I’ve never been comfortable asking for donations but if you are in an altruistic mood on this Giving Tuesday, please consider PINAC as a possible recipient of your generosity because the money will help keep the stories flowing and our mission alive.

Donate more than $100 and receive a personalized PINAC press pass.

The mission as we announced earlier this year is to build a database of bad cops which will be compiled by readers throughout the country making public records requests through their local police departments and prosecutors’ offices.

But it is a longterm project and we first needed to build the foundation which we’ve been doing this year by rebuilding the entire site. I also spent the summer turning a walk-in closet into a podcast studio and plan to launch the first episode this week.

The goal is to publish a weekly podcast where I will interview people relevant to the issue of police accountability, especially when it comes to the Brady List which are the records we will be seeking.

It will be a rarity in the podcast world because most police-related podcasts are all about blindly backing the blue and we’re going to be about holding cops accountable.

We’ve also added forums to the site even though not many people have signed up. The forums is where we will post the records we obtain so they will be accessible to the public while we build the actual database.

We’ve invested thousands of dollars into the project so far and plan to go full throttle at the beginning of next year. The forums alone cost $100-a-month to maintain.

But right now you can help a great deal by making a donation which can be done through the donor box below. You can also make a tax-deductible donation through our fiscal sponsor, the Center of Social Change in Miami.

Check out the photos and short video below to see the new studio. It’s small but perfect for the podcast.

PINAC’s Goal for 2021 is to Build a Public Database of Bad Cops from Brady Lists

Restoring the site took much longer than anticipated but it is now primed and ready to build the national database of bad cops we’ve been hyping up since the beginning of the year.

The PINAC Brady Cop Project is a longterm investigative journalism project that will depend on citizens throughout the country volunteering as national correspondents to obtain public records from local prosecutors.

The records we will be seeking are commonly known as the “Brady List” or “Giglio Files” or “do not call list” – names of cops too corrupt to take the witness stand – but many prosecutors will feign ignorance, claiming the records do not exist or are not public. As a result, these dirty cops take the witness stand all the time, sending innocent people to prison.

So it’s not going to be a matter of simply walking into the prosecutor’s office and walking out a few minutes later with the records. It’s going to take persistence, research and maybe even a few lawsuits. And it’s going to take patience and professionalism to keep from being arrested or worse.

After all, government officials hate it when citizens seek public records. They view it as prying into their private affairs. They especially hate it when you walk in with a camera seeking public records.

But nothing we will do will be illegal. That would defeat the whole purpose of the project so we must remain smart.

The skills we will teach you during this project will enable you to seek all kinds of public records from your local government which hopefully will start a nationwide trend of citizens auditing their local governments through public records requests. The goal is to place the government in the hands of the people where it belongs.

The idea is to “Be the Media” as we’ve been preaching for years which is essential during a time when local media no longer has the resources to investigate local government. It’s about trusting yourself to find the truth rather than complaining about the media not providing that truth.

The first step was rebuilding the website because it was in shambles. The database was so corrupt that we were unable to login to the site for the past several weeks, a result of having migrated to so many different platforms in the past 14 years, not to mention thousands of spam comments allowed by our previous platform, the Maven, right before they handed it back to us.

The second step was implementing forums to establish an online community away from Facebook because the social media giant has been clamping down on our reach since 2017 to appease the government to keep from being regulated. Facebook will never allow this project to succeed.

We may have more than 300,000 followers but Facebook rarely gives us access to more than five percent of those readers on any given day.

Facebook claims we must be restricted because we write about “social issues” which is their way of saying police abuse but it has cost us more than $100,000 in ad revenue since 2017 and it is the main reason we are switching from a for-profit business model to a nonprofit which will allow us to focus on quality over quantity.

The third step will be the podcast which will allow us to dive deep into the topic through interviews and analysis. We plan to launch by early November.

The fourth step is all of us coming together to make this happen. PINAC News will do its part by publishing stories and podcasts relevant to the issue as well as hosting the forums but we need citizens to donate money and time. We especially need attorneys who can advise us and file lawsuits when needed.

As a fundraiser, we are offering personalized PINAC press passes with your name and photo for a donation of at least $100. We have also introduced a new PINAC hoodie into our merchandise line-up.

