Category: Law Enforcement Misconduct

I Approve

No Comments

Today, members of the St. Louis Rams football franchise walked out onto the field with their hands up, using the gesture made famous by the Ferguson protesters:

Members of the NFL’s St. Louis Rams came onto their home field on Sunday posing with the ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ gesture associated with the shooting of teenager Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri.

 The gesture has become part of a movement designed to draw attention to the spate of shootings of young African-American men by police officers across the country.

 As player introductions began at the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis, five players — Stedman Bailey, Tavon Austin, Jared Cook, Chris Givens, and Kenny Britt — came out onto the field first, to the applause of the crowd, before being joined by their teammates.

Rather unsurprisingly, the police officer’s union is calling for disciplinary measures to be taken against these players:

Reacting to five members of the St. Louis Rams coming onto the field for Sunday’s game displaying the ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ gesture, a St. Louis police officers fraternal organization is demanding the team discipline the players, and that the team and league issue a formal apology, reports KSDK.

 In a statement released Sunday evening, the St. Louis Police Officers Association condemned the display, calling it “tasteless, offensive and inflammatory.”

 Prior to player introductions before Sunday’s game, five players — Stedman Bailey, Tavon Austin, Jared Cook, Chris Givens, and Kenny Britt — came out onto the field first with their hands in the air prior to being joined by their teammates.

Notwithstanding some puffery from the union about the 1st amendment, it’s clear that the St. Louis Police Officers Association has no concept of civil rights.

Or, to put it another way, “Why does the St. Louis Police Officers Association hate America?”

Your Statistical Graphic of the Day

No Comments

Yesterdat, I mentione the relative rarity of Federal Grand Juries no-billing to provide context in the Ferguson ruling.

Today, I show you the infographic:

………

That data is from a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and covers October 1, 2009, to September 30, 2010. Over that time period, over 193,000 federal offenses were investigated, about 16 percent of which were declined for prosecution. That leaves just over 162,300 offenses that the government tried to prosecute. And the grand jury decided against doing so 11 times, finding no true bill or a lack of evidence to do so.

Nope. Nothing suspicious here.

Move along.

And Here is a Part of the Solution to Law Enforcement Impunity

No Comments

Here is a fascinating concept.

Given that police misconduct costs taxpayers millions of dollars, and a small percentage of the police are responsible for the bulk of these costs, how about requiring police officers to carry their own liability insurance, just as doctors are:

In almost every city across the US, tax dollars are used to cover the damages and settlements from lawsuits filed against their police departments due to officer misconduct. Taxpayers in essence pay out massive amounts in damages for officers not doing their job properly. Additionally, the cost is compounded because taxpayers are forced to continue paying the salaries of these criminal cops.

 City officials don’t have the guts to hold officers accountable for their actions. So a new approach is necessary to hold rogue officers responsible for their conduct.

 Just like doctors have to carry malpractice insurance, police officers should be required to carry professional liability insurance as a condition of employment.

 ………

 Similarly to how other professionals, such as doctors who are sued too many times become uninsurable, the demands of professional liability insurance will ensure risk reduction takes place. Meaning basically that if city officials won’t hold police accountable for their actions an insurance company on the hook for large police misconduct payouts certainly will.

 Problem officers would find their rates up until eventually they would become uninsurable, a wonderful way to have problem officers forced out of policing entirely.

 To avoid running into problems with union contracts, the strategy would allow cities to fund the base rate of the coverage, and officers funding any additional costs that would be associated with their claims history.

 In most cities, and Minneapolis in particular, it has been found that a handful of officers are responsible for the majority of complaints and lawsuits regarding police brutality.

Here is a quick rundown of how it would work:

  • Out of Control Cops: Evil.
  • Insurance Companies: Evil.
  • Insurance companies vs. Out of Control Cops: Pass the Popcorn.

Any questions?

