(If you’re unable to see Tweets in their entirety, while holding down Control, press -, then + if you’d like them larger; they should justify.)
Rob Urie, writing at Counterpunch, posits that the murder of Unarmed Black While Running Away™ #Walter Scott by Michael Slager in North Charleston, SC might be a social inflection point for killings by police, given that he will be tried for murder.
But he warns that only the future can predict ‘ifs’ in rearview mirrors, and that only the citizen video that surfaced actually changed police minds from ‘justified’ to ‘murder’, as he was caught on film red-handed by Feidin Santana executing Mr. Scott: reflexive prosecutor, judge, and jury.
[Status quo political minister alert: ‘The Rev. Al Sharpton lauds North Charleston mayor, police chief in sermon’]
As we’ve seen before, his black partner backed up his egregious lies of ‘he reached for my gun Taser’, and seemed fine with planting evidence at the scene. ‘Black cops donning white skin of the oppressor state with their police uniforms’ is becoming only too familiar. Oh, my; and look at this: ‘Clarence Habersham, who was with Michael Slager during shooting, is being sued by another black resident who alleges that he ‘stomped on his face’. And he was not fired. Brutality Impunity.
Can Slager’s attorney convince a jury that he was ‘reasonably in fear for his life’ (SCOTUS standard)?
https://twitter.com/ShaunKing/status/586551109411536896
If he’s convicted, how much will it matter?
Can the Chicago cop who killed #Rekia Boyd on trial this week convince a jury of the same thing? If so, how much will it matter to stopping the killings?
Will there be justice for schizophrenic Laval Hall killed by Miami Gardens police for carrying a broom while being in his underwear? His mother told them he’d just gotten out of the mental hospital, but it didn’t matter. Ka-boom! But at least the cowards cuffed him once he was dead…
Or for Jason Harris whose mother called 911 for help with her schizophrenic son, and was murdered for standing in the doorway while holding a screwdriver?
https://twitter.com/BaylorPhotoGal/status/585895656822218752
Can Cleveland Cop Michael Brelo’s attorney actually convince the jury in his current trial for voluntary manslaughter that he didn’t remember jumping onto the roof of two unarmed black citizens’ car and firing 15 of the 49 bullets that killed them? His attorney has already claimed that the cops were only ‘eliminating a threat’ to those vicious cop assassin’s lives.
Eric Harris, criminal suspect, has likely already received all of the ‘justice’ he’ll ever know, as his execution while fleeing Tulsa cops was ‘just an accident’. “Fuck your breath” said one of the cops, moments before he died.
This video of anglo Francis Pusok, has gone viral, perhaps due to the fact that his brutal beat down by ten cops was captured by a television reporter in San Bernardino. He was facedown on the ground when the cop frenzy took place. Will the US Reagan/Thatcher ‘individualists’ Urie writes about take note of it, and object? Or instead, even though white, will he be considered ‘just another deserving criminal suspect’? The department intends to investigate the incident.
As Rob Urie writes in ‘Race and Class are the Real Targets of Police Repression: Disarm the Police’, the many commissions appointed to ‘study the problem’ recommend more body cams on police (fine idea, President Obama), which cameras are often used to cover up crimes by police, and ‘better policing’, which of course, doesn’t recognize the core problem that racism and classism are built into the system, and always have been.
‘A system cannot fail those who it was never built to protect.’
~ W.E.B. DuBois
The origins of police were slave patrols, the first ones created in the Carolina Colony in 1704, but they soon spread widely, including North, and apparently Constable Associations were formed to protect citizens from disgruntled Indians in New England and even St. Louis.
“The questions not being asked are why the police exist in the first place; why they are armed and if they are to be armed, why citizens don’t have the legal right to defend themselves against police violence? The ‘self-evidence’ of the need for police is premised on maintenance of a social order that has violent repression as its ‘logical’ outcome.”
He notes that Slager was acting as an agent of the state, which history of black, colonization and brutality goes back to early Charleston, an entry port for predominantly kidnapped African slaves, but that the more recent police oppression timeline began in Oakland with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, designed to stop the police from murdering blacks with impunity. He lists their demands, which are not far from the others we see in Chicago, Ferguson, and NYC.
