60 Minutes - Sunday, May 21, 2017

Episode Date: May 22, 2017

Philadelphia's Arch St. Methodist is just one of more than 800 churches and synagogues offering sanctuary to illegal immigrants. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. More than 800 American houses of worship are offering shelter from deportation to illegal immigrants and their families. We're taking a leap of faith, right, in many respects, because we don't know what's going to happen. They're daring federal agents to step through their stained glass doors. As a human being, I know it is traumatic for folks. But I will also say that the rule of law is something that America is built on. But this seems to be the one area where the narrative about separating families, you know, sort of gets a little bit ratcheted up. An average of 70,000 men and women pass through Cook County Jail each year, many more than once.

What percent do you think here really shouldn't be here? I would suggest conservatively that half of the people here in the jail shouldn't be here. The county sheriff, Tom Dart, says the jail has become a dumping ground for the poor and mentally ill. If they're going to make it so that I am going to be the largest mental health provider, we're going to be the best ones. We're going to treat them as a patient while they're here. We are going to think differently. Ai Weiwei is China's most famous political dissident.

He's also one of the most successful contemporary artists in the world. A designer, sculptor, photographer and blogger He's also one of the most successful contemporary artists in the world. A designer, sculptor, photographer and blogger who's earned legions of followers by using his art as a weapon to ridicule the authorities. Are you an artist or are you an activist? I think an artist and an activist is the same thing. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker.

I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Holly Williams. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment, and more. Play it at play.it. There is a peaceful rebellion growing against federal immigration law and the interpretation of that law by the Trump administration. More than 800 houses of worship across the country have volunteered to shelter illegal

immigrants and their families who face deportation, daring federal agents to step through their stained glass doors. The churches and synagogues are joining more than 600 cities and counties that have declared themselves sanctuaries, ordering their police not to detain people if it's only because of their immigration status. In no other venue of the law has so much of the nation stood in defiance of Washington. Philadelphia's Arch Street Methodist Church was built by Abraham Lincoln's favorite minister. We are a sanctuary church. And 155 years later, Reverend Robin Heinecke is on the same chapter and verse. By baptismal covenant, there's a vow that's taken either on my behalf when I was baptized as a child

or as an adult, that I would take the power and the freedom that God gives me to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they show themselves. Well, in your view, what is this, evil, injustice, or oppression? It's injustice and oppression, all of which is evil. Yeah, when a human being's human rights are denied, when they can't stay with their family, when they can't work, when they can't participate in the community in which they have deep roots, all of those apply. He's talking about Javier Flores Garcia, who has lived in the church basement for six months. He came from Mexico illegally in 1997. He's a landscaper with a decade-old DUI on his record.

His other offense is crossing the border repeatedly. A judge ordered him deported, but he moved here rather than leave his three children, who were born citizens. I think you have to keep fighting, and I'm doing this for my kids, and I would do it again if it became necessary. We're taking a leap of faith, right, in many respects, because we don't know what's going to happen. Federal agents can arrest Flores in the church, but U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, has a decades-long policy of avoiding places of worship, schools, and hospitals.

My advice would be they should come out of the basement of the churches and follow the law. Daniel Ragsdale is deputy director of ICE. He runs the daily operations and oversees 13,000 officers. So if they are to check in with ICE, they should come and check in with ICE. Checking in with ICE is going to get them deported. Checking in with ICE will follow the law. And in cases where there's a removal order, of course, we would execute it. How much concern do you have about separating families and deportations? As a human being, I know it is traumatic for folks. But I will also say that the rule of law is something that America is built on. But this seems to be the one area where the narrative about separating families

sort of gets a little bit ratcheted up. Well, you can understand why. Well, I can, but I would suggest that every person who has come to the United States illegally, just like if I went somewhere and resided in violation of law, I could expect at some point that sovereign country to want to remove me. We're rounding them up in a very humane way, in a very nice way, and they're going to be happy because they want to be legalized. Before the election, candidate Trump told us he would deport all of an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants.

