by Gospa News Editorial Staff
To best honor the extraordinary and radiant Christian life of Padre Pio of Pietrelcina—whose feast day is celebrated today, September, 23, in the Catholic Church’s liturgical calendar—Gospa News presents three exceptional video documentaries of varying lengths and some exclusive reports.
Gospa News is an Italian and international news outlet focused on Christian —and specifically Marian—information; the name “Gospa” (used in Medjugorje, the site of the Queen of Peace’s apparitions) signifies “Our Holy Lady.”
The Italian articles linked below can easily be read in English and other languages by activating the automatic translation feature via the flags at the top left.
Enjoy the videos and articles, courtesy of Gospa News—founded by Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio, who holds deep devotion and gratitude toward the Friar of the Stigmata.
3 EXCEPTIONALS VIDEOS ON PADRE PIO DA PIETRELCINA
4 EXCLUSIVES REPORTS ON SAINT PIO
St. Pio’ Prophecy on Christians’ homelands, NWO Rockefeller’s Abortion law and Masons war
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by Nicolas Hulscher, MPH – originally published on his Substack Focal Points
All links to previopus Gospa News post or videos have deen added in the aftermath by virtue of the ties with topic covered
A coalition of 168 physicians, scientists, researchers, health-freedom advocates, and public figures—collectively representing over 63 million followers across social media—has just sent an open letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Donald Trump calling for decisive action on the mRNA platform.
The effort was coordinated by Dr. Mary Talley Bowden and includes signatories such as Dr. Peter McCullough, Louisiana Deputy Surgeon General Dr. Sean Troxclair, U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie, former U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and myself. The full list is at the bottom of this article.
The letter argues that current federal actions have fallen short of the health-freedom movement’s stated goals and calls for the removal of mRNA/gene-therapy-derived vaccine technologies, termination of the COVID-19 PREP Act declaration, repeal of the PREP Act, an end to pharmaceutical direct-to-consumer advertising, and reforms addressing conflicts of interest and coercive healthcare incentives.
Below is the full open letter and list of signatories:
Dear Secretary Kennedy and President Trump,
As influential leaders within the MAHA and health freedom movements, we are writing to object to policies under your oversight related to the mRNA platform, and to call you to act on our policy goals.
While the centerpiece of the MAHA and health freedom agenda has been removal of mRNA shots, you have failed to take decisive action on this front despite overwhelming credible evidence to the harm of this technology. Instead, your policies related to mRNA technology are neutered and self-defeating, putting pregnant women and children at risk, misleading parents and eroding their rights, and failing to help those harmed by vaccines.
If you continue to ignore our central issue of removing the mRNA platform, the MAHA and health freedom movements will withdraw their support of you, and you will face the political consequences.
We are writing to express deep concerns about policies emerging from HHS, the CDC, and the FDA. Specifically, we object to:
Removal of the mRNA platform from the market remains one of the central goals of the grassroots medical freedom movement.
Millions of concerned citizens set aside partisan differences and identities to support the historic MAGA/MAHA alliance. Instead of decisive policy actions on these core issues, we see distractions, linguistic misdirections, and watered-down announcements that avoid serious action on the deadly mRNA injections.
Despite the Executive Order from August 10, 2026 reducing the recommended vaccination schedule from 17 to 11 types of vaccines, it simultaneously elevates pneumococcal and HPV shots into the “universal core recommendation”.
The elevation of HPV shots to universal core recommendation is surprising given Merck just reached a $50M settlement¹ with 200 plaintiffs who alleged the Gardasil HPV vaccine caused autoimmunity. In addition, the EO promotes the unconstitutional notion of “shared” decision making between the federal government and parents with respect to the mRNA and some additional vaccines. This Orwellian language does not belong in a free society.
We do not need more data to determine whether mRNA products should be removed from the market. The data are already in from multiple credible sources, including over 4,550 peer reviewed publications, the Pfizer documents released through Aaron Siri’s lawsuits, the VAERS and V-safe datasets, and data from foreign governments.
These sources document catastrophic levels of deaths and serious injuries from the mRNA injections, as well as reproductive harm, including approximately 400% increase in miscarriage rates.
You stated that the shots were removed from the CDC recommendation for pregnant women. Yet pregnancy remains listed as a “high-risk” health category in the revised FDA policy for mRNA shots. It is especially troubling that the new versions of these injections are recommended for all pregnant women, even though this platform has never been tested and proven safe in pregnancy.
Pregnant women have not been made safer by this linguistic shift. Removing the mRNA injection from CDC recommendations for pregnant women and healthy children is meaningless when the American Academy of Pediatrics, to which the vast majority of pediatricians belong, still recommends all babies get a mRNA shot.
Further, the CDC still recommends the shots for every child except those labeled “healthy.” Those outside of this category include children with minor ailments such as an acute illness or allergies. The risks of these shots far outweigh any benefits, particularly given they now carry an FDA warning for increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis in children.
Parental choice is not realistic when parents are not getting informed consent on the true risks of these products. CDC language appears to erode parental rights. Even for healthy children, the CDC frames the decision as one that parents must “share” with healthcare providers—including pharmacists who lack authority to treat patients. By treating the decision to inject a child with mRNA as a “shared decision,” while treating routine injections as the default, a dangerous legal precedent is being set that assigns powers to the federal government that have historically belonged solely to parents.
The CDC’s COVID shot policy claims to be evidence-based. However, no evidence has been provided—and none exists to our knowledge—showing that the categories of people labeled “vulnerable” under this policy would benefit from mRNA injections.
A formal Citizen Petition authored by Children’s Health Defense, asking to properly relabel the COVID-19 vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna as “EUA Countermeasures” is pending with HHS since December 8, 2025.
Under the PREP Act declaration for COVID emergency, the products that went on the market de novo as “EUA Countermeasures” – a non-investigational legal status – cannot be declared “safe, effective and fully approved by the FDA” without complying with the investigational pharmaceutical product requirements under the applicable federal law.
The PREP Act was extended by the Biden Administration in December 2024 and upheld by you to date to last until December 31, 2029. The COVID-19 injections never underwent legally valid investigational assessment for safety and efficacy, being subject to only emergency distribution requirements, since the PREP Act precludes use of bio-chemical compounds in clinical investigation.
This Petition gathered a record number of public comments in support of it (over 104,000). Your failure to respond to this Petition speaks louder than any placating HHS / Trump Administration messaging on vaccine schedule issues in advance of the midterm elections.
