Category: Police State

See if you can guess who’s the bad guy

~ susie

Huh. That taser didn’t look ineffective to me:

Deputies appeared to use Tasers to stun a man and then beat him after the pursuit in San Bernardino County Thursday afternoon.

Aerial footage captured by NewsChopper4 showed the man falling off the horse, and then being stunned with a Taser by a sheriff’s deputy.

The man then appeared to fall to the ground with his arms outstretched. Two deputies immediately descended on him and began punching him in the head and kneeing him in the groin.

The group surrounding the man grew to 13 sheriff’s deputies as several appeared to kick, hit, and punch him dozens of times over a two-minute period.

In the two minutes after the man was stunned with a Taser, it appeared deputies kicked him 17 times and punched him 37 times and struck him with batons four times. Thirteen blows appeared to be to the head. The allegedly stolen horse stood idly nearby.

[…] Deputies said the Taser was ineffective due to his loose clothing and a use of force occurred.
“I can certainly understand the concerns in the community based on what they saw on the video,” McMahon told NBC4. “I’m disturbed by what I see in the video. But I don’t need to jump to conclusions at this point, until we do a complete and thorough investigation. If our deputy sheriff’s did something wrong, they’ll be put off work and they’ll be dealt with appropriately, all in accordance with the law as well as our department policy.”

Shooting witness: Cop had control of the situation

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

This was a very powerful interview:

The bystander who recorded a South Carolina officer fatally shooting an unarmed black man eight times said the cop had control of the situation before he pulled out his gun.

In an exclusive interview with NBC News, the witness, Feidin Santana, said he could hear North Charleston Police Officer Michael Slager deploying his Taser on Walter Scott when he pulled out his camera phone. He said the two were on the ground before he started filming.

“I remember the police had control of the situation,” Santana said during the interview (above). “You can hear the sound of a Taser… I believe [Scott] was just trying to get away from the Taser.”

Slager was arrested Tuesday and charged with murder after the shooting, which occurred during a traffic stop on Saturday. Slager was charged only after the video was released, and the footage pulled the officer’s own account of the incident into question.

Audio of Slager’s call to dispatch was released today, and there are clear discrepanciesbetween that audio and Santana’s footage. Slager said he felt threatened because Scott allegedly reached for his Taser. Video evidences shows Slager dropping an object near Scott’s body after the shooting.

Santana has reportedly said he waited to release the footage to see how Slager would report his actions.

Another cop killing, another coverup

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

This is really difficult to watch. What makes it worse is knowing if a bystander hadn’t taken this video, the cop’s version would have been the last word. Very sickening:

WASHINGTON — A white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., was charged with murder on Tuesday after a video surfaced showing him shooting and killing an apparently unarmed black man in the back while he ran away.

The officer, Michael T. Slager, 33, had said he feared for his life because the man took his stun gun in a scuffle after a traffic stop on Saturday. A video, however, shows the officer firing eight times as the man — Walter L. Scott, 50 — fled.

The North Charleston mayor announced the state charges at a news conference Tuesday evening.

The shooting comes on the heels of high-profile incidents of police officers using lethal force in New York, Cleveland, Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere around the country. The deaths have sparked a national debate over whether the police are too quick to use force, particularly in cases involving black men.

Also: Here’s how this story would have been written without the video.

Ferguson has a libertarian mayor

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

And that explains so much:

Well, well, well. Who would have thought that the mayor of Ferguson had connections that would bring him to a panel at the ALEC affiliated and Kochtopus-funded Show-Me Institute, just months before Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown? Mayor James Knowles, who once led the St. Louis Young Republicans, was there to tout the benefits and profit… Continue reading “Ferguson has a libertarian mayor” →

How Ferguson got privatized

~ susie

So it turns out that Ferguson Mayor James Knowles, nominally a Democrat, is really a libertarian who was gung-ho to privatize as many law enforcement functions as he could to make “users” cover the cost of law enforcement.

Take the shocking “discovery” — actually years in the making — that Ferguson shifted many of its revenue burdens away from taxpayers and onto something the New Yorker described as the city’s “offender-funded” justice system, designed to “shift the financial burden of probation directly onto the probationers…. charging petty offenders — such as those with traffic debts — for a government service that was once free.”

Many decades ago, libertarian author Robert Poole, one of the leading brain bugs of libertarianism and one of the Koch brothers’ longest-serving lieutenants, proposed exactly this sort of system in his pioneering handbook on government privatization, “Cutting Back City Hall” published in 1980:

“Make the users (i.e., the criminals) pay the costs, wherever possible.”

Poole’s book is considered by many the first American policy handbook on mass government privatization. (Poole’s and Reason’s claims that he “coined” privatization have been challenged, most recently in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, which made the case that “privatization” was first coined and implemented in Nazi Germany in the mid-late 1930s.)

Poole’s writings in the mid-late 1970s for Reason magazine (which he edited) and the Reason Foundation (which he co-founded, both with the Kochs’ support) provided the neoliberal blueprintsfor Thatcherism, as recounted by one of her advisers and hagiographers:

“The intellectual case for ‘contracting out’ came from an American MIT-trained engineer turned policy wonk, Bob Poole, head of the Reason Foundation in Santa Barbara and author of a little book called ‘Cutting Back City Hall.’ In this book he explained how all you needed to run a city was a CEO, a lawyer to review contracts and a secretary. Everything — literally everything — could be outsourced and he littered his book with examples and figures….[Thatcher advisor Michael Forsyth] translated Poole’s work into an English context and, led by the Westminster City Council, ‘contracting out’ spread like a contagious disease throughout the country.”

The libertarian Reason magazine also came up with the “St. Louis Solution,” whereby St. Louis and their suburbs privatized streets as a way to keep black people from traveling through. Go read it, it’s quite enlightening.

Ferguson report

~ susie

Even though I know better — even though I know how cops think, and how politicians use them, and the racism that overrides all of it– I was still emotionally overwhelmed listening to Eric Holder summarize the systematic oppression of Ferguson residents in the Justice Department report today.

Truly overwhelming, all the more so because we know it’s not just Ferguson.