And by the way, I know it doesn't sound nice, but not everything is nice. Thank you very much. Now, President Trump says he's pursuing violent criminal immigrants first. You see what's happening at the border. All of a sudden, for the first time, we're getting gang members out. We're getting drug lords out. We're getting really bad dudes out of this country. And at a rate that nobody's ever seen before.

And they're the bad ones. It's not just the bad guys. The fact is, in the Trump administration, according to ICE, about 11,000 undocumented people with no criminal records have been detained so far. That's twice as many as last year. Because of this, the number of religious institutions across the country offering sanctuary has doubled to 800. Just last week, this church in Buffalo, New York, offered sanctuary to a family of six from Honduras. The church has opened its doors to 40 illegal immigrants since January. When congregations in cities including Phoenix, Denver, and Philadelphia give sanctuary,

they are in open defiance of immigration law. That leads me to wonder whether there's any internal conflict within you. You preach morals, and yet you're breaking the law. There's no conflict. I think I've said this before, that when a law breaks the backs of God's people, then it's time for us to think about breaking those laws. Trouble is, those laws never stop changing. And that's one reason the immigration debate is never settled.

Since 1790, Congress has rewritten immigration law on average about every four years. America imported Chinese labor to build the Transcontinental Railroad, and when it was finished, Congress banned all Chinese. In World War I, nearly 20 percent of U.S. forces were not citizens. In World War II, America begged more than four million Mexicans to come to work. And in 1986, Ronald Reagan granted amnesty to illegal immigrants. Day one, my first hour in office, those people are gone. Mr. Trump blames immigrants for violence. He often fired up his rallies by raising the murder by an illegal immigrant of a woman in San Francisco, a sanctuary city. But according to the Department of Justice, the incarceration rate for illegal immigrants is one-third that of citizens. To lay criminality at the feet of immigrants is not only morally unfair, it is factually wrong. One of Jim Kenney's first acts

as mayor was to declare Philadelphia a sanctuary, which means his police do not ask about citizenship and will not hold illegal immigrants if the only reason is that ICE wants to deport them. He says it violates the Constitution to hold people without a warrant. There are more than 600 cities, counties, and states that consider themselves sanctuaries. Two years ago, there were half as many. We've ordered a crackdown on sanctuary cities. President Trump is now trying to cut off federal funds from these sanctuary cities, but he's been stopped so far by the courts.

This is not an us versus them. This is we upholding the Constitution of the United States of America and asking them to comply with it also by presenting us with the proper judicial warrant so we can release that person to their custody. The feds are talking about taking your federal money away. And, Mr. Mayor, I bet you can't afford that. No, but think about the conundrum that this presented. If you accept the assertion that undocumented immigrants cause crime, which I do not accept and I think it's wrong, why would you defund police departments?

Well, you know, there are people shouting at the television right now saying if they came illegally, they shouldn't be here. It's a terrible thing, but they shouldn't have come. Well, you know, Ellis Island opened in 1892. The bulk of Irish diaspora came to America in the 1840s. We didn't have papers either. We were undocumented. There was an anti-Italian slur when I was growing up in my neighborhood called WOP. That's without papers. If you come to the country without documents because you're starving in your country or you're being held hostage by drug dealers or you're afraid your children are going to be shot in the streets or on their farm, I think that that's self-preservation and self-survival.

And any group of people would flock to America because that's been the historic place where people came to be saved. This is my country. I'm working hard. Sixto Paz would have been deported 10 months ago if he hadn't confined himself to Shadow Rock United Church of Christ in Phoenix. Good morning. Ismael Delgado moved in four months ago. We came to work.

Paz crossed illegally in 1985. Under the policy of President Reagan, he was granted a work permit, which was revoked under the policies of George W. Bush. His four children are citizens by birth. His youngest is five. I spent 32 years over here, and I don't want to live in alone. And I paid my taxes for 28 years. Paid your taxes 28 years?

Yes. There are people watching the interview who are saying, you shouldn't have come here. When someone, you got hungry, you don't have a job, you don't have money, what do you want to do? I don't come to the United States to take vacation, man. I'm here because I have to. That's why I come over here, and I respect all the law. I respect the people.

I'm working hard to do the best. I got a clean record, and I learn a lot over here. I learn a language. I don't speak very well, but I'm working on that. And my son, my daughter is a professional. You have two older daughters who are medical assistants. They both graduated from college here in the United States. Yes, sir.