Conflating clearly established risks with an automatically assumed benefit from a product that remains a poorly regulated, liability-free EUA Countermeasure under the PREP Act emergency declaration defies both scientific reason and common sense.
We did not fight to place you in positions of leadership so that our clearly stated policy goals would suffer a “bait and switch” that rebranded the grassroots powerful objection to the damaging mRNA platform as a concern about coloring agents in Skittles.
Health freedom is not the possession of Secretary Kennedy or his advisors. Health freedom agenda arose from the voices of millions of those impacted by the harmful government policies during the pandemic.
The MAHA/health freedom vote was a historic game-changer. Neither Republicans nor the Democrats could have prevailed without this critical swing vote.
Health freedom voters can and will walk away if we continue to see inaction—or condescending non-policy—on our core issues.
If you continue to ignore the centerpiece of our policy agenda—removing all mRNA products covered by PREP Act emergency declarations entirely from the market—you will pay a political price. We will run our own candidates at the state level, and we will support other challengers and sponsors who share our values and advance our draft bills at the federal level for the midterms and for 2028.
We ask you to deliver our actual policy goals in the near term, or face the political consequences:
by Nicolas Hulscher, MPH – originally published on his Substack Focal Points
Epidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough Foundation
Support our mission: mcculloughfnd.org
Please consider following both the McCullough Foundation and my personal account on X (formerly Twitter) for further content.
The names below with a link are those for which we have written an article on Gospa News regarding vaccines.
Deborah Adams, RN
Sally Adams, DVM
Adnan Al-Daini, PhD
Arden Andersen, DO, MSPH, PhD
Lars Bo Appel, World Council for Health
Robert Apter, MD
Anthony Arnott, MD
Raphael Balbino, MD
Clayton Baker, MD, Brownstone Institute Senior Scholar, Global Wellness Forum Council
Bradley Banko, MD
Richard Bartlett, MD, Texas HHS Meritorious Service Award, Texas Health Disparities Taskforce
Nancy Benedict, RN
Laura Bevis, DNP, APRN
Kimberly Biss, MD, FACOG, Senior OBGYN Fellow for Independent Medical Alliance
Marsha Blakeslee, DO, Personaldocs LLC
Mary Talley Bowden, MD, Americans for Health Freedom, Independent Medical Alliance, VSRF
Avery B. Brinkley, Jr., MD
Mark Brody, MD
Margaret Aranda Brown, MD, PhD, CTP
Lisa Bryhn, MD
Dariusz Brzezinkski, DC
Ora Burstein, MD
David B. Collum, PhD.
Carrie S Cannon, MD, MS, CTP
Buckley Carlson
Tucker Carlson
Renee Carlson, BSN, RN (ret)
Lora Chamberlain, DO
Pete Chambers, LTC (Ret), DO
Geeta Chougule, World Council for Health
Liz Churchill, Medical Freedom Activist
Ryan Cole, MD, Head of Medical and Scientifc Affairs, Independent Medical Alliance
Esther N. Cooper, MD, Texas Medical Do No Harm Physician Activist
Jean Coyer, NP
Greta Crawford, Survivor of COVID Hospital Protocol, Founder of ProtocolKills.com
Michelle A. Cretella, MD, Past Executive Director of the American College of Pediatricians
Barbara A. Crothers, DO, FCAP, FMCP-M
John Davidson, Director, “Epidemic of Fraud”
Hannah Davis, BSN, RN
John Day, MD
Xylie Desiree, Founder, Interest of Justice
Maryanne Demasi, PhD, Investigative Journalist
Jan DeNapoli, MHS, PA (ret)
Jimmy Dore, Host of “The Jimmy Dore Show”
Jeff Dornik, CEO Pickax
William Campbell Douglass III, MD, MS – DutyToDissent.Substack.com
Edward Dowd, Phinance Technologies
Henry Ealy, Energetic Health Institute
Richard Edgerly, MD
Charles Fall, Green Liberty Caucus
Brian Festa, Esq.
Harry Fisher, EMT, Medical Freedom Activist
Catherine Austin Fitts, The Solari Report
Christina Flaming, CRNA, DNAP
Jon Fleetwood, Investigative Journalist
Kim D. Folse, DC
Tracy Forker, RN
Jeremy Friedman, Esq.
Lynn Fynn, MD, Global COVID Summit, Independent Medical Alliance
Suzanne Gazda, MD
Eleftherios Gkioulekas, PhD, Professor
Simon Goddek, PhD
Russ Gonnering, MD, MMM, FACS, CPHQ(ret)
Dana H. Granberg-Nill, MD, COO Goldcare.com
Marjorie Taylor Greene, Former U.S. Representative – GA
Erin Greer, MD
Arthur Grinstead, MD
Joseph Guarino, MD, Piedmont Occupational and Urgent Care
Meredith Harwell, DC
Sierra Hamm, RN, BSN, World Council for Health
Dan Hartman, Father of COVID vaccine victim Sean Hartman
Thomas F. Haviland, 2022-2025 “Worldwide Embalmer Blood Clot Survey”
Mary Helms, Health Freedom Advocate
Margaret Hertel, Naturalist
Eric Hensen, DO
Jennifer Hibberd, DDS, FRCDC, Global COVID Summit
Trisha Hope, National Delegate, Texas
Lyndsey Nicole House, RN
Nicolas Hulscher, MPH, Epidemiologist, McCullough Foundation
John Humiston, MD
Stella Immanuel, MD, Faith and Freedom
Ehsan Joader, Medical Freedom Advocate
Daniel Jones, APRN, FNP-C
Jack Jasper, The Paradox Press
Bobbie Jo Jenkins, RN
Sayer Ji, Founder Restore the 1st and Greenmedinfo, Chairman Global Wellness Forum
Shannon Joy, The Shannon Joy Show
Laura Kasner, “Worldwide Embalmer Blood Clot Survey”
Tamra Kelly, MSN, CRNA, APRN
Sandy Kim, MD
Stacy Kiraly-Duran, RPh
Steven Kirsch, Founder, Vaccine Safety Research Foundation
Deanna Kline, AGNP-C, MSN, RN, Author, Substack NPTru4u
Jack Kruse, MD, Kruse Longevity Centers, Inc
Brian Kung, MD
Karl Lambert, ARNP
Seth Landry, FNP
Sasha Latypova, Independent Investigator and Writer, “Due Diligence and Art”
Tess Lawrie, PhD, Founder, World Council for Health
Levi Leatherberry, National Organizer for Medical Freedom
Lionel Lee, DO, FACOEP
Susan Lee, MD
Debbie Lerman, The Brownstone Institute
Maria Liljeblad, World Council for Health
Katarina Lindley, DO FACOFP, Americans for Health Freedom, Independent Medical Alliance
John Littell, MD
Lisa Lopes, World Council for Health
Donna Lowery, RN
Aseem Malhotra, MD
Robert Malone, MD, MS, pioneer of mRNA technology
Jill G. Malone, PhD
Leslie Manookian, Founder/President, Health Freedom Defense Fund
Ben Marble, MD, Nobel Peace Prize Nominee
Allen Martin, Parent of COVID vaccine victim Trista Martin
Taylor Martin, Parent of COVID vaccine victim Trista Martin
Thomas Massie, U.S. Representative – KY
Jonathan Maxham, DO
Kevin McCairn, PhD, Synpatek Labs
Culpepper McCuller, MD, Informed Health Initiative
Peter McCullough, MD, President, McCullough Foundation
Shane Mekeland, Rep., MN (R) District 27A
Reni Moon, MD
Kirk Moore, MD, Ex-Defendant, Freedom Surgical and Aesthetics
Cindy L. Morris, MD, World Council for Health
David Nelson, PhD
MyHuong Nguyễn, MD
Hanna Parikka, MSc, Biotechnology
Gayln Perry, MD
Ivan Raiklin, Esq., Green Beret Lieutenant Colonel (ret)
Tom Renz, Esq.
