Original Posted on November 27, 2011 at OpEd News
submitted by Ritt Goldstein
article/Interview by Joan Brunwasser
My guest today is Ritt Goldstein, investigative political journalist Ritt Goldstein. Welcome to OpEdNews, Ritt. You’ve been in Sweden since 1997. How did you end up over there?
Ritt at Swedish Parliament, 2008
EXCERPTS FROM INTERVIEW:
How I got here is a rather long story, but we can try the ‘CliffNotes’ version.
Events began for me in Norwalk, Connecticut, during the 1980s. I was a Democratic committeeman and justice of the peace then, and I did things for people in the area that needed help with the city. These were simple things, things like getting a municipal waste basket placed somewhere, speaking to state authorities about putting a traffic light on a corner, things like that.
I also began to hear of problems with the police, and read about some in the local paper as well. Like many who had come of age in the sixties, I was also aware that things were not always what they should be. One thing led to another, and I found myself involved in police accountability questions.
The local police often made such questions tough to ignore, i.e., they used a young boy as a human shield, they shot a man with a shotgun who was on the ground and helpless; they had a raid where virtually all the officers involved wore ski masks and had their badges hidden, and then took those they ‘collared’ to a waterfront warehouse for ‘questioning’, not police headquarters. Of course, they also vandalized the Mayor’s home when he challenged them, doing so in his role as head of the city’s police commission. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmdqiUE7Gfw
I faced harassment too, and one day was arrested when two people unknown to me came to my door and attacked me. I called the police, but I was arrested, though the case was eventually dropped.
As you might gather, there were very real police issues in Connecticut, and I would be surprised if they had not worsened since 9-11.
I left Norwalk in the early 1990s, moving to Danbury, and left police questions alone until another Norwalk incident occurred, a bad one involving the death of a young man there. I then picked things up again, was soon being harassed again, but formed a coalition to address misconduct and began writing legislation to provide redress from it.
One thing led to another, and my idea for a ‘State Level’ elected Civilian Police Oversight Board began picking up support. My idea was to have an elected commissioner from every county in the State, and two commissioners plus staff counsel would hear cases of alleged misconduct; but, with innovations no one had earlier considered.
My idea was to go after not the alleged perpetrator of an act against an individual, but rather those in authority over that officer which failed to hold the officer accountable. The penalties were not criminal but job related – do your job, or lose your job.
By forcing the internal affairs and command and control people to actually do what they were supposed to or be fired, not only was the actual act of misconduct addressed, but the whole accountability structure which allowed such acts to happen. Further, by having the Board at the state level, and with no commissioner able to sit on a case involving their own county, an ‘objective distance’ from the ‘local considerations’ that allowed misconduct to continue would end a ‘level of bias’, and hopefully the misconduct as well.
Folks thought it a brilliant and effective idea, and so one might say the bad guys that liked things as they were eliminated me. I was attacked sometimes over twenty times a day with pepper spray, my home and office were trashed with it, the steering unscrewed on my car, and since I had already received an anonymous explicit death threat and been shot at, it seemed I had a real problem.
Unfortunately, rights groups, the US Justice Department, and almost everyone I could think of that should have helped didn’t. Some did, but it wasn’t enough, and I had a choice – flee or die.
On July 4th, 1997, I landed at Arlanda Airport in Stockholm.
I knew I had to flee the US, as I was attacked in assorted states — a private detective found my car emitting tracking signals — and Sweden’s Immigration Minister had recently told the media that the country would give equal consideration to all political asylum applications, no matter from where they came. Sweden is also a country where English is widely spoken, and it has a history with taking in Americans dating from the sixties. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize what the Minister said wasn’t quite accurate, and I spent nine years here living underground before being given permanent residency, simultaneously being thrust into a highly toxic apartment, but that’s another question.
Wow. This has so much relevance to what’s going on now, Ritt. You sure stirred up a hornet’s nest! I’m sure the powers that be were delighted when you left town. So you arrived in Sweden and got semi, quasi political asylum. So what do you mean exactly when you say that you had to live underground for nine years? Weren’t you safe over there?