The Cops will Riot, Not the Protesters. That’s What Happened the Last Time

No Comments

Craven Politician,* and Missouri Governor Jay Nixon has decided to declare a state of emergency and call out the National Guard:

Governor Jay Nixon activated the Missouri National Guard in anticipation of unrest when a grand jury decides whether to indict a white police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black teenager.

Nixon declared a state of emergency and created a “unified command” of police agencies in preparation for the decision, due this month in the slaying of 18-year-old Michael Brown of Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb.

“As part of our ongoing efforts to plan and be prepared for any contingency, it is necessary to have these resources in place in advance of any announcement,” Nixon, a 58-year-old Democrat, said yesterday in a statement. “Public safety demands that we are fully prepared.”

The violence in Ferguson last time did not come from the protesters. It came from the cops.

The Ferguson, and the other local and county police forces participating, rioted.

If Nixon wants to do the right thing, he needs to take those Guard troops, and use them to keep the local police in their barracks.

If he is not willing to do so, then Obama should federalize the guard, and lock down the cops.

A lot of meaningless violence would be prevented.

*But I repeat myself.

Taibbi is Back

No Comments

Now that Matt Taibbi is no longer being gaslighted by FirstLook media, he’s back to writing about corruption in finance, and this one is a doozy.

Basically, he has found a whistle blower who taking the step of breaching her confidentiality agreement to reveal extensive and systematic fraud at J.P. Morgan Chase:

She tried to stay quiet, she really did. But after eight years of keeping a heavy secret, the day came when Alayne Fleischmann couldn’t take it anymore.

“It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street,” she says. “I thought, ‘I can’t sit by any longer.'”

Fleischmann is a tall, thin, quick-witted securities lawyer in her late thirties, with long blond hair, pale-blue eyes and an infectious sense of humor that has survived some very tough times. She’s had to struggle to find work despite some striking skills and qualifications, a common symptom of a not-so-common condition called being a whistle-blower.

leischmann is the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported – more on that later) to keep the public from hearing.

Back in 2006, as a deal manager at the gigantic bank, Fleischmann first witnessed, then tried to stop, what she describes as “massive criminal securities fraud” in the bank’s mortgage operations.

Thanks to a confidentiality agreement, she’s kept her mouth shut since then. “My closest family and friends don’t know what I’ve been living with,” she says. “Even my brother will only find out for the first time when he sees this interview.”

………

She was blocked at every turn: by asleep-on-the-job regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, by a court system that allowed Chase to use its billions to bury her evidence, and, finally, by officials like outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, the chief architect of the crazily elaborate government policy of surrender, secrecy and cover-up. “Every time I had a chance to talk, something always got in the way,” Fleischmann says.

This past year she watched as Holder’s Justice Department struck a series of historic settlement deals with Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America. The root bargain in these deals was cash for secrecy. The banks paid big fines, without trials or even judges – only secret negotiations that typically ended with the public shown nothing but vague, quasi-official papers called “statements of facts,” which were conveniently devoid of anything like actual facts.


And now, with Holder about to leave office and his Justice Department reportedly wrapping up its final settlements, the state is effectively putting the finishing touches on what will amount to a sweeping, industrywide effort to bury the facts of a whole generation of Wall Street corruption. “I could be sued into bankruptcy,” she says. “I could lose my license to practice law. I could lose everything. But if we don’t start speaking up, then this really is all we’re going to get: the biggest financial cover-up in history.”

Read the rest. 

It’s a long read, but well worth it.

The fact that all the big banks are criminal enterprises is now a surprise to anyone who reads the paper, but Taibbi’s description of Fleischmann’s experience with the so called regulators and so called authorities a searing indictment of the deeply craven and corrupt people at the Justice Department, particularly Eric “Place” Holder.

What a Surprise, the No Fly Zone over Ferguson was About Restricting Press Access

No Comments

It was patently obvious at the time, but now we have evidence on tape:

The federal government agreed in August to a request by the police to restrict about 37 square miles of airspace over Ferguson, Mo., for 12 days for what they said were safety concerns, but audio recordings show that the local authorities privately acknowledged that the purpose was to keep away news helicopters during violent street protests.