Charles Rixey, MA, MBA, Edogawa Hospital & D.R.A.S.T.I.C.
Brian Roberts, Americans for Health Freedom
Jessica Rose, The Brownstone Institute
Jeanne A. Rungby, MD, World Council for Health
Molly Rutherford, MD, Americans for Health Freedom
Erica Samp, Vaccine-injured mother from Iowa with Federal lawsuit pending
Andy Schmitt, The Paradox Press
Carl Scott, PhD, Professor, Author, Dissident Conservative Substack
Cynthia Shoemake, RN
Michelle Simpson, RN
Brad Skistimas, Five Times August
Patrick Slater, MD, Austin Ear Clinic
Laurel Starr, MD
Daniel Stock, MD, Senior Fellow, Independent Medical Alliance
Mary Kelly Sutton, MD
Edward Szall, CEO, TLM Global, Producer, Died Suddenly
James Thorp, MD, ObGYN – Maternal Fetal Medicine
Mark Trozzi, MD, World Council for Health
Sean Troxclair, MD, Deputy Surgeon General of Louisiana
Tamella Trulson, MD
Jeffrey Tucker, The Brownstone Institute
Dan Twelmeyer, Medical Freedom Activist, Iowa
Suzanne Vandenhul, MD
Kenneth G. Varley, MD, FRCPC, BSc, MSc, MBA
Rajeev Varma, MD
Joe Varon, MD, President and CMO, Independent Medical Alliance
David Vella, MD, CovidAccountabilityNow.org
Denise Verni, PA
Kelly Victory, MD, President, Victory Health
Joel Wallskog, MD, Co-Chair React19
Bret Weinstein, PhD
Sheri Weinstein, MD, Founder, Health and Freedom Forum
Marcus Wheeler, MD
Lauren Witzke
Gizela Wolan-Szymanski, RN
Katherine Zbodula, NP
Andrew Zywiec, MD, Co-founder, CEO Ekklesia Research Group
In July 1952, reports of a railway disaster in Poland began circulating in the Western media. According to these reports, a Soviet military train derailed near the Polish town of Rzepin on 9 July 1952, killing around 160 Red Army soldiers who were returning to the Soviet Union. The train reportedly left the tracks between Rzepin and Boczów and plunged into a lake. What makes this alleged accident interesting is the uncertainty surrounding whether it actually happened.
The accident as reported by various western newspapers. Credit. Newspaper.com
On 19 November 2025, Indian police raided the ‘Kashmir Times’ in Jammu. They said they were on an “anti-terror” operation. The offices had been shut since 2022 and were in dilapidated condition, the equipment largely defunct. Yet, the police claimed to have recovered a “pistol and live AK-47 cartridges.”
Since 2018, only five journalists have faced cases under India’s draconian anti-terror Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. Trials rarely start, leaving journalists in a state of perpetual purgatory, even if they are out on bail under onerous conditions.
Before the police came charging into these unused offices last year, the ‘Kashmir Times’, founded by my father in 1954, had long suffered sustained persecution – the seizure of records, of equipment, the harassment of staffers, the use of social media to spread slurs, trumped up charges of tax evasion and the embedding of spies.
The first ever copies of Kashmir Times, initially a weekly, were seized by the government. In 1983, my father survived a murderous assault with serious injuries inflicted by a Hindu nationalist mob. I joined the newspaper in 1989, as the armed militancy, the ‘insurgency’ against the Indian state, became widespread, and experienced firsthand the struggle to report the news accurately and truthfully. The government would frequently withdraw its advertising, which was the main source of funding for most news outlets. We were besieged on several fronts, facing down the state, militants and aggressive Hindu nationalists.
In 2019, as Indian prime minister Narendra Modi began his second term in office, his government removed the special autonomous status granted to Jammu and Kashmir and protections that had existed for nearly 70 years. Once a state, Jammu and Kashmir was split into two federally governed territories. The Indian-administered part of Kashmir – the subject of several military conflicts between India and Pakistan, with both countries claiming the entire disputed territory while controlling a portion of it – had effectively become a police state and control of the media was a critical component of this transformation.
As Executive Editor of the ‘Kashmir Times’, one of the oldest newspapers in the region and the largest, with four editions, I petitioned India’s Supreme Court against the six-month-long internet shutdown that the Modi government imposed in 2019. But by 2020, three editions of the ‘Kashmir Times’ had shut down and the fourth only limped along, a once daily newspaper that was now only occasionally published. By February 2022, even this edition was shut down. I left India with my husband Prabodh Jamwal, the editor of the ‘Kashmir Times’, and revived it as a digital newsroom in exile in the United States in November 2023.
But, as the so-called terror investigation and the mysterious discovery of weapons in our long disused office in 2025 showed, the ‘Kashmir Times’ remained a thorn in the side of the Modi government. The Indian prime minister has frequently presented India on the international stage as the “mother of democracy” and the “Vishwaguru”, a moral exemplar and teacher to the world. Just last week, between September 12 and 13, Delhi hosted Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian as part of the annual BRICS meeting, the global group founded initially by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (hence the acronym) that is increasingly being presented as an alternative power centre to the American-led Western alliance. For an India seeking to portray itself as not just an emerging superpower but as a democratic force, it is vital that Kashmir remain repressed, hidden away from global scrutiny.