“It wasn’t until the armed Panthers entered the state house in Sacramento that the modern gun control movement was born, notably limiting its interests to keeping the poor and powerless disarmed under the principle that, centuries of history to the contrary, concentrated social power exists to ‘protect’ them.”
That I hadn’t known.
The “Disarm the NYPD Coalition’ I wrote about earlier wants to create ‘cop free zones’. A new coalition calling itself ‘Safety Beyond Policing’ including the Million Hoodies, (#NoNewNYPD) is campaigning to funnel the millions dollars those cops would cost into making citizens’ worlds better, and their communities stronger.
“We don’t need more cops. We want strong communities.
Communities of color are being systematically over-policed while also being displaced by rising rent and gentrification. We must repair the damage of mass criminalization and help people return to their communities instead of squandering resources. Resources that help our communities thrive, lift our social net and also lower core drivers of crime are key and we demand the City Council invest the $97 million annual dollars proposed for 1,000 new cops instead towards those solutions instead.” And they offer a list of areas including mental health, public housing, transportation, and youth jobs programs.”
You can follow Dante Barry, director of Million Hoodies, on Twitter, including this priceless pic:
https://twitter.com/dantebarry/status/587360687409778688
Oddly enough, just before Urie penned his piece, the head of the Georgia SCLC, the Reverend Samuel Mosteller called on blacks to arm themselves in order to defend themselves against murderous police. Referencing both the recent killings of Nicholas Thomas and bipolar Anthony Hill by police, he said (via AJC.com):
“You stand there, (police) shoot. You run, they shoot. We’re going to have to take a different tack,” Samuel Mosteller, longtime president of the Georgia SCLC, told reporters. “Nobody is protecting the black community,” Mosteller said.”
And from From Glen Ford:
“If the Black Lives Matter mobilization is to sustain itself – if it is to go beyond protests against the latest police atrocity and become a full-fledged movement – it must embrace the principle of Black community control of the police. The entire history of the United States screams out that Black people must define and control the processes by which justice is meted out in their own communities. If there is one historical truth that is indisputable in America, it is that Black people have never gotten justice from the U.S. criminal justice system – which is why one out of every eight prison inmates on planet Earth is a Black American.
In the nearly half century since the Black Panther Party described the police as an army of occupation in Black America, we have learned the very painful lesson that inclusion of large numbers of Blacks among the ranks of the police does not change the nature of the occupation. Nor does the naming of Black police chiefs, or the election of Black mayors and city councils – and certainly not the election of a Black corporate president. In fact, the Mass Black Incarceration regime – what Michelle Alexander calls the “New Jim Crow” – gains legitimacy through diversity in hiring and the collaboration of the servile Black political class. Black cops get jobs, but people get no justice, because the mission of the police remains the same: to contain, control and terrorize the Black community. That’s their job. And that will remain the mission of policing in the Black community until the community seizes control of the police.”
He guides readers to the Black Is Back Coalition, and Omali Yeshitayla, and their upcoming conference in St. Louis on April 18 and 19.
You can read their ‘Political Overview For April Conference on Black Community Control of Police’ here. It’s quite long, and ends with these words:
“Clearly the demand and struggle for Black Community Control of the Police is a revolutionary demand. It is a demand that is required by these times of rising consciousness of Africans and the oppressed of the world.
And, like every revolutionary demand during historically critical moments the demand for Black Community Control of Police will have to be a consciously wielded ideological and political weapon directed at all forms of opportunism that would misdirect the energies of a newly awakened colonial mass.
The momentum achieved already in the struggle against colonial police violence and judicial collaboration must be captured and put in to work in the interests of our colonized people to defeat the white power colonial State and capture black State power in our own black hands.
Black Community Control of Police now!”
But sadly, I can’t find any mention of the conference on the Twitter accounts of the most well-known protestors there.
In case you’re unable to remember many of the names of those unarmed, but killed by police, ‘Mapping Police Violence’ has the stories of over a hundred unarmed black people who were killed in 2014. This is their report from March of this year. And via Brown Blaze:
‘Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have become, refuse to bear them.’
~ William Faulkner
BREAKING: After public pressure, Reserve Deputy Bob Bates charged with second-degree manslaughter in shooting death of #EricHarris
And yes, there is a city with no police. In Spain.Yes, There Really Is A City With No Cops!