On Aug. 12, the morning after the Federal Aviation Administration imposed the first flight restriction, the agency’s air traffic managers struggled to redefine the flight ban to allow commercial flights to operate at nearby Lambert-St. Louis International Airport and for police helicopters to fly through the area — while still prohibiting flights.

“They finally admitted it really was to keep the media out,” one administration manager said about the St. Louis County Police Department in a series of recorded telephone conversations obtained by The Associated Press. “But they were a little concerned of, obviously, anything else that could be going on.”

At another point, referring to the temporary flight restriction, a manager at the administration’s center in Kansas City, Mo., said the police “did not care if you ran commercial traffic through this T.F.R. all day long. They didn’t want media in there.”

Seriously, this is America, and this is not acceptable.

Not only do we need to disband the Ferguson PD, we probably need to do it for the St. Louis County PD as well.

These are ineluctably corrupt organizations.

They cannot be fixed.  They need to be shut down.

This is not The Onion

No Comments
Following years of misconduct, and a federal consent degree, members of the Seattle police force have brought a lawsuit to protect their constitutional right to police brutality:

Over the past year, the Seattle police department has revised its policies on when police can use force, as part of a settlement with the Justice Department over findings that officers used frequent excessive, unconstitutional force on suspects.

But some 125 Seattle police officers responded by filing a lawsuit challenging the new rules. In their view, the new policies infringe on their rights to use as much force as they deem necessary in self-protection. They represent about ten percent of the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild membership. The police union itself declined to endorse the lawsuit.

This week, a federal judge summarily rejected all of their claims, finding that they were without constitutional merit, and that she would have been surprised if such allegations of excessive force by officers did not lead to stricter standards.

The officers claimed the policies infringed on their rights under their Second Amendment and under the Fourth, claiming a self-defense right to use force. Chief U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman pointed out that the Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms — not the right to use them — and that the officers “grossly misconstrued” the Fourth Amendment when they claimed that it protects them, and not individuals who would be the subjects of police force or seizures.

Seriously, there is something profoundly wrong with those officers, and the fact that they carry firearms and have the power of arrest makes me want to stay away from Seattle, and vacation someplace safer, like Kabul.

Sanity in Minnesota

No Comments

He has a sense of outrage that Stewart Lacks

Minnesota has changed the law to require a conviction or guilty plea before allowing civil forfeiture:

In a big win for property rights and due process, Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton signed a bill yesterday to curb an abusive—and little known—police practice called civil forfeiture. Unlike criminal forfeiture, under civil forfeiture someone does not have to be convicted of a crime, or even charged with one, to permanently lose his or her cash, car or home.

The newly signed legislation, SF 874, corrects that injustice. Now the government can only take property if it obtains a criminal conviction or its equivalent, like if a property owner pleads guilty to a crime or becomes an informant. The bill also shifts the burden of proof onto the government, where it rightfully belongs. Previously, if owners wanted to get their property back, they had to prove their property was not the instrument or proceeds of the charged drug crime. In other words, owners had to prove a negative in civil court. Being acquitted of the drug charge in criminal court did not matter to the forfeiture case in civil court.

As Lee McGrath, the executive director of the Institute for Justice’s Minnesota chapter, put it, “No one acquitted in criminal court should lose his property in civil court. This change makes Minnesota’s law consistent with the great American presumption that a person and his property are innocent until proven guilty.”

The bill faced stiff opposition from law enforcement and a bottleneck in the legislature. In March, the Star Tribune called it an “outrage” that lawmakers were “dragging their feet on one of the big, common-sense changes” to the state’s forfeiture laws. Ultimately, SF 874 found wide, bipartisan support, passing the state senate 55 to 5 and the state house unanimously. The reforms will go into effect starting August 1, 2014.

The story is from May, but I just found about it, and I also found this presentation from John Oliver on this issue, and I it was just too good not to discuss.

Civil forfeiture statute has clearly morphed into a deeply corrupt enterprise, and it needs to be completely restructured.