It’s why, even as a newsroom in exile, we continue to be pursued by an Indian government seeking to tarnish our credibility, to deny us the right to report on Kashmir. We are being subject to a vendetta and it represents what has happened to journalism in Kashmir. Journalists have been silenced by the Modi government, Kashmiri voices strangled, and the local media industry deliberately destroyed.
What is happening to journalism in Kashmir is a harbinger of what lies ahead for the rest of India.
Geeta Seshu of Free Speech Collective, which monitors press freedoms in India, argues that Kashmir is a laboratory where every strategy of media suppression is tested and perfected for use elsewhere. India, which once had a noisy, argumentative press, now ranks at a lowly 157 out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index. Reporters Without Borders, which compiles the ranking, says “press freedom is in crisis” in Modi’s India.
The 2023 Digital Personal Data Protection Act provided a “dangerous framework for expansion of surveillance and censorship” across the country. It empowered the government to demand data from any entity, including journalists, effectively requiring them to reveal their sources. The amendments to the 2020 Information Technology Rules already burden intermediaries with harsh obligations and have been used to arrest journalists, block websites and compel social media platforms to restrict content. Recently, Instagram restricted posts about reports of Kashmiris shot by Indian security forces using pellet guns on unarmed protestors.
Seshu’s fear that what happens in Kashmir will be replicated in the Indian mainland has largely been borne out. For example, in 2023, nearly 50 journalists associated with the portal ‘NewsClick’ – some only vaguely – were subject to arrests and interrogations. Many had their devices seized without due process. Their alleged crimes were essentially guilt by association, charges manufactured not from evidence but from a, frankly, lazy piece of journalism published in the ‘New York Times’ about NewsClick’s funding. The charges were eventually quashed by an Indian court.
Such court rulings are less likely in Kashmir. As a Kashmiri journalist based in Delhi says, “unlike the rest of India, Kashmir is a police state, and state control requires any independent journalism to be shut down.”
In Kashmir, the Indian state has engineered a sophisticated edifice of control through securitization, surveillance and interrogation. It is invisible, intangible, and all-pervasive, a model that extracts quiet surrender and obedience. Unlike the targeted killings of journalists in Gaza, in Kashmir the control of information is seamlessly embedded in everyday life, requiring no enforcement, no traces of brutality. The journalists are essentially cowed into submission.
It began with the world’s longest internet shutdown – a complete lockdown for six months and a partial one for another year. What the shutdown created, despite a court verdict restoring communications, was fear among journalists compelled to work out of a government-surveilled computer facility, and then a perpetuation of that fear through consistent localized and temporary digital shutdowns. So commonplace are these shutdowns that they no longer warrant reporting or commentary.
In June 2020, the Modi government introduced a 53-page document called ‘J&K's Media Policy’ which gave the authorities sweeping powers to monitor, judge, and punish journalists, branding critical reporting as “fake news”, “unethical”, or “anti-national”. The authorities would also routinely remove government advertising from cash-strapped outlets and provide accreditation only to journalists deemed loyal, thus turning bureaucrats into arbiters of what constitutes news and who gets to report it. The effect is chilling.
And then there’s the monitoring of communications.
“I can’t say if they’re using Pegasus or some other spyware or technology,” a journalist told me about being interrogated over emails sent to an editor, “but they knew everything about our conversations.” In a 2021 leak, it turned out the Indian government was using Pegasus to spy on at least 40 Indian journalists, only one of who was Kashmiri.
But, a Kashmiri journalist says, “officials have told us ‘nothing in Kashmir is end-to-end encrypted’ and digital activity is clearly being constantly monitored.” No Kashmiri journalist I spoke to for this story, including those who contribute to the ‘Kashmir Times’, have the encrypted messaging Signal app, used worldwide by journalists, on their phones. Devices are routinely checked when journalists are summoned to police stations in Kashmir for questioning. Some said their devices were returned after being tampered with. “You face humiliation and beatings for using Signal and VPNs,” many journalists said. “You can only get away with it if you’re not on their radar,” said one.
In November 2025, the Indian government issued a directive insisting on verifying the “bona fides” of journalists working in Jammu and Kashmir, and the police followed up by requiring journalists to part with personal information including biometrics and bank statements. In January this year, senior journalist Basharat Masood of The Indian Express spent seven hours at a Srinagar police station, then was summoned for three more days and told to sign a bond promising not to “repeat his mistake” – for reporting on the surveillance of mosquea surveillance, even as officials had already admitted to large-scale data collection and verification.
Police also surveil Kashmiris through the use of drone cameras, a network of 1,000 electronic cameras installed at major traffic junctions, and through unrestricted access to people’s social media activity across platforms ostensibly to track anti-India activity. During an illegal “Census 2024” drive, the police collected residents' personal data and GPS-tagged coordinates of homes. And the soon-to-be-rolled-out Jammu and Kashmir-specific digital identity cards that collects the data of entire households, purportedly to ensure the smooth rollout of welfare schemes, has also sparked local anxieties.
Still, as pervasive as the surveillance is, it is journalists that find themselves in the firing line. Any critical word warrants a summons to a police station, interrogation, intimidation and even detention. This happens repeatedly, with journalists never aware of what specific “offence” might trigger a police summons. The reflex, after several such visits to police stations, is self-protection and self-censorship.
A Kashmiri journalist told me that the language the police use to summon journalists for questioning is particularly sinister. It is almost as if the police are enjoying instilling fear. “Aaj dastarkhan par aapki dawat hai”, for instance, is a typical summons. You are invited to a feast, the police say cynically, knowing a journalist is likely to be harshly questioned, even beaten.
Often, Kashmiri journalists, without notice, are placed on no-fly lists. Sanna Irshad Mattoo, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, was twice prevented from travelling abroad for exhibitions and award ceremonies, a pointed message that even international recognition offers no protection. At least twelve journalists have had their passports revoked; two of them were already abroad at the time, rendering them stateless.
The Free Speech Collective filed a Right to Information (RTI) query in March 2024 to ascertain exactly how many Kashmiris had had their passports revoked or cancelled. The plea was rejected by the government on grounds of “national security”.
As India continues to press its case as a formidable, if still rising power, citing its 7.8% growth rate over the past quarter, it continues to be defensive and secretive about Kashmir. Foreign journalists are largely barred, or at least heavily restricted, from reporting from both Indian and Pakistani-administered Kashmir. In May, last year, India and Pakistan exchanged air strikes after a terrorist attack in Indian-administered Kashmir and Modi fell out with Donald Trump over the latter’s claim to have stopped both nuclear powers from accelerating towards a disastrous war.
