Police Brutality, Insensitivity and Militarism/Robotism is all the Rage Now!

[Paul Rigby]

Do you guys really want to sink our international reputation to the level of some third world banana dictatorship?

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Drew, but that view is already commonplace around the globe. The fact is hidden - more accurately, suppressed - by a media which in many countries, most obviously the UK, is US-owned and US-subservient, as are the political elites.

[Albert Doyle]

Officer Wilson said Brown charged him as if he was on drugs even though Wilson had his gun out.


Brown's friends said he took a bullet while running away, turned to put his hands up, and was gunned down.


I doubt Brown posed a serious threat to Wilson. The police escalated the situation and solved it with murder.

[Drew Phipps]

Brown "charging the officer" doesn't make ballistic sense, if the two ways of obtaining the "glancing" arm wound are either 1. front-facing hands up, or 2. back towards officer.

[Lauren Johnson]

new "toys" for the cops by Heather Digby Parton for [URL="http://www.salon.com/2014/08/20/militarized_cops_scary_new_toys_the_ugly_next_frontier_in_crowd_control/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow"]Salon
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Now that the sight of American police decked out as if they are replaying the events of Blackhawk Down has alerted the American public to the militarization of our police agencies, perhaps they will finally be receptive to the warnings that some of us have been making for years about the next generation of weapons that are being developed for "crowd control." As we've seen over the past few days, regardless of whether it's created for military purposes, this gear tends to eventually end up on the streets of the United States.

In Ferguson this week the police used one of these new weapons, the LRAD, also known as a sound cannon. These were developed fairly recently as an interdiction device to repel pirates or terrorists in the aftermath of the attack on the USS Cole. But their use as a weapon to disperse crowds quickly became obvious. In Ferguson it seems to have served mostly as a warning device, but it can cause substantial pain and hearing damage if it's deployed with the intent to send crowds running in the opposite direction. It's been used liberally by police departments for the past few years, even at such benign public gatherings as a sand castle competition in San Diego, California. The police chief (as it happens, the former FBI agent in charge at the Ruby Ridge standoff) explained that it was there in case they needed it. Evidently, San Diego takes its sand castle competitions very seriously.

But the LRAD is a toy compared to some of the other weapons the military industrial complex has been developing to deal with "crowd control." Take Shockwave, the new electric shock weapon developed by Taser International, a sort of taser machine gun:

The cartridges are tethered by 25-foot wires, which can be fired from a distance of up to 100 meters in a 20-degree arc. The "probes" on the end of the cartridges can pierce through clothing and skin, emitting 50,000 volts of electricity in the process.
"Full area coverage is provided to instantaneously incapacitate multiple personnel within that region" Taser explains.
"Multiple Shockwave units can be stacked together (like building blocks) either horizontally or vertically in order to extend area coverage or vertically to allow for multiple salvo engagements." The product description states.
The weapons can also be vehicle mounted or "daisy chained" according to Taser. Clearly it is anticipated that these things will be used on sizable crowds, meaning an increased likelihood of indiscriminate targeting.

The Department of Defense touts the use of these weapons as battlefield devices, but considering the huge market for military gear among police forces, it's fairly obvious that they have been developed for domestic use as well. You can watch a demonstration of the device here. You'll note the demo opens with the question: "What if you could drop everyone in a given area to the ground with the push of a button?" (They leave out the part where they are all screaming and writhing in terrible pain …)
And then there's Taser's new shotgun style taser called the XREP (for Extended Range External Projectile).It has the advantage of being able to be shot from a real gun and it delivers 20 long excruciating seconds of unbearable pain as opposed to the wimpy 5 seconds of the regular taser which kills people with regularity. (You can see a demonstration of that one here.) The Taser drone is still in development but it's sure to be a very welcome addition to the electroshock weapon arsenal.

If we believe, as Joe Scarborough does, that citizens are required to instantly comply with police regardless of the situation, these devices are perfect enforcement tools. On the other hand, if you believe that citizens have a right to peacefully protest and that police are not automatically entitled to deference in all circumstances, then you might want to think twice about the use of these weapons. They are only barely better than allowing police to shoot into crowds with bullets. Tasers can kill people and cause them to badly injure themselves and they are far too easy for police to use indiscriminately since the public has been brainwashed into believing they are harmless.