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
I have been looking at math related to fixing &/or improving LibreOffice — http://www.libreoffice.org/ — so I can’t pass up inflection point. The usual math meaning of an inflection point is a single point on a curve where the slope goes to zero (as if it were about to reverse sign), but then continues on the way it was going before the infection point. No max or min, no turnaround at an inflection point – just a pause then onitgoes….
Ayup, chances are good that the administration of North Charleston put an inflection point on the curve of police violence. Their rapid clear response, once confronted with video, was quite refreshing. However, it will take alot more than just prosecuting the egregious cases to ‘bend the curve’.
~~~~ > ~~~~~ < ~~~~~~
Please note that the popopos that shot James Boyd in the Foothills last March have still not yet been charged. Instead the DA was removed from the case, leaving no prosecutor and no further action towards the maybe-someday possibility that the judge (who disqualified the DA) will actually charge the officers — http://www.abqjournal.com/567299/news/judge-grants-defense-request-to-disqualify-da-in-boyd-case.html — Note that lawyer Bregman was quite recently the head of the county Democratic party.
Here in Albuquerque we keep getting discontinuities instead of inflection points:
— DA says she may have to layoff staff to appoint a special prosecutor in the Boyd case. Perhaps the new Attorney General could step in? (har) Perhaps the AbqCC could divert some of the lawyers, guns and money they have given the City admin to
negotiate withdefend themselves from the DoJ? (har-de-har)— The City Council jumped all over their new Police Over
sightlook Board because they dared to review backlogged cases before completing theirtrainingindoctrination. I get the CC has something to say about legislative intent, but they created a precedent of political interference AND undermined the board’s credibility, quite literally at the starting gate.Perhaps the apparent discontinuities are simply reveals of how far it’s gone and how fast it is still going…
hmmm; my understanding was that the inflection point was at the top of the sine curve, and the curve went toward zero from that point.
but oh my goddess! i’d sent a friend in your area the news that brandenburg was griping to the apd that their many investigations were being slow-walked, wondering wtf was up with her after what, 16 years of zero po-po prosecutions? and now this? it makes me wonder if she knew what was afoot, and made her noises based on it.
is ‘they will decide on prosecuting HER’ some feint, as well, or for real? shoot, i hadn’t looked at david correia’s twit thang for some time now; he would have railed about this, no? (yikers, i just checked, and he doesn’t!)
i am enjoying your alternate realities, though. whassername: lo-Retta lynch? lol. yeppers; she’ll prosecute ‘im. glen ford said her sole qualification for the job is that she’s black.
thank you, lemoyne, for all the news that’s not fit to be printed. sleep well.
oh, and if i’d forgotten to say it, i sure do wish trudell would have asked the interviewer to remind him of what he *had said* about drunken indians.
No. her $OLD-OUT qualification is reserved for manning 0bama’s Barackades for their mutual Banksters! She DESERVES AG disqualification for the Citibank Baracketeering $leaze, ALONE and ought be confined herownself to LORETTO, instead!
Tipping points, inflection points, turning points… seems we’ve been here before and nothing much has changed, but maybe this time will be different.
The murder of Walter Scott caught on video is so stark and appalling that even police are saying that Slager went “too far,” and yep, “it was murder.” Deliberate. Premeditated. Murder One. Straight out. No excuses.
There was no video — that we know of — so we can’t say with certainty that’s what happened to Mike Brown, but the testimonies of most witnesses suggest that Brown’s murder was almost identical, the difference being that Brown turned to face his killer with his hands up, and Wilson just kept firing away.
Everyone has seen the video of the shooting of James Boyd in the Sandia Foothills by APD snipers way back in March of last year, a shooting that triggered the protests that led to the current movement(s) against police violence. The Boyd killing is almost never mentioned in media accounts any more — and that means that it is rarely mentioned, if it is mentioned at all, by most of the activists hitting the streets and the twitterverse to oppose police violence and claim that Black/Brown/Red Lives Matter. It’s as if that whole miserable affair in the Sandia foothills never happened. And I don’t understand that at all.
My interest and focus has been to stop the police killings — and then we can deal with the other things that must be dealt with. But it seems like so much of the focus of the movement(s) is to deal with everything except stopping the killings. We must end racism first. We must end disparate justice and punishment first. We must end the school to prison pipeline first. We must bring a halt to mass criminalization and incarceration first. We must take over police departments and civic bodies first. And so on.
