Category: Police State

On the way to a funeral

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Wendell Pierce is one of my favorite actors and I can’t believe this cop didn’t recognize him. But I’m sorry that this happens to anyone:

Wendell Pierce: And the fact is… The fact is while we have this very comfortable, colloquial debate about it, when the lights go out and I go out in the street and I get behind the wheel of my car, the most dangerous moment I ever have in my life is when a police officer pulls me over. Every black man in America knows that when that happens, there’s actually a possibility his life may come to an end and that shouldn’t happen. It actually happened to me in Louisiana, dressed as I am, going to my uncle’s funeral, two toddlers in the back. I had just picked up my cousin from Chicago. A 100 degrees on the road in Louisiana, I’m pulled over and I sat there waiting for the cop to come. I have a habit of always taking my wallet out and putting it on the dash to make sure he doesn’t think this is going for a gun. I sat there and sat there and sat there and I realized he hadn’t come. Air conditioner on, 100 degrees and I look in the mirror and I see… That’s all I heard.

As I turned down the window you hear, “Motherfucker get out that car, I’m gonna blow your fucking head off.” Now he didn’t have the training to say, “I’m going to come up to the car.” I have to tell these toddlers, “Be cool. Everything’s fine. Uncle Wendell’s going to get out of the car. Everyone don’t move.” I put my hands up, get out the car, opened the door from outside. But I told the officer, “Why didn’t you use your P. A.? Simple, get in your car…” “Well why didn’t you get out of your car?” I said “I had the window’s up, it’s 100 degrees, and I had the air conditioner on. I can’t hear you.” That’s poor training, that he didn’t know that I wasn’t going to be able to hear him in the car. He’s going to fire. So it’s that sort of incident that happens too often all the time, that white America has to understand that Wendell Allen in New Orleans, Mr. Garner in Staten Island, Michael Brown in Ohio, is a constant all over this country. And if we’re going to sit here and pretend that we are post-racial, you have to realize that I can’t afford for your belief or denial that my life isn’t in danger.

Via Ed Tayter.

Horrible

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Only so many stories like this I can take in a week:

Miller’s son, however, said that the officers hadn’t listened when he tried to tell them his father was deaf.

I kept telling them that he can’t hear them. I kept telling them he can’t understand them.

This just makes it even harder. I’m the only one who knows what happened. I was right there. I saw the whole thing.

Truthiness

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Police Shooting Missouri

From yesterday’s Senate hearing on the militarization of police. Catch this little exchange:

Figures released Tuesday by Congress showed that some police departments with fewer than 10 full-time officers had received large mine-resistant trucks designed to withstand roadside bombs in Iraq. Many police departments received enough automatic rifles, such as M-16s, to give several to each officer.

“Bayonets are available under the program,” said Alan F. Estevez, the principle Defense Department undersecretary for acquisition. “I can’t answer what a local police force would need a bayonet for.”

“I can give you the answer,” replied Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky. “None.”

Police chiefs know changes will be made to the federal programs, whether from Congress or the administration, according to Jim Bueermann, the president of the Police Foundation, a research group in Washington, who testified Tuesday. He recommended that, before receiving equipment, police departments be required to prove that they informed the public, trained their officers and set policies for using the gear.

Mr. Kamoie, from Homeland Security, noted that his agency’s grants do not pay for weapons. He said infrared, helicopter-mounted surveillance gear purchased with federal grants, was instrumental in locating Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a suspect in the Boston bombing.

Mr. Coburn corrected him. Mr. Tsarnaev was discovered not by police but by a Watertown, Mass., resident named Dave Henneberry who — once police allowed people to leave their homes — walked outside and noticed a pool of blood in his boat parked in his back yard. Mr. Coburn presented an article from The Boston Globe recounting the events.

Mr. Kamoie seemed surprised. He said his colleagues had credited the helicopter camera. “I look forward to reading that article,” he said.

Grenade launchers for campus cops?