But there's more. The military has been developing something called the Active Denial System, also known as the Pentagon's Ray Gun. "60 Minutes" did a laudatory story on it a few years back in which it showed the training exercises the Army was using to test the weapon for potential use in Iraq. The funny thing was that the exercises featured soldiers dressed as protesters carrying signs that said "world peace," "love for all," which the "60 Minutes" correspondent characterized as something soldiers might confront in Iraq. (Who knew there was a large contingent of American-style hippies in Iraq staging antiwar protests?) The weapon itself is something out of science fiction: It's a beam of electromagnetic radiation that heats the skin to a painful 130 degrees allegedly without inflicting permanent damage. They claim there have been almost no side effects or injuries. It just creates terrible pain and panics the peaceniks into dispersing on command. What could be better than that? Imagine how great it would be if any time a crowd gathers and the government wants to shut it down, they can just zap it with heat and send everyone screaming in agony and running in the opposite direction.
In his thorough Harper's investigation on this subject, reporter Ando Arike explained the purpose behind all these new technologies:

[We have] an international arms-development effort involving an astonishing range of technologies: electrical weapons that shock and stun; laser weapons that cause dizziness or temporary blindness; acoustic weapons that deafen and nauseate; chemical weapons that irritate, incapacitate, or sedate; projectile weapons that knock down, bruise, and disable; and an assortment of nets, foams, and sprays that obstruct or immobilize. "Non-lethal" is the Pentagon's approved term for these weapons, but their manufacturers also use the terms "soft kill," "less-lethal," "limited effects," "low collateral damage," and "compliance." The weapons are intended primarily for use against unarmed or primitively armed civilians; they are designed to control crowds, clear buildings and streets, subdue and restrain individuals, and secure borders. The result is what appears to be the first arms race in which the opponent is the general population.

As I wrote earlier, in a couple of weeks the Soft-kill Convention, also known as Urban Shield, will be holding its annual trade show in Oakland, California. Police agencies from all over the world will attend to try out the various types of modern weapons that will be on display there. The super high-tech weapons described above are probably some years away from the commercial market. But it's highly likely they will make their way to the police eventually through one of the many ways the weapons manufacturers manage to put this equipment in the hands of civilian authorities if the federal government continues to make money available for that purpose.

Hopefully, Ferguson has alerted the public to the danger to our civil rights and liberties brought by the federal government arming police forces to the teeth with military gear. But it's going to take vigilance to ensure that the next time we see civil unrest and peaceful protests on the streets of America, the authorities won't be responding with electroshock or laser weapons or electromagnetic radiation devices designed purely for the purpose of gaining instant compliance from people in a crowd. If Americans foolishly accept these weapons as an improvement on the harsher methods we might see today there is a grave danger that we will be giving authorities much more power to quell dissent. In a free society it shouldn't be easy to quell dissent. If it is, that society won't be free for very long.

[Peter Lemkin]