Despite Kashmir being a long-standing issue that merits global attention, reporting from the region has reduced to a trickle.
A Google search of Kashmir-related news floods your screen with links, but it is bulk without substance. Articles read like a log of official announcements and statements, punctuated by the occasional piece on a shrinking water body, a development project, a political tussle over a non-issue, or unemployment figures. Each report floats like a loose, individual particle suspended in air, packaged and presented as definitive. No investigation into context. No excavation of the past. No interrogation of contributing factors. A story about an alleged terrorist’s hair transplant and cosmetic dentistry, based entirely on police sources, is passed off as an investigation into Kashmiri insurgency. A superficially detailed piece on anti-encroachment drives or home demolitions will carry little beyond the grief of the displaced, or the remarks of a politician whose interest in the community begins and ends with votes. A terrorist’s hair transplant story, based on the police version, passes off as an investigation into Kashmir’s complex insurgency dynamic.
Kashmir fell off the radar a long time ago, says Free Speech Collective’s Geeta Seshu.
Even mundane stories are difficult to report. No one wants to be quoted. A university professor said he could once “talk to journalists and trust they understood the context. Now, a single sentence can be pulled out, circulated on WhatsApp, and suddenly I’m either an anti-national or a government stooge. Both sides will use the same quote to attack you differently. Why would I take that risk?”
Tarushi Aswani, an Indian journalist, told me that “a curtain has been pulled over Kashmir by silencing journalists who ask questions.” Instead, she added, “press release journalism fills the vacuum, erasing the truth about Kashmir, its history, its politics, its development, environment and aspirations.” Kashmir is no longer looking at a mirror. The lack of truthful reporting means nothing is reflected back. Instead, Kashmiris are looking into the lens of a surveillance camera.
*The eight Kashmiri journalists interviewed for this story spoke on condition of anonymity.
Aakash Hassan
Alishan Jafri
The post How Modi silenced Kashmir appeared first on Coda Story.
During the early 1860s, reports of violent robberies known as garrottings filled British newspapers. Victims were said to be attacked from behind, choked into unconsciousness, and robbed before their assailants vanished into the darkness. As sensational accounts multiplied, fear spread far beyond the actual crime scenes. Respectable citizens grew afraid to walk alone at night, politicians demanded action, and newspapers warned that London was facing a new and terrifying criminal menace.
On June 21, 1913, a tiny woman weighing barely 80 pounds climbed into an airplane over Los Angeles and prepared to do something no woman had ever done before. Suspended outside the aircraft in a small swing-like seat, Georgia Ann “Tiny” Broadwick pulled a release lever and dropped into empty space. Moments later, her parachute blossomed overhead and she drifted safely to earth. With that leap, Tiny Broadwick became the first woman to parachute from an airplane.
Yet this remarkable feat was only one chapter in her extraordinary career. A year later, during a military demonstration, she would help pioneer a technique that evolved into the modern ripcord, forever changing the way parachutists escaped from aircraft.
Broadwick ready to drop from an airplane piloted by Glenn Martin. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
On the morning of April 16, 1947, residents of Texas City, a busy industrial port on the Gulf Coast of Texas, watched smoke rise from a cargo ship moored at the docks. Fires aboard ships were not uncommon, and many people gathered along the waterfront to observe the firefighters at work. Few suspected that within minutes they would witness one of the most devastating industrial disasters in American history.
At 9:12 a.m., the French cargo vessel SS Grandcamp exploded with tremendous force. The blast shattered buildings, ignited refineries, hurled pieces of steel across miles of countryside, and killed hundreds of people. By the time the catastrophe ended, at least 581 people were dead and more than 5,000 injured. It remains the deadliest industrial accident in United States history.
A view of the port from a residential area after the 1947 Texas City Disaster. Credit: University of North Texas Libraries
Milo of Croton was the strongest man in the ancient Greek world, or so the stories say. A six-time Olympic champion, military hero, and larger-than-life celebrity, he became the subject of countless legends. Yet despite his extraordinary feats of strength, Milo is remembered today as much for the bizarre manner of his death as for his victories. According to ancient writers, the man who could carry a bull on his shoulders met his end while attempting to split a tree apart with his bare hands.
Milo of Croton, by Joseph-Benoît Suvée (1743–1807). Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Underneath the narrow streets, churches, and palaces of the Italian city of Siena lies a sprawling network of underground aqueducts that supplied water to the Tuscan city for centuries, enabling it to flourish despite a chronic lack of nearby rivers and streams. Extending for roughly 25 kilometers, the so-called Bottini constitute an ingenious hydraulic system that sustained the city from the Middle Ages until the early 20th century.
Fountain Fontebranda, its waters fed by Bottini. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Ancient history is usually told through grand things: ruined cities, royal tombs, battlefield weapons, and monuments built to make rulers look eternal. History loves the flashy stuff. Swords. Crowns. Burning cities. Mysterious tombs. Kings with dramatic beards. Paperwork? Not so much. But that is a mistake. Some of the most revealing things ever found from […]
The post 10 Boring Ancient Documents That Exposed Astonishing Secrets appeared first on Listverse.
For nearly seven decades, one of the most feared men in Rome lived an otherwise ordinary life. He sold umbrellas, attended church, and walked the narrow streets of the Borgo district near the Vatican. Yet whenever he crossed the Tiber River, Romans knew that someone was about to die.
His name was Giovanni Battista Bugatti, though history remembers him by a different name: Mastro Titta.
Across much of the world, powerful royal dynasties are things of the past. But you’d be shocked at how long some of them held power—or repeatedly regained it through cadet branches, restorations, and lines of descent. From the formidably influential Habsburg family to the French Capetians to Japan’s Imperial House, these are ten of the […]
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More than a century before Albert Einstein revolutionized physics with his theory of general relativity, and nearly two centuries before astronomers accepted the existence of black holes, an English clergyman and scientist named John Michell proposed a startling idea. In 1783, Michell suggested that some stars might possess such immense gravity that even light could not escape from them. These invisible objects, which he called "dark stars," bear a remarkable resemblance to what we now know as black holes.
Visualisation of a black hole. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman
The world is a crazy place, and it always has been. Looking back through history, there are seemingly endless stories about real-life situations, events, moments, and acts that now seem very hard to believe. But they were real, they were documented, and in many cases, they are every bit as unsettling today as they were […]
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It appears that quite a few people have been killed or brought to justice for having failed to deliver on their promise of turning ordinary metals into gold, in other words, alchemy. One was the English chemist James Price, who took his own life after his deception was exposed. Another was Georg Honauer, whose downfall ended not in disgrace alone but in a spectacular public execution.