The Minnesota law is a good start, but I would also change the disposition of funds.

 When law enforcement is paid for sh%$ like this, it rapidly begins to resemble a protection racket.

My suggestion would be a scholarship funds.

The Prosecutor for the Ferguson Shooting is Throwing the Grand Jury Investigation

No Comments

It has become patently transparent that even inside the beltway know-nothing Dana Milbank feels compelled to call this out:

What happened in Ferguson, Mo., last month was a tragedy. What’s on course to happen there next month will be a farce.

October is when a grand jury is expected to decide whether to indict the white police officer, Darren Wilson, who killed an unarmed black teenager by firing at least six bullets into him. It’s a good bet the grand jurors won’t charge him, because all signs indicate that the St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, doesn’t want them to.

The latest evidence that the fix is in came this week from The Post’s Kimberly Kindy and Carol Leonnig, who discovered that McCulloch’s office has declined so far to recommend any charges to the grand jury. Instead, McCulloch’s prosecutors handling the case are taking the highly unusual course of dumping all evidence on the jurors and leaving them to make sense of it.

McCulloch’s office claims that this is a way to give more authority to the grand jurors, but it looks more like a way to avoid charging Wilson at all — and to use the grand jury as cover for the outrage that will ensue. It is often said that a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich if a prosecutor asks it to. But the opposite is also true. A grand jury is less likely to deliver an indictment — even a much deserved one — if a prosecutor doesn’t ask for it.

McCulloch has done this before:

……… During his tenure, there have been at least a dozen fatal shootings by police in his jurisdiction (the roughly 90 municipalities in the county other than St. Louis itself), and probably many more than that, but McCulloch’s office has not prosecuted a single police shooting in all those years. At least four times he presented evidence to a grand jury but — wouldn’t you know it? — didn’t get an indictment.

This is rather unsurprising.

DA’s don’t want to prosecute cops in the first place, they have to work with them, and McCulloch has a particularly bad record in terms of prosecuting police misconduct .

The fix is in.

And Now the Cops are Ratting Out Christie’s Bridge Scandal

No Comments

Props to the The Bergen Record for their coverage of Bridgegate.

Today, they revealed that senior staff at the Port Authority Police were aiding the bridge closures, and the rank and file cops are talking:

On the second day of the George Washington Bridge lane closures last year, a Port Authority police officer stationed at a gridlocked intersection picked up the two-way radio in his patrol car. The closures were creating “hazardous conditions” on Fort Lee’s streets, he told fellow officers according to his own account, and the lanes needed to be reopened.

 “Shut up,” a Port Authority police supervisor at the bridge allegedly replied, instructing the officer not to discuss the apparently secret operation over an open radio channel.

 That exchange, as described by officer Steve Pisciotta and involving the highest-ranking officer at the bridge, Deputy Inspector Darcy Licorish, is included in a summary of the recollections of nearly a dozen rank-and-file police officers that was provided to lawmakers investigating the lane closures, according to documents obtained by The Record.

The accounts of 11 officers at the bridge during the week of the closures share common threads and provide vivid new details about how the operation was put into effect on a Monday morning nearly a year ago.

 ………

 The instructions about the new lane configuration, many of them said, were delivered at roll call before the morning rush hour on the first day by Police Lt. Thomas “Chip” Michaels, who grew up with Governor Christie in the town of Livingston. He told the officers not to touch the traffic cones choking the number of access lanes out of Fort Lee from three down to one, according to the officers.

Later that morning, officers said they saw Michaels driving David Wildstein — the Port Authority executive who ordered the closures and also grew up with Christie — around Fort Lee’s gridlocked streets.

………

 Several immediately heard gossip in a police break room that the closures were part of a dispute between Christie and Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, who had declined to endorse the governor for re-election. The officers described the resulting traffic as “horrible” and “horrific,” and at least one urged a reversal of the operation, only to get warnings that his remarks over the radio were “inappropriate,” according to his attorney. It’s the first indication that police charged with patrolling the bridge recognized and notified superiors of the chaos being caused by the lane closures.

