Sherman Austin/ Cop Watch LA on Yahoo!News

international | crime and justice | other press Sunday June 17, 2007 16:42 by L.A. Correspondent - IMC Internationale

Somebody's Watching You

Sherman Austin was arrested prior to 9/11 for operating the website RaiseTheFist.com. An anonymous poster had added a link in a comment to commonly availble information on bomb making. While Sherman was in pre-trial custody 9/11 occured and he foolishly struck a 3-month plea bargain with the prosecutor. The judge ignored the prosecutor's recommendation and tripled the sentence.

Now Sherman is released and has returned to direct action activism in downtown LA involving the videotaping of cops. Yahoo!News covers the story with two video clips.

The Yahoo!News story is slightly inaccurate in details: Copwatch existed in LA prior to Sherman's release. It also ignores the detail that anarchist activity was centered in the Long Beach copwatch which ramped up its activities after Sherman was arrested and resulted in extraordinary police harrasment including the case of math professor Hasan Hasan and activists who were accused of planning to petrol bomb a Klan/Minuteman rally.

The story also leads off with a subheading which calls sherman a "convicted felon", which is strictly true, but misleading as the conviction is questionable at best: note this was a plea-bargain, not a jury trial. The ridiculous lengths to which the FBI strained to prove that Sherman was making bombs went so far as the confiscation of an empty Snapple bottle and fertilizer/plant-food for a potted plant in his bedroom.

The good news is that activists in general and Sherman in particular have continued to mobilize in LA despite appalling police repression, see for example the massive attack on the primarily Latino community in MacArthur park recently (Mayday 2007) to judge the level of brutality the LAPD and Sherriff's Dept are used to dealing out: http://la.indymedia.org/news/2007/05/197854.php