Sounds like the American dream. Yes. If the priority is serious criminal offenders, why are we seeing deportation orders for little old ladies and middle-aged men who've never committed a crime? So that's a great question. So if someone who is placed in removal proceedings goes through that entire process, again, all at taxpayer expense, and gets a removal order, if we encounter that person and that order has been litigated and challenged and due process has been met, it's odd that anyone would expect us to simply ignore all those decisions by lawyers, by judges, by federal court judges in some cases, and simply say, we're going to make policy on the street and ignore it.

One of the changes in the guidance from the Obama administration to the Trump administration is that President Trump's executive order prioritizes the removal of those who entered illegally. Well, that's everybody. That's 11 million people. We only have the same size workforce. There's just no way that that could simply be done in any rapid fashion, which is why we are still focusing on the folks that I talked about, which are people that present the greatest risk to public safety. Javier embodies the spirit of sanctuary. He and we together are sanctuary. Do you worry that the government might take steps against sanctuary congregations across

the country? I do worry about that. I think it would be a huge breach of the age-old traditions of providing, at least having some place in our civil society where there's an opportunity to challenge laws and policies and procedures that are creating more injustice than they are creating justice. In rare cases, ICE officers have made arrests near schools and churches. A man was arrested in California dropping his child at school, and in Virginia, several illegal immigrants were arrested shortly after walking out of this church, leaving many to wonder, where are the lines once the border's been crossed? Those are the laws that Congress has passed.

I don't think it's anybody's question that if you don't have lawful status, that at some point you could be removed. And I think that's something that people should be aware of. And again, I think the president, when he announced the program, was pretty clear about that. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment, and more. Play it at play.it. Chicago, with the largest number of murders last year of any major city in the country, has one of the largest jails in the country. An average of 70,000 men and women pass through Cook County Jail each year, many more than

once. And as with other big city jails, most of the inmates who cycle through are either poor, mentally ill, or members of a gang. One of the few things Republicans and Democrats agree on is the need for corrections reform. And Cook County is leading the way, almost by necessity, with a new approach to help break the cycle. The county sheriff, Tom Dart, is getting a lot of the credit. A former prosecutor who's been elected and re-elected sheriff since 2006, Dart, as you'll see, is unconventional. It was a cold day at Cook County Jail when we met Tom Dart.

He has redefined the role of sheriff. He sees the job as not just keeping people in jail, but helping some of them get out. He says many behind bars shouldn't be there. How are you guys doing? Good. Several times a month, Dart mingles with the men in the jail's minimum security division, all of whom have been charged with low-level, nonviolent crimes. What's your charge?

I had a violation of probation. I was on probation for driving while licensed revoked. Dart says the jail, with a population today of about 7,500, has become a dumping ground for the poor and mentally ill. What percent do you think here really shouldn't be here? I would suggest conservatively that half of the people here in the jail shouldn't be here. I would suggest conservatively that half of the people here in the jail shouldn't be here. They don't pose a danger

to anybody. The people in most jails and 95% of the people in this jail are waiting on a trial. So everybody here are people who haven't been convicted yet. So you say to yourself, alright, they're presumed innocent. Who is so dangerous that we need to hold them here while we're waiting on a trial? You had some violence a long time ago? Nothing a long

time ago? I'm going to tell you, nothing. As he makes the rounds, he sounds less like an incarcerator than a defense attorney. I'm not promising you guys anything, because I never know what the hell they're going to do, but I promise you we will push out. The biggest problem for most of the inmates, he says, is they simply don't have enough money to make bail. I'm trying to find out why my bond's so high. How many percentage-wise people are really poor and can't afford bail? On any given day, we have probably 200 to 300 people that if they came up with $500, they would leave here. But we find that if you have access to money, wherever it may come from, and frequently

it's coming from your gang, and if you happen to be the guy in your gang who is the guy who does most of the shootings, you're a very valuable person. They want you back out on the street. But you have some individual who's in here who's never been a danger to anybody. He can't come up with $100. He's sitting, the guy with the gun, he's out the door. Next guy is possession of cannabis. He usually turns his notes over to his top advisor, Cara Smith,

