Full Disclosure | E5 The Big Lie

December 27, 2022·35 min·2 clips

Phoenix police and prosecutors fabricated an entire gang — the 'ACAB gang' — to charge 18 protesters, one facing up to 100 years in prison, using a protest chant as evidence of gang membership.

The case turns on escalation. Dave describes prosecutors treating ordinary protest objects as signs of organized violence, including umbrellas they said had been changed so they could stab officers. Then it gets stranger. The testimony also treated sharpened fingernails as possible weapons, a claim the speakers admit sounds almost comic before bringing it back to the criminal consequences. That is where the scene lands. What sounds ridiculous on its own becomes serious when a grand jury hears it next to gang comparisons and stacked charges. McBride is named directly. Dave says McBride and others repeatedly compared the group to the Bloods, Crips, and Hells Angels. The host asks what that means in practice. Dave explains that gang charges can aggravate the rest of a case and expose defendants to years in prison. One person faced extreme exposure. Because of the way the charges were stacked, Dave says one defendant could have faced 100 years in prison. The protesters were not a single bloc. Some knew one another from earlier protests, some were regular protesters, and others showed up after seeing flyers. The episode avoids flattening them into one organized force. It presents a mixed group with different levels of familiarity. The evidence does a lot of work. Photos of the umbrellas matter because they weaken the claim that the tips had been sharpened metal tips. The language matters too. Comparing protesters to notorious gangs changed the frame from a protest case to something far more punitive. The result is blunt: claims that can sound exaggerated still shaped charges, risk, and years of possible imprisonment.

As heard by us

A strange prosecution turns protest details into a fight over power, labels, and prison time.

The episode follows a protester gang case and keeps circling the same strange claims: umbrellas treated as weapons, fingernails described as attack tools, and grand jury testimony that casts the group as more organized and dangerous than notorious street gangs.

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Why you'd press play

You hear how a protest case gets recast as a gang charge.

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