No. The killing by police must stop… FIRST. As it has, almost completely, in — of all places — Albuquerque. There has been one killing by APD since last July, and that one seemed to come in response to Kari Brandenburg’s decision to indict Boyd’s killers on an open count of murder (not murder one).
Something happened, I don’t know what, to convince the powers that are over APD. to tell them to STOP THE KILLING. Which they did almost completely. That fact, too, like the Boyd killing itself, seems to have fallen into the memory hole.
Something similar happened in Oakland where killings by police were once common and now are rare.
Many cities and communities in the country have never been beset by murderous police forces. But in too many places the killing goes on and on and on, and the despair is rising that nothing can stop it.
But it can be stopped and it must be stopped, and civic powers that control police forces (especially financial interests that City Managers serve) must be convinced that the continued killing is crippling their cities.
When even police are not defending it, the murder of Walter Scott may be the tipping point that convinces those powers that the nationwide reign of terror and killing by police must end.
And then the Revolution comes, right?
i’d at least submit that *some cops* are being charged, indicted, and a few are being tried. what those outcomes will be will matter a lot in terms of the arc bending toward justice and stopping the killing, of course.
you’re so right that james boyds’ execution (and clearly with malice aforethought, or *locker room humor, as ‘officer’ sandy called it) started the national movement, although most in the #blackLives movement are unaware of it somehow. and hence, few Tweeters in the movement mention it. a few of the accounts i watch seem to understand that class plays a part, but ‘white supremacy’ is the key theme that’s developed (and i do tend to grasp why that is), and boyd and other white expendables don’t quite fit that theme. it may change, as finally they’re becoming more aware that it’s not just black males who are being murdered, but women and transgender, as well.
i understand why you say: ‘first, stop the killing’, but i guess i don’t see ‘the other things’ as quite so tangential as you do, if i get your meaning.
now remember, both the ABQ and oakland PDs have been operating under federal consent decrees, and yes, both had civil suit payouts up the wazoo, which also may *matter* to the city councils or PTB. other reasons the killings stopped are hard to reckon, but bad PR may have played a part. but on the other hand, capitalist gentrification has also played a part in tearing down the tent towns, closing trauma units, etc. in ABQ and other cities, so…i dunno.
and of course, yes: and then the revolution comes. or hillary… ;-)
but did you read lemoyne’s link? brandenburg has been ‘removed from officer sandy’s case’. ay yi yi.
It’s not so much that the “other issues” are tangential, they aren’t. They’re all related. But it’s also a matter of priorities and focus, at least in my view.
For a time, we would see people carrying signs saying “Stop Killing Us!” during protests, but they seemed to disappear after a while, and the focus became something else, often a wide variety of somethings-else, all of which I think are important issues that must be addressed, but I believe they can only be addressed appropriately or adequately when the killing stops.
Every time another publicized incident of police violence/murder occurs, the focus shifts to that incident, to demands that the culprit be held accountable, to the criminal history of the victim, the complaints lodged against the officer. It’s become highly scripted and ritualized, repeated over and over and over again. But the killing continues. For some, the constant killing has almost become a form of entertainment, and I despise that.
Now that a few officers are being held to account, fired, indicted or in the case of Slager, jailed without bail, that too is thrown into the narrative. But nothing really changes, not yet anyway. The killings continue, about three a day, month in and month out. doG only knows how many incidents of unwarranted police brutality occur daily, but I’d guess it’s in the hundreds or thousands.
This has got to stop, and it can stop. It doesn’t require solving the inherent racism of American society first. It doesn’t require that any of the other issues (many of them intractable) be solved first.
It requires an order going out from the top saying in no uncertain terms, “Stop it — or you will be fired and/or jailed.”
Oakland has been under a court supervised settlement agreement for more than a decade and until the appointment of the current chief, the PD openly defied the court and continued killing and brutalizing civilians. They got away with it. They did because the court lacked the power of enforcement, and because the city administrator(s) simply let the police do what they wanted, or encouraged them to do so in some cases (Deanna Santana). Then the new guy from Internal Affairs was appointed chief and they got a different city administrator, mayor, and council members who finally said, “You know what? Let’s put a stop to this shit,” and somehow they did.