who runs what you might call a you-shouldn't-be-here squad. And what do you charge for? Retail debt. And what do they say you try to steal? Some Red Bulls. Some Red Bull drinks? Smith and her staff hold office hours looking for inmates they can help. What we need to work on is trying to get your bond reduced so

that you can bond out so that you can get out of here. Okay. Okay? Yes. Okay, good luck. All right, you too. We'll be in touch. Combing through cases, Kara Smith discovered something disturbing. They call them dead days. We made up the term, but we call them dead days because people spend so much time pre-trial here at the Cook County Jail that once they're sentenced to prison, they've already served their term. They probably spent more time here than the sentence in some cases. So last year alone, we had 1,024 people who spent their entire prison term here in the Cook County Jail. But the more incredible statistic is that same group of people spent an extra 222 years of custody here in the Cook County Jail. Lengths of stay run from a week or less to eight or nine years. Some of the people who spend years here are the mentally ill,

who make up about a third of the population and are the jail's biggest cost. And do you know what your charge is today? Retail theft. Retail theft. $70 worth of ground beef. $70 worth of ground beef. Every inmate is screened for mental illness when they first arrive. I would die of no schizophrenic when I was in group home.

In group home? Okay. We're going to make sure that you get help today. If I don't get the medication that I need, I know it's going to go wrong. This man, who also has a history of mental illness, has been in and out of the jail 37 times. I understand. How does that happen? How does someone and out of the jail 37 times. I understand. How does that happen? How does someone come back to a jail 37 times? What in God's name do you expect to happen with that person? Okay, so this person's got a serious mental illness. He's not being treated. His family and him have been disconnected for years. He obviously doesn't have a job. He has nowhere to live. What do you think is going to happen? I'll tell you what's going to happen.

He will come in contact with law enforcement either because he's trying to find a place to sleep or he's trying to find something to eat and he'll be back in here. It's not because he walked out of here saying, listen, I want to go and commit horrific crimes. It's like he's trying to survive. In many ways, society has turned jails and prisons into mental health clinics and you're actually running one here. Yeah. I said, okay, if they're going to make it so that I am going to be the largest mental health provider, we're going to be the best ones.

We're going to treat them as a patient while they're here. It's like we are going to think differently. Cook County Jail was already one of the largest mental health facilities in the country in 2012 when Chicago closed down half its mental health clinics. These men, the high-functioning mentally ill, are bused five days a week to a program that is now a model for other jails across the country. They get medication, visits with psychiatrists, and group therapy. So today, I want us to continue to move forward, and you're going to have to have some things that's going to take you to another level. About 60 percent of all the jail's corrections

officers have advanced mental health training and DART has moved new people over to the medical facilities. What I did is redefine job positions and where it would have been a law enforcement position I changed it into a doctor position or a mental health position. And so we've been bringing on a lot of doctors, counselors, therapists. Is he running a jail? Sometimes I wonder. Nothing exemplifies his new direction more than who he chose to run the jail. Not someone with a law enforcement background.

He named a psychologist to be the warden, 39-year-old Dr. Nika Jones Tapia. I'm going to go cell to cell. Who should I talk to? She started as an intern at Cook County Jail almost 10 years ago and worked her way up. As warden, she tries to infuse more humanity into a pretty heartless place, the maximum security wing, where she offers some tough love therapy. People wouldn't let the officers handcuff them. Right. Why is that?

They had to take them to the ground and cuff them. Are you going to keep getting into it with Seth? If they keep denying my rights. Okay, see, you have the wrong attitude. Because I'm trying to help you, but you're still telling me that you're going to have issues with the staff, and I can't have that. So what's up to you? We filmed you doing rounds like a doctor in a hospital, but you talked to every single inmate that you passed. Yes. It's because we understand the person is a person. They're not what they're, they're not, they're charged.

They're not their crime. And so we want to give that individual attention to as many people as we can. Sorry, gentlemen. On a walk through a medium security cell block, she works on attitude adjustment, trying to change their way of thinking so they don't come back here. All of you guys with tattoos, you might want to think about having those removed. You need to, because how are you going to get a job when you get up? I mean, the first impression is everything. You can't do that.