Rebellion in Ferguson: A Rising Heat in the Suburbs

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Posted on Aug 17, 2014

By Chris Hedges

NEWARK, N.J.The public reaction to the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., exposes the shifting dynamic of rebellion and repression in the United States. Spontaneous uprisings against the lethal force routinely employed by militarized police units will probably not erupt at first out of the old epicenters of unrestWatts, Detroit, Harlem, Newark and othersbut suburban black communities such as Ferguson, near St. Louis. In most of these communities, the power structures remain in the hands of white minorities although the populations have shifted from white to black. Only three of the 53 commissioned officers in Ferguson's police department are black. These conditions, which approximate the racial divides that set off urban riots in the 1960s, have the potential to trigger a new wave of racial unrest in economically depressed black suburbs, and perhaps later in impoverished inner cities, especially amid a stagnant economy, high incarceration and unemployment rates for blacks and the rewriting of laws to make police forces omnipotent.
"We are headed into a period of increased social protest," said Lawrence Hamm, one of the nation's most important community organizers and the longtime chairman of the People's Organization for Progress. POP, which has roughly 10,000 members, is based in Newark and has 13 chapters, most of them in New Jersey. I met with Hamm in a downtown coffee shop in Newark.
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"The pendulum swung far to the right after 9/11. Now it is swinging back," Hamm said. "Fear and paralysis gripped the country after 9/11 and the creation of our authoritarian police state. We are overcoming this fear. The rebellion in Ferguson was not planned. It was spontaneous. People said, Enough.' They struck out in the only way they knew how. All the other waysand I have no doubt that the people in Ferguson and St. Louis, as we have, marched peacefully, sent letters and went to city council meetings to protest police violencehave proved ineffective. We will see other incidents like this one, but because of demographic changes these rebellions will occur in places that did not rebel previously."
Hamm said that the declining populations of primarily black citiesNewark, where he has spent most of his life as an organizer, has seen its population drop from 400,000 to about 250,000 in the last few decadescoupled with the election of black officials and the integration of blacks into police forces mean that the old centers of rebellion are less polarized.
"These [changes] helped to ameliorate the overt racism and will probably prevent a recurrence of open rebellion in these urban areas," he said. "In cities like Newark you no longer have a blatant apartheid structure. This dynamic dampens, to a degree, the movement for social justice. It dampens the outrage. It dampens the ability to mount opposition to ongoing institutional racism and oppression. But we have suburbs around Newark [much like the St. Louis suburb] Ferguson that were once white and are now black and that replicate the racial power imbalance. And this is where the tinder will be."
Being the object of unwarranted deadly force by police officers is part of what it means to be black and poor in America. But, as Hamm said, no matter how much blacks raise their voices against indiscriminate police violence "the killings keep coming."
"The police are the primary instrument of social control," Hamm said. "But after the rebellions in American cities in the 1960s the [federal government under President] Nixon realized that the police were not enough. Nixon began to link the local police with the state police and the National Guard. During the rebellion in Detroit in 1967 the [federal] state had to deploy the 82nd Airborne. Nixon set up this seamless connection between local police units and the military. It was then that we began to see a change in training, the acquisition of military equipment and the arrival of SWAT teams in black uniforms. In April 1999 when we marched in Orange [N.J.] to protest the torturing to death by the police of Earl Faison the police deployed SWAT teams on the roofs of the post office and department stores. These teams had their automatic rifles pointed at us. And we were nonviolent marchers. The real criminals [those who killed Faison] were within the ranks of the police."
In the 1970s Hamm obtained a scholarship to attend Princeton and when he graduated began work on a doctorate at the university. But he abandoned his doctoral work to return to Newark, where he had grown up. In 1983 the organizer co-founded POP, one of the nation's most impressive grass-roots radical movements. He can routinely pull thousands of people into the streets and is one of the most rousing orators in the country. He was always an agitator, organizing a student walkout in city schools when he was in high school, but he credits his political maturation to the playwright and poet Amiri Baraka, also from Newark. They met in 1971 and remained close friends until Baraka's death last January. It was Baraka, he said, who inspired him to commit his life to political struggle on behalf of poor people. And he carried that commitment to Princeton University, where he mobilized students to carry out sustained protests against the numerous ties between the university and the apartheid regime in South Africa.
"Groups like POP come out of the black liberation movement," Hamm said. "They are led by people who were deeply involved in that movement and who are committed to a lifetime of struggle. Many of the organizations that existed in the '60s don't exist anymore. POP is one of the few survivors. But POP is also consciously anti-sectarian. One of the pitfalls of the movements of the '60s was ideological sectarianism, that if you're not of a particular ideology you're wrong. Groups spent more time attacking each other than attacking the forces of oppression. We avoided that. That's why we've lasted [more than 30] years."
"There is an historical ebb and flow of social movements, and that's true of the black liberation movement," he said. "You don't have an ever increasing radicalism. You have highs and lows. There was a conscious effort to destroy the black liberation movement of the 1960s. The state had great success in that regard. But it did not totally end. People continued to fight, even though we had COINTELPRO and the assassination of black leaders, as well as the incarceration of other black leaders."
"It's easier to fight the external aggressor than it is to fight someone who looks like you [Barack Obama]," he said. "We have to grapple with this until enough people become convinced that it's not about individuals and that it's about institutions and systems of oppression. I don't think most people yet see it that way. We struggle to try to help people understand that it's not about individuals. It's about white supremacy, capitalist oppression and imperialism. But the majority does not share the radical consciousness we try to imbue. Black consciousness is oppositional, but oppositional does not necessarily mean radical. Oppositional means that people have a clear enough perspective that allows them to see an injustice and maybe a set of injustices and the desire to change those injustices. A radical consciousness requires a change of an entire system. And people in general, not just black people, people in general are not born with radical consciousness. We have to bring that kind of consciousness to them through education and persuasion. Black people see the election of Barack Obama as oppositional in terms of opposing white supremacy. But we want to tell people that just electing a president, even from a very conventional political point of view, is not enough."
"There's a difference between prophetic tradition, which we need, and political movement building," Hamm said. "Many of us knew when Obama was running for president that if elected he would be the CEO for U.S. imperialism. But if the very people we purport to serve and represent are going in a particular direction, then we have to look very hard at how we operate in that given environment. Our struggle is to build a politically potent movement. We're not going to be able to build that movement only with the people who have the most radical consciousness. When Obama is wrong, we criticize. But when the choice is between Obama and something worse, we do not tell the people to go out there and choose something worse. We don't want to alienate ourselves from our own base. We have to accurately assess and be truthful about what's happening, but at the same time we have to do that in a way that doesn't alienate us."



