It’s a warm Saturday night in Texas, and a former Wall Street investment banker and one-time Army officer is training a small group of people on the tactics of cop watching.
“Our first job is to help the person being detained,” says Antonio Buehler, forty, as he clicks through his PowerPoint presentation at Monkeywrench Books in Austin. “It’s not to get YouTube views.”
After this introduction to videotaping police interactions with civilians, the volunteers for the Peaceful Streets Project that Buehler co-founded will sally forth on one of their patrols to record activities of the Austin Police Department.
How did Buehler, who has degrees from West Point, Stanford, and Harvard, come to this cause? To understand that, you have to go back to the early morning of New Year’s Day, 2012.
Buehler, a newly arrived Austin resident, was standing at a gas pump outside a downtown convenience store when he heard a woman scream. He watched as police pulled her from a vehicle and threw her to the ground. The woman called out to him to videotape what was happening. Buehler approached with his cell phone and, after a verbal exchange with police, was himself arrested and charged with a felony for assaulting a police officer.
Buehler was standing at a gas pump outside a convenience store when he heard a woman scream. He watched as police pulled her from a vehicle and threw her to the ground.
The incident prompted a years-long series of legal actions that included dismissal of the felony and Buehler’s acquittal on an additional misdemeanor charge. It also caused the previously straitlaced Buehler to reexamine his attitude toward authority and oppression. Later that year, he and other activists founded Peaceful Streets, and Buehler was arrested five more times in the next few years for activities related to cop watching.
Cop watching and filming, it turns out, has a long history. California activist Andrea Prichett co-founded Berkeley Copwatch in 1990. And of course Rodney King’s arrest, perhaps history’s most influential cop video, occurred in 1991.
Yet Peaceful Streets, in large part due to Buehler’s record as an Iraq War veteran, has become the standard-bearer for cop watching in the last few years. He acknowledges this fact while noting that it makes him somewhat uncomfortable.
“My role especially in the police accountability and police brutality space is unique in that I’m not black or brown. I’m not from a historically oppressed or marginalized group,” says Buehler, whose olive skin, straight black hair, and facial features suggest his Korean and Caucasian ethnicity. “Oftentimes, I want to step back and allow other voices to be heard. But I recognize at the same time that my background story allows many people to pay attention whereas they don’t necessarily pay attention to the issue otherwise.”
Buehler can be a polarizing figure. After a Houston policeman was shot and killed, he posted on social media that the man was a “pig” who belonged to “a criminal gang”—the police department. He often says police as well as prisons should be abolished, and he can be seen in YouTube videos engaging in profane shouting matches with police.
Ken Casaday, head of the Austin Police Association, describes Buehler as “very smart” but manipulative. “He keeps getting arrested because he’s breaking the law,” Casaday says, although Buehler’s arrests have all resulted in dismissals or acquittals.
“There’s absolutely no problem with filming police officers,” Casaday says. “You just need to do it in a fair and respectful way. Some people with Peaceful Streets do that. Some people in Peaceful Streets—including him—get right in your face and insult you and use profanities to try to get you to make a reaction.”
But Millie Thompson, the Austin attorney who successfully defended Buehler after his first arrest, has a different view. “Police officers don’t like getting challenged and he challenges them,” she says. “So they’re going to arrest him in order to regain the power that they assume they need in every situation.”
After his first arrest, Buehler sued the city and police for allegedly violating his civil rights. But the case was dismissed and appeals to reinstate it failed.
Buehler filed a new civil rights lawsuit in federal court in August 2017 against the city of Austin and five police officers. He thinks it stands a better chance of success. His attorney in that case is Daphne Silverman, who served in the JAG Corps, the legal arm of the Navy.
“Antonio is more powerful than anybody else because of the military background and having a Harvard degree and Stanford degree,” Silverman says. “His voice is listened to by everyone.”
Jacob Crawford, the co-founder of the national group WeCopwatch, also praises Buehler and his group. “They do a great job of keeping people safe,” he says. “I credit Antonio and Peaceful Streets Project largely for the growth of the police-watching movement in Texas. I think what they’ve done has been incredible.”
Videotaping police encounters is seen as an important tool for improving accountability. Mary Angela Bock, an assistant professor in the school of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, has researched the topic and says police-controlled dashboard cameras and body cameras are only part of the solution.
“If you control the image, you control the story. That’s why cameras need to be in the hands of the public.”
“If you control the image, you control the story,” Bock says. “That’s why cameras need to be in the hands of the public.” She notes that images captured on video by cop watchers have forever shifted the way people view police.
Buehler says Peaceful Streets videos have helped more than a dozen people arrested by police defend themselves in court, producing dismissals and supporting police misconduct lawsuits. And, at least in the downtown entertainment district where hostile encounters between police and civilians are frequent, he thinks police have grown somewhat less aggressive.