The summary, written by the legislative panel’s attorney Michael W. Knoo and based on an interview with the officers’ attorney Dan Bibb, renews questions about the role of some Port Authority police officers in what appears to have been an exercise motivated partly by politics.

The Record also obtained separate summaries of informal interviews with the two police supervisors at the bridge at the time, Michaels and Licorish. Those interviews were conducted prior to the one given on behalf of the 11 rank-and-file officers and do not address some of the allegations regarding the instructions – and warnings – the officers say they received.

………

 Some of the 11 rank-and-file officers at the bridge, however, described the supervisors as ordering them not to voice opposition to the lane closures as they were happening.

 Perhaps the most explosive anecdote was provided on behalf of Pisciotta, a 12-year officer who is typically one of the first to arrive at the bridge before the morning rush hour, according to the summary. Pisciotta’s attorney said his client, who had worked at the bridge for over five years, recognized early on that the closures were causing traffic safety problems and aired his concern over the radio on the second day, according to the summary.

………

 Licorish “replied to Pisciotta by radio, telling him to ‘shut up’ and that there could be no further discussion of the lane closures over the air,” according to Pisciotta’s attorney.

Michaels and a police sergeant then “visited him in person at his post to tell him that his radio communication had been inappropriate,” the attorney said.

A second officer, Angela Tait, said she witnessed both exchanges, according to the summary.

State Sen. Loretta Weinberg, of Teaneck, who is co-chairwoman of the legislative panel, said the summaries indicate that “law enforcement was in on this whole thing.”

 “It was bad enough that it was the Port Authority and people close to the governor, but now you’ve got the people who are responsible for keeping us safe,” she said. “Any time you have law enforcement involved in a political operation, that’s very troubling.”

 Bibb, who is representing the 11 officers, also told the lawmakers’ attorney that many of the officers have already been interviewed by federal investigators, who are conducting a criminal probe. Bibb provided the legislative panel a summary of what the officers stationed at the bridge would say if subpoenaed to appear before the committee and testify under oath, according to the memo, dated Aug. 27.

Seriously, the lower level cops have both gone to the union, and gone public about this.

This is like peeling an onion, but someone is clearly making onion rings out of this, hopefully the US Attorney.

Handmaid’s Tale. It’s their goal. It’s ALWAYS been their goal.*

No Comments

In Texas (why is it AWAYS Texas), a personal tragedy for a scared young girl is made a full metal jacket exercise of police and Christofascist excess:

Parents in Texas are upset after police reportedly “swarmed” a Texas high school because a girl may have had a miscarriage in one of the bathrooms.

KDFW reported that a school custodian notified the principal at Woodrow Wilson High School after finding a “possible fetus” in one of the bathroom stalls on Friday.

The principal contacted police, who “swarmed” the school, according to KTVT.

“I seen a helicopter and I was really worried,” one student recalled.

Parent Christine Kerry was outraged that she had not been notified as to why so many police had been deployed to the school.

“I got out of my car and specifically asked, ‘What’s going on, and is it safe for these kids to be out here?’” she said. “And I was told to go away.”

………

Dallas Police Department’s Child Abuse Unit detectives were investigating to find out who may have abandoned the fetus. The person involved was being considered a “suspect.”

“We’re reviewing video, talking to the teachers, trying to determine if anybody has any knowledge of any student that may have had something going on in their life, and pray,” Dallas Police Major John Lawton said.

Alan Elliott of Baby Moses Dallas explained to KDFW that the mother could have avoided any criminal charges if she had taken advantage of Baby Moses laws by carrying the child to term, and then dropping it off at a safe baby site like a fire station.

“And that’s a happy ending when that happens, because the baby is safe, the mother is protected from any sort of prosecution, so it’s a win-win for both of them,” Elliot noted.

However, it was not immediately clear how far along the pregnancy was, and the cause of the possible miscarriage was not known.