"After all," he went on, "the problem confronting the leftblack, white and otherwiseis that we're weak. We don't have enough people. We're weak because of the state of the labor movement in the United States. There needs to be a symbiosis between the struggle for racial equality and the labor movement. You see that in countries such as Jamaica, but not here."Three decades after he co-founded POP, Hamm, 60, admits to some frustration.
"POP is a great organization," he said. "I'm proud of our accomplishments. I'm proud of our members. But I have to say, as a criticism of myself, that after 30 years we should be stronger than we are."
"I'm growing increasingly skeptical of the ability of electoral politics to bring about the kind of social change that not only African-Americans need but that working and poor people in general need," he said. "We made the most progress when we were in the streets in the '60s. There were more than a thousand urban uprisings. And that is what we need to do mostput people in the streets."

[Peter Lemkin]

Rebellion in Ferguson: A Rising Heat in the Suburbs

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Posted on Aug 17, 2014

By Chris Hedges

NEWARK, N.J.The public reaction to the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., exposes the shifting dynamic of rebellion and repression in the United States. Spontaneous uprisings against the lethal force routinely employed by militarized police units will probably not erupt at first out of the old epicenters of unrestWatts, Detroit, Harlem, Newark and othersbut suburban black communities such as Ferguson, near St. Louis. In most of these communities, the power structures remain in the hands of white minorities although the populations have shifted from white to black. Only three of the 53 commissioned officers in Ferguson's police department are black. These conditions, which approximate the racial divides that set off urban riots in the 1960s, have the potential to trigger a new wave of racial unrest in economically depressed black suburbs, and perhaps later in impoverished inner cities, especially amid a stagnant economy, high incarceration and unemployment rates for blacks and the rewriting of laws to make police forces omnipotent.
"We are headed into a period of increased social protest," said Lawrence Hamm, one of the nation's most important community organizers and the longtime chairman of the People's Organization for Progress. POP, which has roughly 10,000 members, is based in Newark and has 13 chapters, most of them in New Jersey. I met with Hamm in a downtown coffee shop in Newark.
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"The pendulum swung far to the right after 9/11. Now it is swinging back," Hamm said. "Fear and paralysis gripped the country after 9/11 and the creation of our authoritarian police state. We are overcoming this fear. The rebellion in Ferguson was not planned. It was spontaneous. People said, Enough.' They struck out in the only way they knew how. All the other waysand I have no doubt that the people in Ferguson and St. Louis, as we have, marched peacefully, sent letters and went to city council meetings to protest police violencehave proved ineffective. We will see other incidents like this one, but because of demographic changes these rebellions will occur in places that did not rebel previously."
Hamm said that the declining populations of primarily black citiesNewark, where he has spent most of his life as an organizer, has seen its population drop from 400,000 to about 250,000 in the last few decadescoupled with the election of black officials and the integration of blacks into police forces mean that the old centers of rebellion are less polarized.
"These [changes] helped to ameliorate the overt racism and will probably prevent a recurrence of open rebellion in these urban areas," he said. "In cities like Newark you no longer have a blatant apartheid structure. This dynamic dampens, to a degree, the movement for social justice. It dampens the outrage. It dampens the ability to mount opposition to ongoing institutional racism and oppression. But we have suburbs around Newark [much like the St. Louis suburb] Ferguson that were once white and are now black and that replicate the racial power imbalance. And this is where the tinder will be."
Being the object of unwarranted deadly force by police officers is part of what it means to be black and poor in America. But, as Hamm said, no matter how much blacks raise their voices against indiscriminate police violence "the killings keep coming."