But even if you can’t afford to donate, you can still help the cause by sharing our content and spreading the word that we are taking this police accountability movement to another level.

For now, please take a look through the site and let us know what you think. There is still much work to be done. Many of the older articles lack photos but we have the photos and will replace them before the end of the year.  It’s a monumentous task because there are more than 5,000 photos and it must all be done manually but we’re happy having all our content under our control.

We were also able to integrate the database from the earliest blogging days in 2007 when PINAC was hosted on a WordPress site (rather than self-hosted) which had been removed during a previous migration about ten years ago.

Some of you longtime readers may remember those early days when PINAC had a mission to teach the world that photography was not a crime during a time when it was viewed as a crime. Now we’re just expanding on that mission.

Last Thursday marked 14 years since I launched Photography is Not a Crime as a one-man blog on WordPress after having been beaten and arrested two months earlier by Miami police for photographing them against their wishes in a story I’ve told countless times over the years.

Today marks PINAC’s return to WordPress after a three-year stint on the Maven, a publishing company that was paying us a percentage of ad revenue from our stories each month until late last year when they replaced the PINAC-friendly CEO with one not too fond of PINAC. They then restructured our contract, blaming it on COVID, and as a result, we have not received a single payment since December despite the fact they continued running ads in our stories.

It was a minor setback for a site that has experienced multiple setbacks over the years only to remain resilient and relevant while dozens of other news sites have come and gone or sunken into obscurity. But the lesson here is that PINAC needs to remain as independent as possible in order to survive another 14 years which is why I am happy to be back on WordPress and look forward to keeping the site updated with the latest stories and videos.

Part of the plan is to launch a weekly podcast show highlighting the most important stories of the week as well as featuring guests, including victims of police abuse, attorneys, activists and anybody else relevant to the issue of criminal justice reform, including cops, judges and prosecutors if they are brave enough to come on the show.

The podcast will also help us build the national database of bad cops we announced in January by teaching listeners how to obtain Brady list public records from their local prosecutors office. These are lists that contain the names of cops with integrity issues, cops who lie and abuse and destroy innocent lives, an idea we have been discussing for years but never made an attempt to implement until now.

We will also pay tribute to the “Worst Cop of the Week” since cops place so much value in their participation awards, dedicating a special page for them on the site with their photos to ensure they receive the recognition they deserve.

I will host the podcast show from my bedroom closet which I am converting into a soundproof studio to ensure professional quality audio and not piss off my neighbors with my rantings about cops as I live in a condo with thin walls so it may take a few weeks before I launch it.

But I have several people lined up who have agreed to be interviewed, including a man who spent years in prison based on the lying testimony of a Brady list cop who was protected by prosecutors. There are many more like him who will be interviewed as the show progresses. We will open people’s eyes to the truth.

The goal it to focus more on education rather than just information because the country is finally accepting the fact we have a serious issue with police abuse so we need to figure out what to do about it. Newly elected President Joe Biden is promising criminal justice reform but we must never trust politicians in these matters because deep down they are afraid of the cops and will bow down to their manipulative intimidation tactics as they have done throughout history.

The only reason Biden is even talking about this issue is because a 17-year-old girl named Darnella Frazier knew her rights and was not afraid to exercise them when she recorded Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin planting a knee on George Floyd’s neck for almost ten minutes on March 25, 2020, igniting what was already a growing movement against police abuse in this country.

And the only reason Frazier knew her rights was because of sites like PINAC and the ones that followed that educated people on their right to record at a time when the government was trying to deny us those rights. Many of us fought hard for those rights and it paid off even though people are still getting arrested for recording, just not as often as before.

Now we need to take it a step further and teach citizens how to obtain public records from the local government agencies, especially those records they tend to keep secret like the Brady list because these are the criminal cops that give all cops a bad name. The ACLU describes these cops as having “histories of falsifying reports, fabricating or tampering with evidence, lying on the witness stand, coercing witnesses, brutalizing people, accruing misconduct lawsuits or complaints, blatant racism, and more.”

The origin of PINAC

It was a much different world when I launched PINAC on April 28, 2007 because the country was still enamored with police under the “9/11 changed everything” spell which enabled cops to harass and threaten photographers for taking photos in public while receiving heroic praise from a clueless public for keeping them safe from potential terrorists with professional-looking cameras.