Georg Honauer was born in Olomouc, Moravia (now in the Czech Republic), in 1572. In 1596, he entered the service of Friedrich I, Duke of Württemberg, in Stuttgart after persuading the duke that he was both a skilled goldsmith and a successful alchemist.
An etching depicting the execution of the alchemist, Georg Honauer. Credit: Science History Institute
In the first century BC, nearly two thousand years before the invention of the microscope, the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro made a remarkable observation about the cause of disease. Writing in his agricultural treatise De Re Rustica around 37 BC, Varro advised landowners to avoid building homes near swamps. His reason was unusual for the time:
There are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases.
The statement sounds astonishingly similar to the principles of germ theory. Varro described invisible living organisms too small to be seen, entering the human body and causing illness. Although he lacked any means of observing microorganisms and had no scientific evidence to support his claim, his words represent one of the closest approaches to germ theory found in the ancient world.
Wilbert L. Cooper | Longreads | August 25, 2026 | 3,848 words (14 minutes)
Excerpted from The Black Shield: An American Memoir of Family and Power by Wilbert L. Cooper. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2026 by Wilbert L. Cooper. All rights reserved.
In Wilbert L. Cooper’s new memoir, The Black Shield, he tells two intertwining stories: the history of the city’s Black Shield Police Association, one of the country’s oldest Black policing organizations, and the multigenerational narrative of his own family, embedded in the police force. Both of his parents and sister are retired Black Cleveland cops, and on his mother’s side, there’s been a Cleveland cop in the family since 1950. In this book about race, policing, and power, Cooper examines the complex duality of the Black cop, what it was like for his parents to navigate an institution that was hostile to their own community, and, ultimately, what this all has meant for him.
This excerpt combines the prologue and a chapter focused on his mother’s beginnings in Cleveland’s police department. Two individuals mentioned spearheaded legal efforts in the 1970s to diversify the department: Fred Johnson, the association’s president who led a lawsuit over the department’s discriminatory hiring and promotion practices, and Jean Clayton, a policewoman and the organization’s secretary whose parallel lawsuit disbanded the segregated Women’s Bureau and integrated women into the department. Below, Cooper recounts how his mother, Gayle, walked through the door that they opened. But it was not without a struggle.
—Cheri Lucas Rowlands
The gun was always there. I used to see it in flashes as Dad would get ready to leave the house. After he doused himself in spicy cologne and sliced a plastic comb through the waves of his jet-black Jheri curl, I would catch that 9-millimeter sliding between the small of his back and the belted waistband of his blue jeans.
Mom had her own. She kept it in her purse. One of those big leather bags, the kind they show behind the counter at Dillard’s, with shiny metal clasps and countless compartments. Her gun would be in there with red lipstick, a double-sided compact mirror, and her bulky pager. I knew the gun was there because I sensed its heft whenever I’d have to move the bag off the kitchen table to do my homework. It felt like a bowling ball in a pillowcase.
Dad used to store his 9-millimeter above the fine china, on top of the large, baby-pink Victorian-style cabinet in our dining room. One time while he was sleeping, I climbed on top of the pink-velvet-upholstered chairs to get a good look at it through the scrollwork. When I came face-to-face with the gun, I was too intimidated to actually pick it up and play with it.
It took a few moments for me to work up the gumption to run my little fingers across the raised bumps of its grip. Then I touched the ridges of the slide and the smooth, cold, hard barrel from where bullets burst. And just that alone felt crazy to me. Even in the dusty, mundane space of the cabinet, the stock-still object pulsated with wild energy. It was like petting a tiger.
Even now, it’s overwhelming for me to imagine that all that calamitous potential to take life, to inflict pain, to inspire fear, to demand subservience, to have your way with the world, to finally be the actor instead of the one who is acted upon—was right there and it was theirs.
I was 7 or 8 when I saw Dad shoot that gun. It must have been the summer, because I still remember the heavy outside air kissing my arms and legs, the suburban sunlight beaming on me. I see that light reverberating off the concrete, making vivid every blade of green grass in the yard and every goose-egg stone in the gravel strips. But I cannot hear the gunshot. I cannot tune in to the boom. All I sense is the fear, because it is so foreign. I’m still there. Standing in the driveway. Stuck and dumbfounded. Until Dad’s shouts break through, begging me to run inside before those crackers come back, commanding me to have Mom call the cops.
Have you heard of Pastor Leon McCray? The man of faith who saw two White people dumping a refrigerator on his property. When McCray tried to stop them, the duo threatened him. One of the Whites ran off to grab three more racists. McCray says that’s when they all ganged up on him. That’s when they told him that his “Black life didn’t matter.” The beating didn’t stop until McCray pulled out his gun. When the police showed up at the scene, they handcuffed McCray and put him in the back of the cruiser. His assailants laughed and waved at him as he was taken off.
But at least McCray survived. You know that many of us aren’t so lucky: The police shot and killed the father Philando Castile during a traffic stop after he told them he had a firearm. The police shot and killed the father John Crawford while he was carrying a pellet rifle inside the Walmart that retailed the damn pellet rifle. Police shot Emantic F. Bradford Jr. at a shopping mall while they were responding to a call about gunshots at the mall. Witnesses say they killed Bradford as he was trying to direct shoppers to safety.
These killings now give shape and sharpness to that immense and totalizing fear I felt in the driveway as a child. That American malice is always there anytime we try to commandeer a power that wasn’t intended for us. Black people are killed or incarcerated every day for much less than what Dad did. Simply owning a gun can put a bullseye on your back. Pulling one on a White man can turn you into a hashtag.
So why did Dad want to call 911? I know that he’d tell you it was because his gun was different from Pastor Leon’s. Dad didn’t buy it at Walmart or Bass Pro alongside camouflage galoshes and fly-fishing rods. He didn’t pick it up at a gun shop with a shooting range full of targets depicting men in turbans and hip-hop gear. He didn’t procure it across state lines at a gun show with bundles of cash and no identification or background check. And he didn’t get it off the street, with scratched-out serial numbers and bodies on it.
Dad got his gun from the City of Cleveland. That’s where Mom got hers, too. Both are tools of policing, the Cooper family business. They hold up those guns and their power to use them as symbols of our freedom in a country that will not stop killing or incarcerating Black folks. When I was a child, I never questioned that contradiction. But to become my own man in the America I inherited, I realized I’d have to try to solve the paradox of my parents.