And the cops are already treating it as a crime scene, because maybe a poor, scared girl, might have taken RU-486 or some similar drug to terminate a pregnancy.

This is all about punishing some poor, scared, teen because she tried to assert autonomy over her body.

These people just hate fear women, and their sexual power.

Please, can we give Texas back to Mexico?

*H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS for the title.

University of California Study Reveals the Obvious

No Comments

Rather unsurprisingly, when protests occur, police frequently provoke violence:

The violence that turns a small-town protest into a fiery national spectacle like the one that has played out this month in Missouri is often unwittingly provoked by police, according to researchers at UC Berkeley.

The research team, which studied clashes between police and activists during the Occupy movement three years ago, found that protests tend to turn violent when officers use aggressive tactics, such as approaching demonstrators in riot gear or lining up in military-like formations.

Recent events in Ferguson, Mo., are a good example, the study’s lead researcher said. For nearly two weeks, activists angered by a white police officer’s fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager have ratcheted up their protests when confronted by heavily armed police forces.

“Everything starts to turn bad when you see a police officer come out of an SUV and he’s carrying an AR-15,” said Nick Adams, a sociologist and fellow at UC Berkeley’s Institute for Data Science who leads the Deciding Force Project. “It just upsets the crowd.”

Adams said many law enforcement agencies aren’t aware that they set the tone of a protest and end up inflaming it.

I disagree with the last point.

I think that police are very aware that militarized responses encourage protests to turn violent, and that this violence gives a justification to engage in kinetic action to break up the protests.

This has been the norm for police-protest interactions ever since the mid 1800s, when police were used to crush organized labor.

Today’s Must Read

No Comments

Charlie Pierce notices something about the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, specifically the treatment of the body:

I keep coming back to what seems to me to be the most inhumane thing of all, the inhumane thing that happened before the rage began to rise, and before the backlash began to build, and before the cameras and television lights, and before the tear gas and the stun grenades and the chants and the prayers. I keep coming back to the one image that was there before the international event began, before it became a television show and a symbol in flames and something beyond what it was in the first place. I keep coming back to one simple moment, one ghastly fact. One image, from which all the other images have flowed.

They left the body in the street.

Dictators leave bodies in the street.

Petty local satraps leave bodies in the street.

Warlords leave bodies in the street.

A police officer shot Michael Brown to death. And they left his body in the street. For four hours. Bodies do not lie in the street for four hours. Not in an advanced society. Bodies lie in the street for four hours in small countries where they have perpetual civil war. Bodies lie in the street for four hours on back roads where people fight over the bare necessities of simple living, where they fight over food and water and small, useless parcels of land. Bodies lie in the street for four hours in places in which poor people fight as proxies for rich people in distant places, where they fight as proxies for the men who dig out the diamonds, or who drill out the oil, or who set ancient tribal grudges aflame for modern imperial purposes that are as far from the original grudges as bullets are from bows. Those are the places where they leave bodies in the street, as object lessons, or to make a point, or because there isn’t the money to take the bodies away and bury them, or because nobody gives a damn whether they are there or not. Those are the places where they leave bodies in the street.

4 hours with his body lying in the street, with no effort to cover him.

This cannot be seen as anything but a demonstration of raw power to, and contempt of, the community, by which I mean the people of color in Ferguson, Missouri.

It may not say anything conclusive about what happened that day, but it does fairly clearly tell us that the police force of Ferguson do not see themselves as protectors of the poorer side of town. They see themselves as an occupying force.  (Of course, whole Mosul in Missouri thing that has been going has made this pretty clear anyway. )

That being said, read the rest of Charlie Pierce’s post. It is quite good.

Not The Onion*

No Comments

The Egyptian government is urging restraint by the police in Ferguson, Missouri:

Egypt on Tuesday urged U.S. authorities to exercise restraint in dealing with racially charged demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri – echoing language Washington used to caution Egypt as it cracked down on Islamist protesters last year. It is unusual for Egypt to criticize such a major donor. Ties between Washington and Cairo were strained after Egyptian security forces killed hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood supporters following the army’s ousting of freely elected President Mohamed Morsi in July 2013.