"The police are the primary instrument of social control," Hamm said. "But after the rebellions in American cities in the 1960s the [federal government under President] Nixon realized that the police were not enough. Nixon began to link the local police with the state police and the National Guard. During the rebellion in Detroit in 1967 the [federal] state had to deploy the 82nd Airborne. Nixon set up this seamless connection between local police units and the military. It was then that we began to see a change in training, the acquisition of military equipment and the arrival of SWAT teams in black uniforms. In April 1999 when we marched in Orange [N.J.] to protest the torturing to death by the police of Earl Faison the police deployed SWAT teams on the roofs of the post office and department stores. These teams had their automatic rifles pointed at us. And we were nonviolent marchers. The real criminals [those who killed Faison] were within the ranks of the police."
In the 1970s Hamm obtained a scholarship to attend Princeton and when he graduated began work on a doctorate at the university. But he abandoned his doctoral work to return to Newark, where he had grown up. In 1983 the organizer co-founded POP, one of the nation's most impressive grass-roots radical movements. He can routinely pull thousands of people into the streets and is one of the most rousing orators in the country. He was always an agitator, organizing a student walkout in city schools when he was in high school, but he credits his political maturation to the playwright and poet Amiri Baraka, also from Newark. They met in 1971 and remained close friends until Baraka's death last January. It was Baraka, he said, who inspired him to commit his life to political struggle on behalf of poor people. And he carried that commitment to Princeton University, where he mobilized students to carry out sustained protests against the numerous ties between the university and the apartheid regime in South Africa.
"Groups like POP come out of the black liberation movement," Hamm said. "They are led by people who were deeply involved in that movement and who are committed to a lifetime of struggle. Many of the organizations that existed in the '60s don't exist anymore. POP is one of the few survivors. But POP is also consciously anti-sectarian. One of the pitfalls of the movements of the '60s was ideological sectarianism, that if you're not of a particular ideology you're wrong. Groups spent more time attacking each other than attacking the forces of oppression. We avoided that. That's why we've lasted [more than 30] years."
"There is an historical ebb and flow of social movements, and that's true of the black liberation movement," he said. "You don't have an ever increasing radicalism. You have highs and lows. There was a conscious effort to destroy the black liberation movement of the 1960s. The state had great success in that regard. But it did not totally end. People continued to fight, even though we had COINTELPRO and the assassination of black leaders, as well as the incarceration of other black leaders."
"It's easier to fight the external aggressor than it is to fight someone who looks like you [Barack Obama]," he said. "We have to grapple with this until enough people become convinced that it's not about individuals and that it's about institutions and systems of oppression. I don't think most people yet see it that way. We struggle to try to help people understand that it's not about individuals. It's about white supremacy, capitalist oppression and imperialism. But the majority does not share the radical consciousness we try to imbue. Black consciousness is oppositional, but oppositional does not necessarily mean radical. Oppositional means that people have a clear enough perspective that allows them to see an injustice and maybe a set of injustices and the desire to change those injustices. A radical consciousness requires a change of an entire system. And people in general, not just black people, people in general are not born with radical consciousness. We have to bring that kind of consciousness to them through education and persuasion. Black people see the election of Barack Obama as oppositional in terms of opposing white supremacy. But we want to tell people that just electing a president, even from a very conventional political point of view, is not enough."
"There's a difference between prophetic tradition, which we need, and political movement building," Hamm said. "Many of us knew when Obama was running for president that if elected he would be the CEO for U.S. imperialism. But if the very people we purport to serve and represent are going in a particular direction, then we have to look very hard at how we operate in that given environment. Our struggle is to build a politically potent movement. We're not going to be able to build that movement only with the people who have the most radical consciousness. When Obama is wrong, we criticize. But when the choice is between Obama and something worse, we do not tell the people to go out there and choose something worse. We don't want to alienate ourselves from our own base. We have to accurately assess and be truthful about what's happening, but at the same time we have to do that in a way that doesn't alienate us."