By the time the Black Shield had forced the hand of the Cleveland Police Department in 1977, Gayle had given birth to another child—a little boy named Geoffrey. Now with three kids, she was even more entrenched in a wrathful marriage and farther away from the working world. And losing her uncle Lloyd, which felt a lot like losing a father, only made her feel that much more alone. When he died, the dream of becoming a cop and the freedom the job promised died with him.
It was at the moment that she’d almost completely resigned herself that it all came raging back. She opened up an issue of the Plain Dealer to find that people who’d taken the test with her and were lower than her on the eligibility list were being appointed to the police academy. And quickly, her despondency turned to confusion. And then her confusion turned to anger. She said to herself, “I know my number is higher than this and they’ve gone eighty past me and I’m not getting called?!” As she started to look into the issue, she found out that the city had expunged her from the eligibility list. “They were trying to lose Black folks’ stuff,” she told me. The city claimed it was because her addresses had changed and she hadn’t notified the civil service. To get back on the list, she had to go to court. “They claimed I had moved, but I owned my own home!” she said. “I told them, ‘I bought this house, I haven’t gone anywhere.’” As soon as she prevailed in her hearing, a White officer walked up to her in court. He simply said, “I’m from the academy.” He took her information. And then he said, “You will start the police academy on Monday.”
Later that same night, Fred Johnson called Gayle’s phone. It was the first time she’d ever spoken to the man. Lloyd was never big on the Shield Club, and Curtis was much closer with her younger brother, his namesake, who would join the police department five years later. Gayle didn’t have a complete idea of what the Shield Club had been up to at that point, or of how much it had shaped the situation she was walking into. Because of all the lawsuits, more than 40 percent of her classmates would be people of color and women. But the department they were entering was only 9 percent Black or Hispanic, and 2 percent women. For his part, Johnson stressed the struggle happening in the city to resist the change that Black women like Gayle represented. The academy was framed as a contentious environment controlled by people who were intent on destroying Gayle’s professional prospects and her spirit.
Despite the reforms that resulted from the Shield Club and the Women’s Law Fund cases, Gayle was still put through a series of tests, during which she could still be expunged. She had to meet with a psychiatrist, who asked her questions about her affiliations. Although this test had been revised thanks to the efforts of Fred Johnson and the Shield Club, it remained biased. As many of us conclude from a life living in this country run by White people, Gayle figured the best way to stick around was to hide herself. Her strategy was to answer every question like a White man of modest intellect.
In the 1970s, Gayle had spent a few years in the Nation of Islam. Although she never really let go of Jesus, she converted aesthetically and culturally to satisfy the whims of her second husband. She traded her hot pants for conservative flowing dresses. And instead of sweet potato pie, she started baking bean pies. When she did make a Polish Boy, she did it with beef sausage. She even traveled to Chicago once for Saviours’ Day to see the honorable Elijah Muhammad with her own eyes. But she put all that behind her when she found out that her proud Muslim husband was sleeping with a fellow “sister.” By the time she took the psych test to become a police officer, she’d gone back to straightening her hair and listening to gospel music. But some of the political knowledge she gained from the Nation, especially its perspective on America, stuck with her. She understood things differently than most—like the “riots” that happened in Hough and Glenville. She saw them as a natural reaction to the way her people had been done in this city and done in America. To her, the people who stormed the streets weren’t criminal. The crimes being committed were by the landlords renting rat-infested apartments and the Board of Education shoving kids into overcrowded schools and businesses charging a premium for rancid meat. She had a lot of ideas about these sorts of things, but none of them could feed her kids or free her from her marriage. And so she kept them to herself during her psych test.
The new hires were also required to do a complete physical examination. This was especially humiliating for Gayle. The whole ordeal was a perverse take on the idea that if women want to be in the academy, if women want to do what the men do, then they have to go through the exact same processes. For the physical exam, this meant standing around nearly nude to be ogled by their peers. “They made us stand up there in paper gowns and these guys were trying to catch glimpses at us. And they make you do stuff in the gowns so the gowns get all torn up. My breasts and everything were just hanging out,” Gayle recalled. She was so thoroughly humiliated that a fellow female in the academy came to her with some Scotch tape to try to cover her up. “They did that kind of thing because they wanted us to quit. The guys didn’t want us, their wives didn’t want us, it was terrible. They treated us like new meat, picking out which one they were going to take.”
Fred Johnson made himself available to all the Blacks in the academy because he was prepared for the city to try to find excuses to fail them. Gayle didn’t think she’d have a problem. She was voted the vice president of the academy class and consistently scored high on all of the interstitial tests. Those high scores were attained by studying alongside her new girlfriend. But when they both got good grades on a test with similar answers, they were accused of cheating and threatened with expulsion from the academy. Fred Johnson had to step in and help them prove that they’d arrived at the same answers because they’d been preparing together.
After passing the academy, but before they could be sworn in as officers, they were also required to take a qualification test administered by the State of Ohio that evaluated their skills. Cadets could fly through the academy with high marks and still get disqualified to be a police officer. Although policewomen in Cleveland had been in the academy before the 1970s, they weren’t required to take the qualification test because officers in the women’s bureau didn’t carry guns. Anticipating that they would do whatever they could to disqualify her, Gayle prepared for the test with the desperate intensity of a woman fighting for her life. “To prepare for the running test, I used to run up and down the steps whenever I’d put the kids down for nap,” she told me. To make her qualifying time, she outran some Vietnam veterans, who threw up before they crossed the finish line. The state also required people to do a series of chin-ups and push-ups and dips that demanded upper body strength that seemed to favor the male physique, but Gayle fought her way through those. When she finally had to take her shooting test, the last phase, it was 19 degrees below zero. In 1977, Cleveland was in the midst of one of its coldest winters ever. But one of the essential rules of the academy was that it never canceled or postponed qualification tests for any reason, in an effort to help simulate what it’s like to be a police officer and have to work when everyone else gets the day off. And so Gayle stood at the outdoor range with the soft skin of her red-nailed fingers sticking to the ice-cold metal of her gun, her body involuntarily shivering, hoping the icy air didn’t tank her shot.