Albuquerque only came under a consent decree last fall, but the killing (at least by APD) stopped before that, in July. It stopped, I’m sure, because the order went out from the top — Rob Perry, and whomever has his nuts in a wringer — to STOP THE KILLING. Why? I don’t know the reasons why, but the DoJ report was probably a big part of it, the continuing protests (the last big one was in June), the multi-million dollar settlements with victims’ families, and the shame brought on the city by the Boyd killing and the subsequent killings that were self-evidently unnecessary. Each one was a further outrage and black mark on the city.
On the Brandenburg Thing, I think you know I’ve been skeptical of her sincerity in charging Perez and Sandy for the killing of James Boyd from the beginning. She has approximately zero credibility on it, so removing her from the prosecution will probably not make a whole lot of difference. The one APD killing since last July happened to coincide with the announcement of the charges against Perez and Sandy. It looked like a hit, a demonstration in a way, to show the people who needed to know that APD could still be as bad as they wanted to be, but that they were holding fire so long as they weren’t subject to things like murder indictments for past killings.
The Revolution comes… or Hillary??? Ack! The horror! The horror!
i hadn’t remembered (or maybe known) that the oakland pd had been under a consent decree for that long, pre–jean kwan, then. we’re in agreement as to the ingredients that stopped the killings for the most part, and i saw a video today about the NY justice league’s march to washington happening now. it was billed as ‘for the children’, but still, no one specifically said: ‘stop the killing’, or ‘i can’t breathe’ or anything like it. i’ll go and fetch it.
now students in madison today, they*did* but yes, it’s still one at a time for the most part. but public pressure has also gained some mojo in coercing the cops and stores to release videos of the killings, and that’s not too shabby.
on edit, arrgh, always in a rush: for crissake, for the next 16 months her face will be every-fooking-where. four (countem, four) posts at fdl, 3 after tuttle’s first one. and no, it’s not like racism *can be* fixed. but the reasons for the mass incrcerations of blacks and commie dissidents *can be* eventually. but hillary? she’s got Dog and eric schmidt on her side. and she’s for ‘women, children, and everyday amurrikans, see?
.
Sweet lo-RETTA in loretto? ahhh, what an imagination you have, bruce. but sheesh; i thought you’d be tickled witless about omali and his conference. does he still live in florida? and, my, the florida po-pos have been busy ‘serving and protecting’ lately.
i’d forgotten to add that Illinois just quietly passed a law that makes it a felony to record the police without consent. new law mirroring the old law that was deemed unconstitutional, it seems.
http://www.ibtimes.com/illinois-passes-bill-makes-it-illegal-record-police-1744724
….which caused me to go to PINAC to see if they have it yet (not that i could see), but oy, they have more stories.
http://photographyisnotacrime.com/
This new Illinois law is about recording the audio of ‘private conversations’ not public video or public audio although we have to wait and see how it is applied.
The ACLU seemed most concerned with the provision to allow the Cops to record the audio conservations of suspects for 24hrs without a warrant only a judges verbal OK.
This is how our high paid Liars make sausage that purports to protect private discourse while it actually expands Police State powers.
er…maybe.
https://cms.fightforthefuture.org/illinois-just-made-it-felony-film-cops/
No time to comment, but:
http://chicago.suntimes.com/news-chicago/7/71/518178/city-establishes-5-5-million-fund-burge-torture-victims
thanks, marym. yes, $20 million would have put a bit more money where rahm’s Mouth is. it seems that burge had *already* cost chicago $120 million in legal fees, payouts, etc., according to ‘in these times’. well, split 120 ways, it ain’t much, i agree with mr. cannon.
wish i knew more about the pension funds scandal…oops, i mean ‘situation’.
on edit: i saw a chart that noted that the victims kids (grandkids?) would get free college; that helps. but rebelutionary_Z retweeted this:
https://twitter.com/Karnythia/status/588002043790553088
I love how the auto spell correct makes me look like an idiot, ‘ audio conservations’ indeed.
I’ll look at your other link and see if it has better information, I couldn’t bring myself to read the actual legalese.