"After all," he went on, "the problem confronting the leftblack, white and otherwiseis that we're weak. We don't have enough people. We're weak because of the state of the labor movement in the United States. There needs to be a symbiosis between the struggle for racial equality and the labor movement. You see that in countries such as Jamaica, but not here."Three decades after he co-founded POP, Hamm, 60, admits to some frustration.
"POP is a great organization," he said. "I'm proud of our accomplishments. I'm proud of our members. But I have to say, as a criticism of myself, that after 30 years we should be stronger than we are."
"I'm growing increasingly skeptical of the ability of electoral politics to bring about the kind of social change that not only African-Americans need but that working and poor people in general need," he said. "We made the most progress when we were in the streets in the '60s. There were more than a thousand urban uprisings. And that is what we need to do mostput people in the streets."

[Peter Lemkin]

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Out of Control, Hyper-Militarized Local Police-- Radley Balko Intvw Transcript-- Part 1

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By Rob Kall

This transcript series was originally published in November 2013. It is totally relevant to what's happening in Ferguson.

Ferguson Riot Police Open Fire Into Peaceful Protest Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/DrPolarbear Recorded Via Livestream from Ferguson; Ferguson riot police fire rubber bullets and tear gas canisters into ...
(image by YouTube)

This is the first half of the transcript of my interview withRadley Balko, author of Warrior Cop: The Militarization ofAmerica's Police Forces. It's an eye-opener.

Radley Balko's book
(image by Radley Balko)

Here's the link to audio recording of theinterview: Rise of the Warrior Cop; Interview withRadley Balko


Thanks to Eric Forat for help with thetranscription process.

Rob Kall: Welcome to the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show onthe NJC1360 AM, out of Washington Township reaching metro Phillyand South Jersey sponsored by, Opednews.com. That's progressivenews and opinion, just Google progressive opinion and Oped newscomes up at the top. Check us out. My guest tonight is RadleyBalko, he's the author of Rise of the Warrior Cop: TheMilitarization of America's Police Forces. He's a senior writerand investigative reporter for the Huffington Post, where hecovers civil liberties and the criminal justice system. Radley,welcome to the show.
Radley Balko: Thanks for having me on, glad to behere.
Rob Kall: So, you've got a really powerful book here,with statistics and stories that are frightening. They'reterrifying really. Let's start by you telling a story thatexemplifies what this book is all about.
Radley Balko: Sure, I'm actually going to take a storythat's not in the book, that didn't make the final edit, but that Ido think is, is emblematic of all of the problems that I, that Ioutline in the book.
This is a story about Katherine Johnson, who is a ninety twoyear old woman, who lived in a bad neighborhood in Atlanta. Andthis all started right around Thanksgiving in the year 2006. Therewas an Atlanta narcotics team out, on patrol, or sort of drivingaround. And they saw a guy walking alongside the road that they'darrested before on various charges, knew he had a record. So theyjump out on this guy, they throw him to the ground. We found outlater that they had, ended up actually planting a bag ofmarijuana on him. He knew he had a record, they knew he had arecord, so they tell him they'll let him go if he can tell themwhere they can find a large supply of drugs. So he basically justmakes up an address in the neighborhood. And that address happenedto be the address of Katherine Johnson.
Now what's supposed to happen at this point, is the police aresupposed to get a confidential informant to go do what they call acontrolled drug find. The informant will wear a wire, andthey give him a bunch of marked bills, and he's supposed to go tothis house, buy some drugs, and at that point they apply for asearch warrant.