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Vietnam Protest 1969

Yeah, I guess it really is time for a revolution. This shit is scary:

The Pentagon’s 1033 program, which allows the Defense Department to unload its excess military equipment onto local police forces, has quietly overflowed onto college campuses. According to documents obtained by the website Muckrock, more than 100 campus police forces have received military materials from the Pentagon. Schools that participate in the program range from liberal arts to community colleges to the entire University of Texas system. Emory, Rice, Purdue, and the University of California, Berkeley, are all on the list.

In 1990, Congress enacted the National Defense Authorization Act, including the magnanimous section 1208, which since 1996 has been known as program 1033. Over the last 17 years, this trickle-down gift economy has distributed more than $4.3 billion worth of equipment, according to program administrators. As Ferguson police rolled up to peaceful protesters in military-grade tanks, firing tear gas and rubber bullets, President Obama ordered a review of the program, which reached new highs in regifting under his tenure.

It’s clear why a review of the program is in order, because it isn’t clear at all what sort of equipment these colleges are receiving. David Perry, the president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators, told Politico that 1033 mostly funnels “small items” to college police forces for daily use. These could be anything from office supplies or uniforms or car parts, but it’s probably not all that tame. Campus Safety magazine recommends that universities take part in the 1033 program to cover a range of needs from storage units to grenade launchers. That is, after all, what the program was designed to achieve.

But program 1033 doesn’t even come close to explaining all the ways in which campus police have been militarized over the past two decades. Colleges can also apply for Homeland Security grants, the same ones made available to every municipal police department in the country after 9/11. In 2012, UC Berkeley tried to use the program to purchase an eight-ton armored truck. After a backlash, university officials ultimately decided the truck was “not the best choice for a university setting.” The following year, Ohio State University acquired a mine-resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicle. So far, it has yet to be targeted.

Other college policies are even more difficult to quantify, though they pose immense obstacles to the cultures of free action and thought that academic institutions are supposed to cultivate. One such policy is the Memorandum of Understanding, in which local law enforcement enters into an official partnership with campus “peace officers.” Sometimes memoranda of understanding can have positive impacts on students, as when they are established between universities and rape crisis centers to ensure that anyone seeking help receives proper care. In this sort of arrangement, universities work with centers and both institutions train one another, so that resources and knowledge are shared. This is what happens with local and campus police arrangements: The departments draft vague language to work in concert on operations both on and off campus, but the actual extent of this partnership is not well documented, with the line between campus police forces and those controlled by local government fuzzy at best.

Continue reading “Grenade launchers for campus cops?” →

Feds to probe Ferguson PD

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Eric Holder going to Ferguson- is this a witch hunt?

This is significant and puts other police departments on notice that DoJ isn’t going to turn a blind eye anymore:

Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday announced a sweeping federal civil rights investigation of the police department of Ferguson, Missouri, citing a “deep mistrust” between officers and the people who live there.

Holder said the investigation would determine whether officers in Ferguson had “engaged in a pattern or practice of violations of the U.S. Constitution or federal law.”

He said that the investigation would analyze police use of force, traffic stops, searches and the treatment of detainees. It will go beyond the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, by a white officer, Darren Wilson, on Aug. 9.

[…] He said that Justice Department officials had also reviewed records, including racial statistics for police stops, before deciding the open the investigation. The Justice Department is investigating the Brown shooting separately, as is a grand jury in the St. Louis area.

Thanks to Steve Duckett Attorney at Law.

Failure in Gaza

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

GUETO
Good take on the politics behind the scenes in Israel and Gaza, and why Netanyahu never wanted a peace agreement.

Netanyahu could have chosen a different path.2 He could have used the reconciliation to reinforce Abbas’s position and further destabilize Hamas. He could, in recognition of the agreement, have encouraged Egypt to open its border with Gaza in order to demonstrate to Gazans that the Palestinian Authority offered a better life than Hamas. Instead, Israel prevented the transfer of salaries to 43,000 Hamas officials in Gaza, sending a clear message that Israel would not treat Gaza any differently under the rule of moderate technocrats from the Palestinian Authority.