To quote Anna Russell, “I’m not making this up, you know.”

*But it should be.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

No Comments

This is the epitome of a pro police state mentality:

Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me. Most field stops are complete in minutes. How difficult is it to cooperate for that long?

Yes, just let the cop search your car, and your person when they have no right to.

Let them shut down your completely legal demonstration.

Let them prevent you from talking at a city council meeting because the Mayor disagrees with you.

Never, ever tape cops when they don’t want you to.

How difficult is that?

Don’t worry, cops never abuse their power.

Just a little pinprick. ……… But you may feel a little sick.

The Most Transparent Coverup Ever

No Comments

So, the Ferguson police department, aka the gang that cannot shoot straight, but will do so with fully automatic weapons mounted on top of an MRAP, decided to both release the shooting officer’s name and begin a policy of character assassination against Michael Brown:

Police on Friday said that Darren Wilson, the officer who shot and killed Michael Brown last weekend, confronted Brown after the teenager was identified as the main suspect in a convenience store robbery that occurred Saturday morning.

 However, hours later, authorities said that the robbery was not the reason for the encounter that ended with Brown shot to death on a suburban St. Louis street, suggesting that it was unrelated to the confrontation.

As Ezra Klein notes, “The police are the issue in Ferguson, not Michael Brown’s character.”

I am tempted to go all Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp fiction, and asking if Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson thinks that we look like a bitch, because he is certainly trying to f%$# us like one.

If there are not multiple of indictments of the police involved in this, both for the town of Ferguson and for St. Louis county, I will be suggest that it will be because of collusion between the police and the prosecutors.

Thoughts on Ferguson: Part 2: the Protests and the Police Response

No Comments

These are not peace officers, These are an implacably hostile occupying force.

This guy is eager to start shooting “animals”

First, and perhaps most telling, was the police officer caught on tape screamig, “Bring it, all you f%$#ing animals! Bring it!”

This is not just a cop who is ill trained to either handl a protest and defuse potential violence, this is someone who actively wants to shoot some people. (One does wonder which Cracker Jack box this guy got his badge out of)

Then, we have the comments by the Ferguson police chief, blaming the violence on “outside agitators,” which has historical echos to the comments of people like Birmingham’s infamous police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor.

I think that it is fairly clear that both the Ferguson, and the St. Louis County PD have not covered themselves with glory, but a bigger issue is the increasing militarization of the police, and their increasing view of the general public as the enemy:

Michael Brown was shot dead by an officer from a police force of 53, serving a population of just 21,000. But the police response to a series of protests over his death has been something more akin to the deployment of an army in a miniature warzone.

 Ferguson police have deployed stun grenades, rubber bullets and what appear to be 40mm wooden baton rounds to quell the protests in a show of force that is a stark illustration of the militarization of police forces in the US.

 “I’m a soldier, I’m a military officer and I know when there’s a need for such thing, but I don’t think in a small town of 22,000 people you need up-armor vehicles,” Cristian Balan, a communications officer in the US army, who was not speaking on behalf of the US military, told the Guardian. “Even if there’s an active shooter – are you really going to use an up-armor vehicle? Do you really need it?”

Of course the don’t but the Pentagon is giving away their slightly older stuff for free, and they are fun toys.

The problem is that it makes things worse, not better:

“As we’ve seen in Ferguson, the militarization of policing tends to escalate the risk of violence to the communities,”said Kara Dansky, senior counsel with the ACLU’s Center for Justice and the prime author of its June 2014 report on the militarization of US police. “We think that historically, the police and the military have had different roles and that American neighborhoods aren’t war zones and police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies.”

 She said the trend of militarizing local police forces has continued over the past several decades and that communities of color bare the brunt of most military policing.

 Representative Hank Johnson, a house Democrat from Georgia, said on Thursday that he plans to introduce the “Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act”, which would end the department of defense’s military surplus program.

Your mouth to God’s ear, Representative Johnson.