The first night Patrolwoman Gayle Smith reported to the Fifth District of the Cleveland Division of Police in the winter of 1977, her supervisor showed her two things: the coffee machine and the broom. It was expected that she would be the shift’s glorified janitor. But she bucked back. “I did not go through all that training to do no housekeeping. I came here to be a police officer,” she remembers saying to him, surprised by her own candor. Ridiculous as it seems now, perhaps this kind of insult by her male colleagues should have been expected. After all of the efforts by the Women’s Law Fund and Jean Clayton to break down the formal barriers in the CDP, women still constituted only 2.3 percent of the police force when Gayle started. The assholes she was working with had almost no experience working alongside women as equals and little incentive to see them as such. Gayle was basically a guinea pig. Ironically, it was because of Jean Clayton, Gayle’s initial inspiration to become a lady cop, that the women’s bureau was dissolved and lady cops ceased to exist. Although Gayle had been intent on following Clayton’s path, she found herself involved in something entirely new.
While most of the male cops were unhappy with the gender integration of the department, a lot of the women officers were displeased, too. They were especially pissed at Jean Clayton and her damn lawsuit. These were women who had no interest in being partnered with men and participating in a form of policing that oriented itself around violence and punishment. There were certainly fair criticisms of the women’s bureau, from its troubling focus on purity to the fact that its diversion efforts and empathy weren’t as equally distributed to Black suspects as they were to Whites. But I wonder if the department would be less lethal and repressive today if the men on the Cleveland Police Department had become more like the women and their women’s bureau. Instead, the women became more like the men. After the women’s bureau closed, some of its important work, such as sex crimes, was shamefully ignored or mishandled. Gayle would see this firsthand. But first she needed to get out of coffee duty.
It took some convincing, but eventually Gayle got her first assignment outside the district. After roll call, she would be taken to White City Beach, a former park on Lake Erie that in the 1940s was home to attractions like Bonavita the lion trainer, along with fishing and a yacht club. After natural disasters hurt the park and desegregation saw the City of Cleveland give up on supporting community spaces shared by both Blacks and Whites, White City Beach went the way of Euclid Beach. By the 1970s, it became a dumping ground for garbage and a place where the city parked vehicles that were towed to clear the streets for snowplows or as the result of car wrecks. That year, it was overflowing with gnarled automobiles. It had been the coldest Cleveland winter of the century, complete with “superbomb” blizzards and scores of days that were more than 20 degrees below zero. There were more than one thousand cars down there at White City Beach, but not another soul in sight.
“They dropped me off at White City Beach every night and stuck me in a shell of a car that was up on bricks and cinder blocks, with a wire heater inside of it. There was no bathroom. They’d leave me there all night and they’d come back and get me in the morning. I was just down there by myself in pitch blackness and cold. Even if I had wanted to get out, I couldn’t go nowhere. If someone had tried to steal the cars down there, there is nothing I could have done about it. It was demoralizing.”
Mom told me this in the kitchen, where I’d often heard her talk about the bad early days on the job. I’m not sure whether this was the first time I was really listening, or if she was telling it differently. Usually, her stories were never this detailed and specific. It was just “racism” and “men being nasty.” Perhaps because I was taking a real interest, she started accessing parts of the story she had often left untouched in her recounting.
There is a feeling of humiliation that stings long after an event has passed. It doesn’t just hurt because of what was done, it hurts because you feel as though you had some agency in the matter. That you let it happen. When she started telling me what it was like, I could feel her own surprise at the disregard she had endured. In the zone car with White partners, she was beneath speaking to. These were men who would greet a dog if they saw it on the street, but wouldn’t say one word to her. In this sense, despite the lawsuit and the consent decree, not much had changed on the job since the late 1950s, when White officers would “throw a shoe” to avoid being paired up with Curtis and Fred Johnson.
“When they finally had two guys take me out, they put me in the back seat where a prisoner would sit. And they didn’t let me touch the radio. They were supposed to show me some things. But instead, they got out of the car and went to eat. They just left me locked in the back of that car without saying anything. I’m just beating on the door and everything.”
It wasn’t until an old, White, Catholic officer who looked like Santa Claus decided to take Gayle under his wing that she finally got to learn a bit about real policing. The rotund veteran with snow-white hair explained to Gayle the first time she got in the car with him exactly why he was willing to teach her. It wasn’t that he was pleased about working with Blacks or with women. He simply realized the futility of resistance: “If we get rid of her, they will just send another one of them down here.”
“It was crazy to have me on the job that length of time and nobody taught me nothing except what I learned in the academy,” she remembered of her time wasted on frivolous assignments. “When he took me out, the first thing he ever told me was this: He said, ‘Okay, kid, what time is it?’ I looked for my watch. He said, ‘That is the first rule. Don’t you ever take your eye off anybody. If they ask what time it is, say you don’t know or your watch is broke. But you don’t look down.’”
It was with Santa Claus that she got to see how the men handled sex crimes now that the women’s bureau was closed. The first rape call that they ever responded to together involved a White woman. The lady had walked three doors over from where she lived to bum a cigarette from her neighbor. Before she could get back home, three men had grabbed her off the street, dragged her into a car, and took turns raping her. While Gayle was wrenched by the story, calling back to her own experiences of sexual abuse, the veteran was incredulous. “He talked to that girl so bad, I felt sorry for her,” she remembered. “He asked her, ‘What were you wearing?’ ‘Why were you out at that time of night?’ ‘What did you expect was going to happen?’ It was horrible . . . I will never forget it. That girl ended up not even filing.”
It was also alongside Santa Claus that she finally proved she could be real police, like the men. The call was a robbery at a drugstore that drew several cars to the scene. The suspect was a young Black man who managed to run out the back door. To show her tenacity, Gayle took off after him ahead of the rest of the cops, moving just as she had when she was training for the department’s entrance exam, going up and down those steps. Santa, who was heavy and plodding with bad knees, couldn’t keep up as Gayle tailed this man through an alleyway. And then from behind her, a shot rang out.
When a police shooting happens, officers come together to get their story straight. Although this was an era when it was still legal for officers in Cleveland to shoot fleeing felons, all the patrolmen made sure they agreed on what took place. After they were finished, they looked over at Gayle to see if she saw it the same way they did. Forget the police academy. The offensive rape call was a pop quiz, and this shooting was the final exam of real police shit. And Gayle passed with flying colors. “After that, I started having people to work with,” she told me. “It didn’t feel good, but I had a demon behind me.”
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Wilbert L. Cooper grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. He studied journalism at Ohio University and earned a master’s degree in publishing at New York University. He has written for outlets such as The Guardian, The New York Times, The Marshall Project, and The Wall Street Journal. His Vice documentary The Cleveland Strangler was nominated for a National Magazine Award. In 2024, he was the recipient of the Richard J. Margolis Award. The Black Shield is his first book.
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