’ve heard rumors for years that Ms. McDonald’s father, he being the businessman who owned and then sold Rockwood to the developers who razed it, actually wrote his daughter out of his will because of her participation in the protest rally where the policeman was shot. I believe she teaches English overseas now, or something like that.
The Confession of Copeland Cane Page 33