I would also suggest that requiring on duty police to wear cameras at all time would help.  We know what happens when both the police, and the citizenry, become aware that there is monitoring of law enforcement interactions with the general populace:

.
In 2012, Rialto, a small city in California’s San Bernardino County, outfitted its police officers with small Body Cams to be worn at all times and record all working hours. The $900 cameras weighed 108 grams and were small enough to fit on each officer’s collar or sunglasses. They recorded full-color video for up to 12 hours, which was automatically uploaded at the end of each shift, where it could be held and analyzed in a central database.

 When researchers studied the effect of cameras on police behavior, the conclusions were striking. Within a year, the number of complaints filed against police officers in Rialto fell by 88 percent and “use of force” fell by 59 percent. “When you put a camera on a police officer, they tend to behave a little better, follow the rules a little better,” Chief William A. Farrar, the Rialto police chief, told the New York Times. “And if a citizen knows the officer is wearing a camera, chances are the citizen will behave a little better.”

The situation in Ferguson has gotten so bad that both liberal icon Elizabeth Warren, and Teabagger militant Justin Amash have condemned the overreaction of the police, and civil rights icon John Lewis has called for Barack Obama to federalize the National Guard and declaring martial law.

On the bright side, the local constabulary, both the Ferguson and the St. Louis county PD have been removed from command, and replaced by the state Highway Patrol, which has resulted in a lighter touch and less violence:

A wall of militarised police had blocked the centre of Ferguson, Missouri, this week, shooting teargas and rubber bullets at seething protesters who dared to show any defiance.

 On Thursday evening it melted away.

 A carnival-like demonstration filled the centre of the city after a new police chief given control of protests over the killing of an unarmed 18-year-old implemented a dramatic shift in tactics.

 Hundreds of people gathered at the same intersection in this northern suburb of St Louis that has been the epicentre of violent clashes with police in the previous days.

 But where the officers with assault rifles once stood, backed by armoured trucks topped with snipers’ nests, on Thursday there was almost no police presence.

 Car horns filled the air as people blew whistles and chanted “no justice, no peace” and “hands up, don’t shoot”, the slogan adopted in solidarity with Michael Brown, who according to witnesses was shot by a police officer as he fled a confrontation with his arms aloft on Saturday afternoon.

 The shift followed the installation of Captain Ron Johnson of the Missouri state highway patrol as the effective commander on the ground, under orders earlier in the day from the state governor, Jay Nixon. His force replaced the St Louis county police in leading the operation

Gee, a simple rule, “Don’t be a savage and blindly unreasoning racist asshole,” appears to have defused much of the situation.

I think that the police forces in that part of Missouri rate a full deep dive investigation of their policies and actions by the Feds.

Zero tolerance, baby.

Thoughts on Ferguson: Part 1: the Shooting

No Comments

This first bit is arguably the least important detail in the whole affair.

What we know at this point is that two black men of roughly college age, Michael Brown and Dorian Johnson, were walking down the street, that a police officer confronted them over this and it ended with Michael Brown dead from multiple gunshot wounds.

The video you see is Dorian Johnson describing the confrontation.

The police claim that Mr. Johnson went for the gun, and Mr. Johnson claims that the (as still unnamed) police officer went after Mr. Brown, and that Brown was trying to get away, and his death was the result of the police officer being shot while holding his hands up.

So, what really happened?

I don’t know, but what I do know is that what happened in the immediate aftermath is very strange.

What surprises me is that Dorian Johnson has not yet been questioned by police.  Heck, it surprises me that he wasn’t taken into custody, as he wasn’t just a witness, but he was a part of the incident, as he was walking down the street with the victim.

The only reason that I can imagine that the police are studiously avoiding questioning witnesses in this matter is because the police already knew what happened, that the officer was at fault, and they are trying to cover it up.

Note that I am not talking about the law enforcement reaction to the protests, that will be part 2, I am simply describing the profound irregularities in the investigation that I cannot explain except by deliberate wrongdoing.