How many of you guys have kids? Oh, my. So it's not just you that's impacted by you being here. Our families. Your families. Your children. To reach out to their families, she's listed her phone number on the jail's website. Dart and his methods have come under intense criticism.

He's too soft on the inmates, say some of the corrections officers. Their antagonism grew into outright hostility last year when Dart, intending to be transparent about life behind the walls, released videos to the public showing guards brutally beating up inmates. Dennis Andrews, the business agent at Teamsters Local 700 that represents the corrections officers, says his members were furious. The anger was he didn't release the videos of the detainees attacking the officers. You can't release a small segment of something happening without releasing the tape of how you got from point A to point B. Does the public have a right to see those men beating the prisoners?

If we aren't releasing that information, then it furthers the public's feeling that law enforcement is covering things up and that we are hiding things. And we don't have anything to hide. We have good people here is the majority, but we have some people that don't. And we can't shy from that because it's what poisons the well of the public. After the criticism, Sheriff Dart did release videos of inmates attacking staff. But Dennis Andrews says that didn't improve morale. He doesn't address the situations of his own staff at the jail who are being attacked daily by detainees.

He presumes them innocent, but he doesn't presume his staff innocent. He presumes his staff guilty? Yes. It can't be good if they think that you're not on their side. You know, I become puzzled when they think I'm not on their side. It is the most difficult job. And you start with that, and then you're dealing with mentally ill folks. So they've been asked to do all sorts of things that they didn't sign up for,

and I am outrageously sympathetic to that. What Sheriff Dart can't tell us yet is whether recidivism rates are coming down. On any given day, he says he releases roughly 200 people to the streets, but he accepts another 200, some still the old familiar faces. To improve the chances they won't return again, he's introduced activities like chess lessons. People said, you know, your chess program, you know, how does that work? I said, you know what, one of the major issues we have with the people here is they don't

think about consequences. They just think the very first move. They're playing checkers. Chess makes you think four, five, six moves out. I can't tell you how many guys in the chess program have told me they never thought like that in their life, that their way of thinking has changed. There's more than chess. Dart has enlisted volunteers to offer all kinds of classes you rarely see in a jail. And you can always move in closer if you want.

A photographer teaches inmates how to find new ways to look at the world and themselves. Musicians provide therapy through rhythm and sound. Ah, voila. Are we going to put a little rosemary? Italian chef Bruno Abate gives cooking lessons. I'm not here just to make food. I'm here to change the way you think it. So don't come back in this place anymore. We say, you know, we touch the bottom now. We can only go up, right? What about your corrections officers?

Do they look at you and say, wait a minute, this is all upside down here? Yeah. I mean, there's definitely employees here that are puzzled by me. You know, Sheriff Goofy is out giving pizza to all the inmates now because he loves it. Sheriff Goofy. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I wear it proudly. People are going to say, you're on the wrong side of the street. That's been suggested. Yeah.

But you'll never find anybody that is more strident in going after the bad, the evil, the ones that hurt people. I used to prosecute them. I arrest them now in my sheriff's office as well. But when it comes to just blindly and truly out of indifference, just saying there's segments of our society that we will treat this horrifically callous way, I'm not going to be party for that. And if that upsets people, that's fine. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment and more. Play it at play.it. Ai Weiwei is China's most famous political dissident, a provocateur and a troublemaker whose clashes with the Chinese government

have gotten him harassed by police, thrown in jail and driven out of the country. He's also one of the most successful contemporary artists in the world, a designer, sculptor, photographer and blogger who's earned legions of followers by using his art as a weapon to ridicule the authorities. And we should warn you, some of his work can be offensive. But when you meet Ai Weiwei, he's soft-spoken, self-deprecating and shy. The last person you'd expect to be an

enemy of the state. They thought your intention was to subvert state power. Which is true. Which is true. You want to bring down the Chinese government. Not bring down, but I don't think I have the power to bring it down. But you want it to change. Yes, of course. Those are dangerous words in China where even after decades of modernization, the government has little tolerance for dissent. But that's never bothered Ai Weiwei. This is the work he's perhaps most famous for. What you're seeing in the background is a portrait of China's revered former dictator Mao Zedong, part of a series in which Weiwei gives the finger to other symbols of power around the world.