I was a 38-year-old journalist who had spent much of the prior decade covering the cop beat for various newspapers in New Mexico, California and Arizona, so I had a much more cynical view of police, having had my share of run-ins and clashes with cops for taking photos and asking hard questions or for just reporting the truth based on public records.

As a wordsmith with an attitude, I was not afraid to stand up to them, especially when the truth was on my side, but they considered me an asshole and would complain to my editors who would then tell me I have to write more positive stories to balance all the negative stories which were accurate just not “fair” in the eyes of police.

PINAC became an unfiltered adaptation of the newspaper cop beat I had worked for years but at the national instead of the local level, no longer watered down by cop-adoring editors to maintain the institutional line of bullshit. I had my share of haters in the beginning, many of them cops, as well as doubters. But the doubters turned into believers and the cops rarely comment anymore because their intimidation tactics fail on the internet.

And the corporate media that used to criticize PINAC for not being “objective” are now reporting on these stories with much more honesty than before when they would resort to the tired-old cliche of a “few bad apples” which is a lie produced by the Police PR Spin Machine but regurgitated by the media to maintain access to public information under the pretense of objectivity.

The truth it, it is the culture of policing that is corrupt and broken and needs to be changed because it is an institution that preys on the poor and powerless. A profession that attracts narcissists, bullies, control freaks, rapists and GI Joe Wannabes in addition to genuine people who want to do good for the community but it is the former who get promoted while the latter either quit or become apathetic.

A system that is more about controlling the public than about public safety that produces paranoid, violent officers with zero emotional intelligence who have been manipulated to believe they are heroes and trained to believe every citizen is a possible enemy combatant out to kill them whether it be with a phone, comb or remote control which are all possible weapons in the eyes of cops and have led to innocent people getting killed.

The culture of corruption extends to the prosecutors and judges who many times are in systemic cahoots with the cops in supporting their false narrative over actual evidence as I discovered after my arrest for taking photos on February 20, 2007.

The cops claimed I had been standing in the middle of a busy street taking photos while blocking traffic so they were only looking out for my “safety.” But my photos showed they were on the ones standing in the street and I was standing on the sidewalk. They ended up bashing my head into that sidewalk and charging me with nine fabricated misdemeanors, figuring that would teach me to never photograph cops again but it just made me more defiant.

I did not know it at the time but the judge was a former police union attorney and the prosecutor was the son of a local police chief so they were both appalled that I would write negatively about cops on a blog. It just wasn’t being done at the time.

On the day of my trial on June 16, 2008, the prosecutor had printed out more than a year’s worth of stories I had written on PINAC which he claim proved I was biased against the cops and therefore should be convicted, telling the jury I got myself purposely arrested for the sole purpose of launching a blog.

He was especially fixated on an article I wrote about a week after launching the blog, comparing the LAPD to nazis after they were caught on video beating journalists and children while dressed in indistinguishable riot gear. The jury acquitted me of most of the charges but convicted me of resisting arrest which is Florida’s contempt of cop law. One juror told the bailiff they did not like my attitude.

But I appealed and had the conviction reversed because I was able to prove the judge not only allowed improper evidence against me in trial, mainly the contents of my blog which were written after I had been arrested and therefore irrelevant to my actions before my arrest, but he also issued me a harsher sentence than recommended by the prosecutor because I did not show “remorse” to the cops for photographing them. I still ended up serving a year probation, attending anger management classes and doing community hours.

I was arrested an additional three more times for taking photos over the next seven years and the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office insisted on taking each case to trial, believing they had enough evidence to prove my guilt or at least get me to agree to a plea deal, only to fail each time. Suckers.

The same Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office refused to indict a South Florida cop on rape charges despite multiple women filing complaints against him, claiming it did not have enough evidence to persuade a jury to convict the cop. It was only when the FBI stepped in and arrested Hialeah police officer Jesus “Jesse” Menocal that he was stripped of his badge and is now facing life in prison.

So it’s time to start holding the prosecutors accountable as well as the cops because they are a big part of the problem which we plan to do with our Brady list project.

But this is going to be a long-term project which will only succeed with the support of the readers, so if you would like to support our mission, click here to make a tax-deductible donation or on the icon below to make a PayPal or debit/credit card donation.