The abduction of three Israeli youths in the West Bank on June 12 gave Netanyahu another opportunity to undermine the reconciliation. Or so he thought. Despite the statement by Khaled Mashal, the Hamas political bureau chief, that the Hamas political leadership did not know of the plans to carry out the abduction, Netanyahu was quick to lay the blame on Hamas, declaring that Israel had “unequivocal proof” that the organization was involved in the abduction. As yet, Israeli authorities have produced no such proof and the involvement of the Hamas leadership in the kidnapping remains unclear. While the individuals suspected of having carried out the kidnapping are associated with Hamas, some of the evidence suggests that they may have been acting on their own initiative and not under the direction of Hamas’s central leadership. Regardless of this, Netanyahu’s response, apparently driven by the ill-advised aim of undermining Palestinian reconciliation, was reckless.3

Determined to achieve by force what he failed to accomplish through diplomacy, Netanyahu not only blamed Hamas, but linked the abduction to Palestinian reconciliation, as if the two events were somehow causally related. “Sadly, this incident illustrates what we have been saying for months,” he stated, “that the alliance with Hamas has extremely grave consequences.” Israeli security forces were in possession of evidence strongly indicating the teens were dead, but withheld this information from the public until July 1, possibly in order to allow time to pursue the campaign against Hamas.

On the prime minister’s orders, IDF forces raided Hamas’s civil and welfare offices throughout the West Bank and arrested hundreds of Hamas leaders and operatives. These arrests did not help to locate the abductors or their captives. Among the arrested were fifty-eight Palestinians previously released as part of the deal to return the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been a captive of Hamas since 2006.

As part of this ill-conceived operation against Hamas, Israel also mounted air strikes on Hamas facilities in Gaza. Apparently, Hamas did not take an active part in firing rockets for more than two weeks, although it did not prevent other factions in Gaza from firing.4 Only on June 29 or 30 did Hamas restart the rocket bombardment of Israeli territory, which it had not engaged in since November 2012.5 Israel retaliated against Hamas in Gaza and a vicious cycle began. Netanyahu lost control over an escalation he had instigated. In his badly misjudged eagerness to blame Abbas and punish him for reconciling with Hamas, Netanyahu turned a vicious but local terrorist attack into a runaway crisis.

H/t Kush Arora.

‘Very urban areas’

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Police Shooting Missouri
My God, these cops are parodies of themselves!

CLAYTON, Mo. — The head of the Saint Louis County Police, who oversaw the crackdown on protests in nearby Ferguson shortly after a teenager was shot and killed by a police officer there, is defending the way his officers used military-style equipment even during peaceful daytime protests.

Chief Jon Belmar said Wednesday that in his opinion — as well as in the opinion of police chiefs around the country — much of the military-style equipment now used by police is necessary “because we patrol very urban areas.”

Belmar added that the St. Louis County Police had a responsibility to mitigate the threat of “serious crimes” and “certain terrorist events.” In practice, though, he said the equipment is used in armed barricade situations and, occasionally, in executing search warrants. He said he never anticipated he would ever use it against demonstrators.

“I never envisioned a day in which we would see that type of equipment used against protesters. But I also never envisioned a day in 28 years that we’d see the kind of criminal activity spin out of peaceful demonstrations,” Belmar said.

Responding to questions from The Huffington Post and other reporters at St. Louis County Police headquarters, the chief said he had no regrets about some of the more aggressive tactics used in Ferguson this month, such as releasing tear gas on the crowds.

They’re cops, they do whatever they want

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

A homeless handicapped woman and a service dog? Yeah, I can see why he felt threatened:

For eight months, Diane Smith says she has been panhandling near the Highway 65 off ramp on Hubbell Avenue without any problems. That is until recently, when the 50-year-old says she was attacked by a Polk County Deputy, who she says also choked her service dog.