Antonio Buehler grew up in a small central Pennsylvania town in a “conservative Republican family.” His father met his Korean mother on a military deployment to South Korea.
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree from West Point, Buehler served five years as an Army officer, including tours in Kosovo and Iraq. After military service, he went to Stanford, where he earned an MBA. His next move was to Wall Street.
But throughout his life, Buehler enjoyed working with kids. He volunteered at an orphanage while stationed in Europe and coached youth sports teams, among other mentoring activities. On Wall Street, he was always on the lookout for an entrepreneurial opportunity in education. That’s what brought him to Austin in 2011.
At the time of his arrest in 2012, Buehler was teaching high school math, history, and entrepreneurship at a new alternative school in the Austin area. The founder and director of that school, Ariel Dochstader Miller, says that when Buehler called her to report his arrest, she was supportive.
“I said, ‘Good for you,’ ” Miller recalls. “ ‘You were doing what you know is right.’ I think that’s a very powerful thing to model for young people—standing up for your beliefs.” When Buehler decided to apply to Harvard, Miller wrote a recommendation letter.
After receiving his second master’s degree, this one in education from Harvard, Buehler returned to Austin and informed Miller that he planned to start his own alternative education school that would compete with her Skybridge Academy. Again, Miller was supportive. “A lot of people have ideas and think, ‘Wouldn’t the world be a better place if this or that were happening,’ ” she says. “Antonio does something about it.”
Abrome, the alternative school Buehler founded in 2016, is run out of his modest home on the outskirts of Austin.
The school has no curriculum, classes, or grades. “We have no requirements other than that students positively contribute to the community,” Buehler says. “They respect themselves, they respect others, and they respect the space. If they do that, they are free to do whatever they want.”
Students are urged to take ownership of their lives. “We want them to take control of their education and we want them to push their education down a pathway that’s uniquely beneficial to them in a way that could never be done if we were expecting everyone to be on the same path.”
On an afternoon not long after the start of the 2017-18 school year, Abrome students can be seen watching a documentary and cooking frozen pizzas for lunch. One of the students is his attorney Silverman’s son. She admires how Buehler encourages students to become the best versions of themselves, not just to absorb academic material, and his genuine passion. “When you see him with the children, that is his true self,” Silverman says. “He is a happy, loving, and compassionate person.”
Thomas Bohman, a University of Texas research scientist and co-founder of Austin’s alternative Clearview Sudbury School, says Buehler’s approach meets the needs of parents and students who don’t fit mainstream public schools. “One of his great strengths is his ability to analyze the current system as a game that if you want to play, here are the unwritten rules you need to know.”
Buehler says his goal is to “create a learning environment where people really can engage in self-directed learning and are not subjected to the practices and structures of schooling.” Ultimately, he wants to force public schools to be more like Abrome.
Buehler’s tutorial at Monkeywrench Books is interrupted when attendees recognize a woman who keeps walking by the door as a participant in a recent alt-right rally. She’s confronted by a camera-wielding Peaceful Streets member and departs. Later, there’s a flurry of concern when someone spots what could be a drone monitoring the meeting remotely.
“One of Buehler's great strengths is his ability to analyze the current system as a game that if you want to play, here are the unwritten rules you need to know.”
Buehler continues his class unperturbed. The group heads out in a caravan of cars to patrol parts of town where arrests are frequent. On this night, nothing happens.
Two weeks later, Peaceful Streets volunteers head to Austin’s vibrant if somewhat seedy Sixth Street entertainment district, to film interactions between police and often-inebriated celebrants. Buehler does indeed get close to police officers with his camera, recording their badge numbers in case something happens later. But the police interact stoically and at times pleasantly with him and conduct no notable arrests.
The only real friction comes from not police but passersby. While many compliment the cop watchers, others protest. One pedicab driver harangues Buehler with a lengthy diatribe, steering his vehicle in alarmingly tight circles around one Peaceful Streets member who uses a wheelchair. Buehler engages in limited repartee with the critic, who eventually is encouraged by police to move on.
Later, in an interview, Buehler likens his work monitoring police to his work as an educator. “My goal in life is to push back against, undermine, and dismantle oppressive systems and replace it with something better,” he says. “Something that’s humane, something that improves the lives of everyone, as opposed to just the people who get to profit off of it.”
But Buehler realizes that most people from his background are not going to see the need for change unless something like his New Year’s Day arrest happens to them.
“The people with power are the ones who are going to be the least likely to recognize it because things are working out just fine for them,” he says. “And it’s not until they’re victimized that they say, ‘Holy shit, we gotta do something.’ ”
Mark Henricks is an Austin-based freelance journalist.