The FFF link seems less informative and vague than the IBTimes report and more an appeal for people to sign another useless petition using a frightening headline and highlighted talking points. It didn’t dispute my assertion that this law is directed at audio recording not video recording. It did mention the audio ‘Wiretapping Law’ that has been in effect most everywhere for decades but has been twisted to protect the Cops more recently.
their point was that it was vague. but as for the aclu, there may be some state rgs not in service to the state, but i did go hunt this fukkery/pretzel logic (and faux confidence about obama) up just to make my point. and the courts declaring photographing the police in any situation legal, hasn’t stopped cops from confiscating camera phones. see: ferguson, especially.
Can we All NOT 卐EE, that the PTB prefer provoking a race war; as less dangerous to them than their perpetually perpetrated CLAϟϟ WAR on the rest of US? (BTW, in at least the terminal breath-taking Erics Harris and Garner executions; the BusHogs are the ones sporting thuggish tattoos to match their murderous mayhem).
i don’t seem to be getting your meaning about the bushogs and thuggish tattoos, bruce.
race war is class war of a sort, isn’t it? and what about the suggestions that citizens should be allowed to i) arm themselves, and ii) fight back? i couldn’t find it again, but i read a piece a few weeks ago about ‘the new black panthers’ (no one seems able to decide who they are, including themselves) marching in open-carry demonstrations. small wonder that the piece had elicited zero comments.
otoh, two mormon missionaries just interrupted my attempt at a siesta. grrrr. surly she does be. i don’t DO missionaries, said she.
You missed my jibe at their vague report about a supposedly vague law. The ACLU, who they mentioned, certainly know when a law is vague but they don’t seem to be too concerned about this part of the law. They are concerned about the expanded police audio surveillance powers in the law.
I think we all know by now that the laws of this land are not written or interpreted to protect us Little People and never will be. The best and earliest example of that fact is the Chicago 7/8 being charged under a provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that was purportedly intended to be used to protect AA form the Klan.
Even when the Supremes rule against their illegal actions they ignore them because their victims will pay for their defense, if it comes to court, and what are the Little People to do then, vote them out?
Back to the topic of your post, I’m glad to see some people proposing the radical pipe-dream of disarming the police which at least could lead to the idea of disbanding the police but none of this is possible without the even more radical idea of destroying the Ruling Class who the Cops are there to protect.
We’ve already seen how the Ruling Class reacted to the Occupy Movement with the use of all of their security apparatus. It will be interesting to see how they respond to the threat of armed Black men attempting to take control of their neighborhoods from the RC security forces. You, I and others have already seen this movie and it didn’t end well the first time.
i hadn’t known that it was that provision they were tried under, actually. but yes, the IL aclu woman was all over: ‘we worked with them…yada, yada’. pffftt. the IL policy institute link was better, but the point is that there should be no laws passed against filming or recording ‘public servants’. period.
https://www.illinoispolicy.org/illinois-general-assembly-revives-recording-ban/
give my holey (no, not holy) memory, i’ve forgotten which state’s gov refused to sign a similar bill recently, and good on him.
meanwhile, 3 of the atlanta ‘educators’ were sentence to 20 years, 7 in the slammer, 13 (presumedly) ankle bracelet arrest. but MI put a hold on killing the retarded man scheduled to be executed today. for now.
i like it that those radical ideas are *out there* now, though, and so is the theme that it’s capitalism and property protection that underlies so much of this ‘protection by the po-po. i’m quite frustrated that no one in ferguson that i see tweeting even knows of the black is back coalition’s conference on black control of policing, and it starts in four days.
i’ve emailed both omali and margaret kimberly at BAR suggesting that they might tweet up a storm about it, and haven’t heard back for over 24 hours.
most of us, on the other hand, don’t need auto-correct to help us look like idiots. i know *i* don’t. ;-)
Aloha, wendy…! I just saw your emails I’ll try to post it soon…!
aloha, ctuttle (wot? no more sea Turtle?); bless yer pea-pickin’ heart. i’ll watch since i’d like to provide a list of Twit accounts in case any readers know how to give folks in ferguson a heads-up on the conference that starts soon there.
If my recollection is accurate these educators were not convicted of cheating but of violating a RICO statute that was supposedly designed to target the Mob. The Golden Rule applies not just to who makes the rules but how there minions interpret them.