Smith says Deputy Adam Rodgers called her to his patrol car. She says she offered her state issued weapons permit to Deputy Rodgers as identification. That’s when she says the deputy told her he felt threatened, so she walked away. “Next thing you know I’m in trouble and arrested he thinks I’m threatening him and I’m being thrown down on the ground and he hangs my service dog clear up in the air,” Smith says, “I don’t know what was in his mind. You know? I don’t know. he just…he hung her up and she wasn’t biting him, you know? “

Smith is charged with Interference With Official Acts. According to online records, this is her first serious arrest. A sheriff’s department spokeswoman is refusing to turn over police car dash-cam video of the incident, even though she acknowledges it is public information. She says she has to get permission from the Polk County Attorney first, even though there is no law or policy requiring her to do so.

See why cops have to play with those toys?

~ susie

Day of Rage-Denver,CO

It’s “use it or lose it”:

The militarization of America’s police forces has been the result of federal policy that not only provides the means to give men-in-blue the same tools as combat soldiers, but in fact requires law enforcement to “use it or lose it” when it comes to military equipment.

Specifically, the Department of Defense’s 1033 program—which funnels all kinds of military surplus goods to police—has a provision that clearly says that any participating law enforcement agency must use its equipment within one year of receiving it. If they don’t, they have to give it up.

This from the state of Missouri’s “application to participate” in 1033: “Property obtained under this SPO must be placed into use within one (1) year of receipt, unless the condition of the property renders it unusable, in which case the property can be returned to the nearest DLA Disposition Services Site. If property is not put into use by the LEA (law enforcement agency) within one (1) year, the State/LEA must coordinate a transfer of property to another LEA or request a turn-in to return the property to the nearest DLA Disposition Services Site.”

Another problem with the Pentagon’s decision to shower police forces with military hardware is that it’s not accompanied by training, Amanda Taub noted at Vox.

Militarization is profitable

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Retired Philly police Captain Ray Lewis

Philly retired police captain Ray Lewis in Ferguson was interviewed by VICE:

In 2011, when Middle American thought of the Occupy Movement as a smorgasbord of drum circles, a photo emerged of a former police captain being arrested by the NYPD. That was Ray Lewis, 23-year veteran of the Philadelphia Police Department. The Occupy Movement turned him into some sort of legitimized and uniformed social advocate. He’s since traveled to various protests across the US, including the recent unrest in Ferguson. I caught up with him across the street from the QuikTrip where Mike Brown was killed.

VICE: What’s the most surprising thing you’ve seen in Ferguson?
Ray Lewis: Last night I saw officers not wearing name tags or badges. It’s unfathomable to me that officers, while being investigated, and with international attention, are still breaking the law. I can’t believe it. Officers on site are allowing it. That’s unheard of. If I ever saw that, the officer would be off the street in a second.

You’ve never seen anything like that before?
My officers knew better. They’d never think of doing something like that. The thing is, there’s no accountability. They get away with it here. That shows me one thing—it shows that nothing gets done to them.

Who did you see doing that?
It was the dark blue uniforms—either Ferguson or highway patrol. Speaking of which, I’ve got the St. Louis police right over my shoulder here. I don’t know what they’re doing, but I’m standing right next to CNN.

What do you think the solution in Ferguson is?
Well, Police Chief Jackson has got to go. He will go. That’s one of the ways they’ll persuade the citizens. They’re going to have to get rid of his top commanders and get new guys to come in. They’ll know that they have to do the job right. But [these officers] are going to say, “Now nobody is going to cover for me.” They’re going to try and undermine the new command. It takes time to get around that.

The new commanders need to designate an officer as a community-relations officer. He’s got to interact. The people get to know the officer, and the officer gets to know the people. Right now there is no interaction.

At Chief Jackson’s press conference where he announced the name of the officer [who shot Mike Brown], there were around 12 officers behind him—all white. If he had intermingled with the community in his four years, he’d have had 12 black people back there.

Go read the whole thing.