They didn't do that. Instead, I should add I guess, that that,that process would take a day and a half, two days. But they wantedto get there quicker. So they lied, they lied on the affidavit,they claimed that they had made a controlled buy with an informantwhen they actually hadn't. And instead of waiting a couple days,they got their warrant signed within a few hours.
So later that evening they start trying to break in to thiswoman's home. As I said this was a bad neighborhood, so had putbars on her doors, so it took them awhile to get in. by the timethey got in she was standing in the living room, holding a rustyrevolver that she kept by her bed to scare people off. The gunactually didn't work, she just waved it at people, when she wantedthem, when she was frightened.
The police break down the door, she's standing there, they openfire, they kill her. They initially claim that she fired first, wenow know that wasn't true because the gun wasn't functional. Andtwo officers were wounded by, gun fire from other officers. Theycalled ambulances to come and treat those officers. They did notcall an ambulance to come and treat Katherine Johnson. Instead theylet her, handcuffed her, and let her bleed to death on her livingroom floor, while one of the officers went down to the basement toplant some marijuana. To make her look like the drug dealer thatthey claimed she was.
Of course now they have a problem, they have to find aninformant who will lie, and say that he was the informant named inthe search warrant. So they go after this guy that they had used inthe past, they put him in a police car. Informants are pretty shadypeople most of the time, they tend to be addicts or rival drugdealers. To this guy credit, to this guy's credit, he wouldn't playalong. He, there's actually this remarkable phone call that he madefrom the back of an APD cruiser, where he calls 911, immediatelyasks to speak to the FBI. Which you can't do through 911. But hesays, you know, "They're trying to make me say that I helped killthat old lady, and, and I don't want any part of it".
At this point, he jumps out of the car and starts to flee. Theofficers chase him. And there's actually a foot chase throughdowntown Atlanta. Through, you know, a hotel lobby or two,businesses. Finally this guy finds a phone, he was working with theATF at the same time. Calls his ATF agent who swoops in and pickshim up and puts him up at a hotel out in the suburbs.
At this point they open up a federal investigation. And what thefederal investigation found was that this was rampant in theAtlanta Narcotics Unit, of the Atlanta Police Department. Thatthere was lots of lying on search warrants, that there were lots ofraids on the wrong houses. A, the Atlanta City Council later heldhearings, and dozens of people came forward to say that, "Yeah thishas happened to me too". In fact they had raided another woman whowas on the same block, who was in her eighties, who also kept a gunby her bed to scare people off. They managed to hold their fire inthat case.
But what the federal investigation found was that, that thesenarcotic officers had quotas. They had to arrest so many peopleeach month, they had to seize a minimum quantity of drugs eachmonth. And, you know, what we now know, what's pretty obvious now,is that those quota's came because, like every other policedepartment in the country, the Atlanta Police Department wascompeting for a limited amount of federal resources that go towardsanti-drug policing.
So, the police department is facing pressure to enhance revenueby getting its hands on this federal funding. It passes thepressures then on to the police officers, whose careers are, jobevaluations and promotions and careers depend on meeting thisquotas, or exceeding them. And so all of this was basicallyresulted, resulting in these mass constitutional violations.
The entire narcotics units was in a pinch, they were fired orreplaced, or transferred to another department and replaced. Andthere were some promises for reform, though most of them didn't panout.
Now you could argue that, you know, Atlanta was the only policedepartment in the country where this was going on. And they justhappened to be the only one that got, the one who got caught. Butyou know these federal incentives are for every police departmentin the country. And, you know they, people tend to respond toincentives in the same way. But I, you know, I would guess thatthis is happening in far more police departments than just inAtlanta. In fact we have other cases studies showing that ithas.

[Albert Doyle]

The new witness Michael Brady says Brown ran from the cop car at least 25 feet, turned around and immediately crumpled from shots, and was then gunned down in cold blood by 3-4 more shots.

It's pretty clear officer Wilson was going to shoot down Brown as soon as he emerged from his car. I'm pretty sure the cops are just flagrant liars in this case. They've been hyped-up by Bush fascism which unleashed rogue police power on the world both domestic and international.