Just like this, yeah? Are we creating a new Ai Weiwei as we stand here? Oh, it's so easy. Everybody can do it. Easy, certainly not subtle, and maybe a little silly. But the Chinese authorities took them very seriously. They thought it was subversive. Why was the regime frightened of art? Because they are afraid of freedom.

And art is about freedom. They're afraid of freedom? Yes. Are you an artist or are you an activist? I think an artist and an activist is the same thing. As an artist, you always have to be an activist. You have to be political to be a good artist. I think every art, if it's relevant, is political.

That's the purpose of his life. Evan Osnos is a writer for The New Yorker, who spent years in Beijing and chronicled Ai Weiwei's confrontations with the authorities. He calls him an entrepreneur of provocation. What does that mean? It means that no matter what he's doing, he's figuring out a way not to cooperate with the prevailing wisdom or the people in charge.

And this can make a lot of people very angry. What's wrong with how things are, to Ai Weiwei's mind? In China, you are being constantly told that the world today is so much better than it was 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, when Chinese people were literally starving, that you should be satisfied. And what Ai Weiwei is saying is, absolutely not. You should demand more. It's not good enough to be rich. Exactly. It's not good enough to be rich. Exactly. It's not good enough to be rich. You need to be free as well.

In 2008, Ai Weiwei's one-man rebellion turned into a war with the Chinese government after a massive earthquake shook Sichuan province. It killed almost 90,000 people, including several thousand children, many of whom were crushed in poorly built government schools. It was a national trauma, and the authorities tried to put a lid on the public's anger by covering up the number of children who died. It was a state secret how many children had died in these schools.

They always use that as some kind of excuse not to tell, not giving you the correct numbers. Weiwei assembled a team of activists to interview the parents, many of whom had lost their only child. He called it a citizen's investigation. China had never seen anything like it. So you were trying to get to the truth. Why did that make the Chinese government so angry? To control the information, to limit the truth, is the most efficient tactic for totalitarian society, for the rulers.

He gathered the names of more than 5,000 dead children and published a list on the internet, shaming his government. And across China, people took notice. It was a challenge to the government's authority. And they couldn't accept it. It was an act of radical transparency. Nobody had ever done that before. And they didn't immediately know how to respond. They had never really encountered a person like Ai Weiwei. What were they worried that he might do? Inspire people. Inspire people to do and live the way that he did. The Chinese authorities responded

brutally. Ai Weiwei says police beat him up and he later had to be hospitalized. Doctors discovered bleeding in his brain, which he says could have killed him. He documented it all on social media for his followers around the world, infuriating the government and escalating the confrontation. He weaponized social media. He figured out that in a country that controls information so carefully, that seizing the tools of information distribution is a very powerful thing to do. What did the Chinese government think about that? They began to think he was a very dangerous person.

Ai Weiwei was groomed to be a dissident since childhood. His father, Ai Qing, was a celebrated poet who was denounced as a traitor and exiled with his family to the edge of China's Gobi Desert, where Weiwei watched his father's humiliation as he was forced to clean public toilets. You were an outsider from the beginning. Yes, I'm a natural outsider. I've always been pushed out. But that also gave me a very special angle to look at things.

It made you an independent thinker. It made me an individual and I always have to make my judgment independently because the mainstream will never accept somebody like me. Weiwei got out of China at the first opportunity, moving to New York in the early 1980s. He was intoxicated by the city, chronicling everything in pictures, drawing inspiration from American masters like Andy Warhol, and stringing together a living doing odd jobs and street art. So you were drawing portraits of people and selling them for how much? $15. $15?

$15. Some of his work now sells for millions. But in America, he discovered something you can't put a price on. You once said that once you've experienced freedom, it stays in your heart. Is that true? Yeah, I think it's true. You taste the most important thing in life. And you will never forget it.

