Category: Police State

‘The police in America are becoming illegitimate’

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

This cop scared...

Matt Taibbi:

The press and the people who don’t live in these places want you to focus only on the incidents in question. It was technically a crime! Annoying, but he should have complied! His fault for dying – and he was a fat guy with asthma besides!

But the real issue is almost always the hundreds of police interactions that take place before that single spotlight moment, the countless aggravations large and small that pump up the rage gland over time.

Over the last three years, while working on a book about the criminal justice gap that ended up being called The Divide, I spent a lot of time with people like Eric Garner. There’s a shabby little courthouse at 346 Broadway in lower Manhattan that’s set up as the place you go to be sentenced and fined for the kind of ticket Staten Island cops were probably planning on giving Garner.
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‘The cops are still out of control’

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

serpico
Frank Serpico:

Forty-odd years on, my story probably seems like ancient history to most people, layered over with Hollywood legend. For me it’s not, since at the age of 78 I’m still deaf in one ear and I walk with a limp and I carry fragments of the bullet near my brain. I am also, all these years later, still persona non grata in the NYPD. Never mind that, thanks to Sidney Lumet’s direction and Al Pacino’s brilliant acting, “Serpico” ranks No. 40 on the American Film Institute’s list of all-time movie heroes, or that as I travel around the country and the world, police officers often tell me they were inspired to join the force after seeing the movie at an early age.

In the NYPD that means little next to my 40-year-old heresy, as they see it. I still get hate mail from active and retired police officers. A couple of years ago after the death of David Durk — the police officer who was one of my few allies inside the department in my efforts to expose graft — the Internet message board “NYPD Rant” featured some choice messages directed at me. “Join your mentor, Rat scum!” said one. An ex-con recently related to me that a precinct captain had once said to him, “If it wasn’t for that fuckin’ Serpico, I coulda been a millionaire today.” My informer went on to say, “Frank, you don’t seem to understand, they had a well-oiled money making machine going and you came along and threw a handful of sand in the gears.”

In 1971 I was awarded the Medal of Honor, the NYPD’s highest award for bravery in action, but it wasn’t for taking on an army of corrupt cops. It was most likely due to the insistence of Police Chief Sid Cooper, a rare good guy who was well aware of the murky side of the NYPD that I’d try to expose. But they handed the medal to me like an afterthought, like tossing me a pack of cigarettes. After all this time, I’ve never been given a proper certificate with my medal. And although living Medal of Honor winners are typically invited to yearly award ceremonies, I’ve only been invited once — and it was by Bernard Kerick, who ironically was the only NYPD commissioner to later serve time in prison.

A few years ago, after the New York Police Museum refused my guns and other memorabilia, I loaned them to the Italian-American museum right down street from police headquarters, and they invited me to their annual dinner. I didn’t know it was planned, but the chief of police from Rome, Italy, was there, and he gave me a plaque. The New York City police officers who were there wouldn’t even look at me.

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Good point

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

If this cop was really sorry, he’d admit he did something wrong:

The widow of Eric Garner, the unarmed black man who died after being put in what officials called a police “chokehold,” Wednesday night angrily rejected a gesture from the officer that offered her his prayers and condolences.

“Hell no. The time for remorse would have been when my husband was yelling to breathe. That would have been time for him to show some type of remorse, or some type of care for another human being’s life,” Esaw Garner said at a news conference when asked about the condolences offered by NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo after a grand jury earlier Wednesday declined to indict him for Eric Garner’s death on July 17.

“No I don’t accept his apology. No, I could care less about his condolences. He’s still working, he’s still getting a paycheck, he’s still feeding his kids. And my husband is six feet under, and I’m looking for a way to feed my kids now,” she said.
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Even Redstate has a problem

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Speaks for itself, no words mean more than the last ones said. Good Night family, God keep you safe. #Repost #thankyou @briemorganwrites with @repostapp.・・・Eric Garner's last words. Rest in peace. #blacklivesmatter #ericgarner #words #poetrycommunity

From Redstate:

Unfortunately for Garner, this will not help his family get justice as a Staten Island Grand Jury has decided not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo. This decision is really and truly baffling to me, and infuriating besides. I understand the vast majority of cops are good at their jobs and conscientious about protecting the civil rights of citizens. But there are without a doubt bad cops who make bad decisions and when they do so from a position of authority the damage they can do is exponentially worse.

And the problem we have is that no one is practicing effective oversight in many cases with respect to who belongs in which camp. Just last year, Newsday ran a damning report about the police in New York in particular and the endemic misconduct over which virtually no oversight is conducted. If you read only one thing today, read this.

And now, because the police earn such automatic and unjustified trust in the minds of so many, even on the rare occasion that a cop is actually videotaped, the criminal justice system cannot be trusted to provide effective oversight.

Holder says they will investigate NYC death

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Who the hell knows if it’s for real?

US attorney general Eric Holder announced a federal investigation into “potential civil rights violations” in the death of Eric Garner, just hours after news broke that a local grand jury had decided not to indict the New York police officer who placed Garner in a chokehold.

In a televised address, Holder said the Justice Department would investigate whether Garner suffered any civil rights violations when he was placed in a chokehold by New York police department officer Daniel Pantaleo.

A separate DoJ investigation is already underway into Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson’s fatal shooting of another unarmed black man, Michael Brown.
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I just want to climb into a hole and cry

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

I was at the doctor’s office yesterday, checking Twitter. Suddenly, the whole feed lit up: No indictment in Eric Garner’s death. Cops can kill a black man on video, and still, nothing happens.

And why? He wasn’t doing anything!

http://youtu.be/j1ka4oKu1jo

http://youtu.be/vT66U_Ftdng

They didn’t give him CPR. They let him die.

And then we have 12-year-old Tamir Rice, killed in Cleveland for playing with a toy gun.

Ohio is an open-carry state. By law, cops are supposed to confirm whether someone carrying a gun is a threat.

Did cops set fires in Ferguson?

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

http://youtu.be/uT0uaZ5Ymeo

This is pretty darn convincing:

This is what Che Lank says: “Para-military Police CAUGHT ON FILM methodically setting fire to a vehicle in front of Advance Auto Parts in St. Louis MO. This happens on W Florissant Ave., the same street where nearly every fire occurred. Despite having this building locked down, Advance Auto Parts burnt down to the ground!

Here is smoking gun irrefutable proof that police were methodically and deliberately setting the fires after the announcement of the Grand Jury Decision not to indict Darren Wilson in the shooting of Michael Brown.

I think the owner of that building might want to see this footage!

UPDATE: The white pickup truck seen in the Fox News photograph of the Advance Auto Parts building can also be seen in the original footage of the police lighting a car on fire. Also, I have confirmed that these are SWAT personnel as can be seen by the matching uniforms and vehicles of SWAT on W. Florissant in the following video @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyt7G…

Also notice that the nearby buildings are on fire but “rioters” are no where to be seen. I suggest these buildings were being methodically torched by SWAT/Para-military Police operatives to create the illusion that this was done by Protesters/Looters.”

Deconstructing the bullshit

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

http://youtu.be/XIKyJbFgs3I

Via Raw Story:

CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin ripped St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch for asking Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson “softball” questions during the cross examination of his testimony, which she called “fanciful and not credible.”

On Monday, McCulloch had released all of the evidence provided to the grand jury that eventually decided not to indict Wilson for shooting unarmed teen Michael Brown. The evidence included Wilson’s testimony to the grand jury that Brown looked “like a demon, that’s how angry he looked.”

“When I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a 5-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan,” Wilson said. “That’s just how big he felt and how small I felt just from grasping his arm.”
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