This is a clear case of murder. The new witness Brady said Brown turned and crumpled. This is exactly the same description given by Brown's friend. He was therefore never any threat to officer Wilson and was shot down in anger while presenting no threat.


The cops also lied about another man they shot down in Ferguson. This man approached the cops saying "Go ahead shoot me too" and was gunned down by several shots from two officers. It's obvious once the cops start shooting they shoot dead whether necessary or not. They lied in this case too saying the confronting man was holding a knife in a downstroke position while moving towards the cops. A cellphone video showed that wasn't so. This case could have easily been solved by police talk-down tactics and non-lethal force.

[Magda Hassan]

Missouri police officer on leave over video in which he says: 'I'm ... a killer'

By Greg Botelho, CNN
August 23, 2014 -- Updated 0243 GMT (1043 HKT)

Source: CNN



VIDEO HERE



STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• St. Louis County Police officer Dan Page has been taken off his job after video surfaces
  
• In it, he derides Supreme Court, calls Obama "undocumented President" from Kenya
  
• Page also talks about killing while in the military: "If I need to, I will kill a lot more"
  
• The police chief apologizes for those offended by the officer's "bizarre" remarks
  

(CNN) -- A Missouri police officer involved in maintaining security in troubled Ferguson was put on administrative leave Friday after a video surfaced showing him railing about the Supreme Court, Muslims, and his past -- and perhaps, he said, his future -- as "a killer."
The officer, Dan Page of the St. Louis County Police Department, became something of a familiar face to many earlier this month when video showed him pushing back CNN's Don Lemon and others in a group in Ferguson. At the time, CNN was reporting on the large-scale and at times violent protests calling for the arrest of a white Ferguson police officer who shot and killed African-American teenager Michael Brown.
But it's another video that led St. Louis County police officials to say they had removed Page from his post and had started a process that will likely include the department's internal affairs unit investigating and a psychological evaluation of the officer.
Officer in Ferguson relieved for remarks
Chief: I apologize for officer's remarks
Capt. Johnson: We will take swift action
"(I) apologize to the community and anybody who is offended by these remarks, and understand from me that he ... does not represent the rank-and-file of the St. Louis County Police Department," county Police Chief Jon Belmar told CNN. Belmar called the video "so bizarre."
CNN placed several phone calls Friday to what's believed to be Page's home number seeking comment on the video and disciplinary action against him, but never got a response.
Posted to YouTube and highlighted by CrooksandLiars.com, the video shows the military veteran talking for about an hour to an Oath Keepers group. According to its website, Oath Keepers is "a non-partisan association of current and formerly serving military, police, and first responders who pledge to fulfill the oath all military and police take to 'defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.'"
The president of the Oath Keepers' St. Louis/St. Charles chapter, Duane Weed, told CNN that Page was a guest speaker and is not a member of his group. A link to the video of his speech was posted to the local chapter's Facebook page on April 23 -- a day after it happened -- along with text that highlighted what Page had to say about the dangers of private contractors in war zones.
That was just one of many topics Page touched on, sometimes jokingly and at other times very seriously.
In his rambling remarks on the video, he talks about what he describes as a draft replacement for the U.S. Constitution, the "four sodomites on the Supreme Court," and a visit to Kenya "to our undocumented President's home." He refers to Barack Obama as "that illegal alien who claims to be our President."
Page frequently references violence, including nine combat tours in the Army, during which he did "my fair share of killing."
Speaking about Muslims, he says pointedly: "They will kill you."
On domestic disputes, he opines: "You don't like each other that much, just kill each other and get it over with. Problem solved. Get it done."
On urban violence, he predicts that "when the inner cities start to ignite, people are going to start killing people they don't like."
And lastly, Page says, "I personally believe the Lord Jesus Christ is my savior, but I'm also a killer. I've killed a lot and, if I need to, I will kill a whole bunch more."
"If you don't want to get killed, don't show up in front of me."
Belmar, the head of the St. Louis County police department, said all the talk about killing was especially disturbing to him.
"As a police chief, that's something I'm not going to be able to endure," Belmar said.



http://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/22/us/mis...index.html

[Albert Doyle]

Very Hitlerian.


Bush unleashed this.