After a decade in the US, he moved back to China and set up a studio in Beijing, breaking new ground and challenging old sensibilities with mischievous, provocative art. Like this piece, in which Weiwei photographed himself destroying a 2,000-year-old Chinese urn. He wants to shatter the Communist Party's official version of history. You smashed a priceless urn.

It's not priceless. For a lot of Chinese people, it's a priceless part of their history. For me to smash it is a valuable act. If you buy that, and the art world certainly did, look at what he did to these urns doused in bright paint or emblazoned with the Coca-Cola logo, paying tribute to his idol Andy Warhol. By 2010, new commissions were rolling in and Weiwei's work grew more ambitious. Not all of it was political. He cast giant animal heads in bronze and sent them on tour around the world. He hired 1,600 artisans to handcraft porcelain sunflower seeds.

Then carpeted the floor of a giant atrium in London with a hundred million of them. It captivated the public and helped turn Ai Weiwei into an art scene superstar. You're the darling of the art world. I'm the darling of the art world. I don't really care. You don't care? No, I don't really care. They can't just forget about me. I don't care. But they're not forgetting about you. Well, that's their problem, you know. They should. They should learn how to forget about me.

The Chinese government wanted everyone to forget about Ai Weiwei, blocking his name on the internet in China and making it impossible to search for him. But that didn't stop Weiwei from needling the authorities relentlessly. When they put his studio under surveillance, Weiwei decorated the cameras with lanterns, then fashioned replicas out of marble for his exhibitions. When officers were ordered to follow his every move, he got his own cameraman to film them filming him, ridiculing the state in a way no one else in China had ever dared.

I mean, in a way, people have learned to be keep your head down. And Ai Weiwei doesn't. He's no, I'm not going to keep my head down. I'm going to wave my big head with my beard and my crazy haircut all over the place, and you'll have to deal with it. He was making the Chinese government look ridiculous. Yeah, he was mocking it. He was mocking it. And the Chinese government is many things, but it is not possessed of an abundant sense of humor. And I think, you know, at a certain point, they said, we're not going to take it anymore. And they didn't. Early one morning in 2011,

as he was about to board a plane, they put a hood over his head and took him away. It was the beginning of 81 harrowing days in solitary confinement under 24-hour surveillance. They watched you shower. They watched you use the toilet. They watched you when you were asleep at night. They were trying to humiliate you. I think that's the very routine way when they detain somebody they think is very important. They're trying to break your spirit?

I think they don't have to try. Did they break you? Somehow, I think. When he was released from detention, his passport was confiscated and he was forbidden from speaking publicly. I cannot talk, I'm so sorry. But Ai Weiwei couldn't help himself. He recreated his prison cell with these three dimensional models, which were exhibited around the world. It helped pile pressure on the Chinese government. And two years ago, he was finally given his passport back. Within days, he was on

a plane out of China, setting up a new studio in Berlin. When we visited him, he'd shifted his attention to the plight of refugees struggling to reach Europe, turning these clothes they discarded into a new work. He told us he's staying in Europe for the time being out of concern for the safety of his young son, but he hasn't ruled out moving back. Ai Weiwei has now left China.

Doesn't that mean that the Chinese government has won? I don't think so. I think, I'm not sure how far we are into the game here, but the game is not over. He might start the fight again with the Chinese regime. I would not be surprised. Anytime people have sort of counted him out, they've been proven wrong. Now, an update on a story we called Shots Fired. Last September, in a brief encounter on a street in Tulsa, a white police officer, Betty Shelby, shot and killed an unarmed black man, Terrence Crutcher. Most of what happened was caught on police cameras. Officer Shelby, while awaiting trial for manslaughter, told us Terrence Crutcher wouldn't obey her instructions to stop when she confronted him

walking in the road. He put his hands up, but to Shelby, Crututches seem disoriented and possibly on PCP he had abandoned his SUV in the middle of the street and now seemed intent on getting back to it where Shelby told us he began to reach inside perhaps for a weapon if I wait to find out if he had a gun or not, I could very well be dead. There's something that we always say. I'd rather be tried by 12 than carried by 6. This past week, a Tulsa jury of 12, after deliberating for nine hours, found Officer Shelby not guilty of manslaughter in Terrence Crutcher's death.

I'm Bill Whitaker. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.