‘racketeering charges’, so i reckon those are under RICO statutes. just think if prosecutors were to seize wall street assets under RICO charges; we could have that better world! well,okay….
yes, it’s clear that they opened up a can of bad tuna, and that not more school districts chose instead to refuse to give the tests, as a few schools in seattle did. i never followed what the eventual ‘sanctions’ were; likely diane ravitch would know, and the first two articles are on opt-outs (i didn’t pend the time to read).
http://dianeravitch.net/
I try to have sympathy for these women who in desperation made a stupid plan to save their schools. What they have actually succeeded in doing is opening up all educators, who collude on any plans to resist the Corporate takeover of Education , to the legal attacks of their enemies.
Woot! at least my blog-whoring request to have this posted at fdl bore fruit; some darling seems to have gotten on the ferguson protestor accounts i’d named (bella eiko retweeted the conference)
AP is reporting on the latest Cops Gone Wild video from Arizona. A Cop used his cruiser to take down a perp who was shooting a stolen rifle on a busy thoroughfare. All the publicity about Cop violence may be having an effect and now their cruisers are being used as less than lethal weapons.
‘less than lethal weapons’, lol. bella had it. yeah, from feb. the cops just released the video to show how righteous a take down it was. matt lauer is high-larious! and his podner: who knows who he’d shoot?
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/arizona-cop-used-car-ram-armed-suspect-video-shows-n341636
wendye, I know you don’t have time to read entire articles, so on this one I apologize but it really is good, makes mention of citizen involvement that I think is very positive – on counterpunch this morning:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/04/15/cops-cameras-and-justice/
Most of it I think you have already outlined, but the person who filmed the video is somebody well worth extra attention amidst all of the tragic circumstances. And I would say as I have before that while our black population suffers from these atrocities and indignities far out of proportion to caucasian, the poor among the latter group (which increasingly sucks in even those who have tried to go through the education grinder) have all kinds of ‘prosecutable offenses’ on their bios which would cause them to run from the police should they be stopped for a minor infraction. The system is wearing all our young people down, and they know full well when a tragedy such as this occurs that ‘there but for the grace of God go I.’
well, yes; it’s the reason ché and i keep trying to float the ‘class and race’ meme, and factor in the mentally ill in the class designation. when i used to write so often about indigenous issues, i would try to remind people that ‘we are all increasingly becoming third-worlders living in a banana republic’.
and the system seems to want to grind them down, doesn’t it? i’ve been reading about the charter school movement, including privatized ones publicly funded, yada, yada, and who *isn’t served by that system*. or wage-slave jobs, same thing. it could be different, and used to be, in many respects.
anyhoo, i will read it; it looks interesting. i bailed on putting any of this one in my new post, as the author seems a mite confused in some sections, and i didn’t want to have to untangle his contentions here and there. and i don’t mean you *should read it* at all. ;-)
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/04/14/a-turning-point-in-the-us-labor-market/
juliania, the john grant piece you linked to was interesting in several respects, first, for the info on apps for i-phones that make uploading videos to youtube automatic. it seems to require only tapping an icon on, then off, to accomplish that. now clicking the ‘off’ would be seriously hard in any police snatch-and-grab scenario, especially when accompanied by stomping on, or confiscating the camera phone. but still, a good development, which i assume most live-streamers know, and cop watch will be explaining to their trainees.
oddly, while mentioning the Forgiveness movement, he doesn’t link to it. this is the one i found, and while it may be a good movement, i found a few points of disagreement with mr. carpenter, but that’s no important here. the question for me is how able are cops so steeped in authoritarianism and white supremacy *able* to empathize with the scotts of the world, at least without a planetary rise in consciousness (which i keep hoping is on the way, as foretold by so many indigenous holy people)?
http://theforgivenessmovement.org/
i get that grant wants to cover his butt by alluding to ‘getting rid of the few bad apple’ police, but that meme misses the mark to me, as so many former cops have gone to great lengths to narrate what the police culture entails, and how and why they commit brutal and even lethal acts, then cover for one another. but then maybe he believes that, who knows?
as to his contention that what’s needed is broad social change, khalil speaks to it and makes some good points, even in the very limited time he was given.
but yeppers, grant was right about rand paul and expediency, and perhaps hadn’t known that ‘republicans’ were bringing up the invasion of privacy issues already.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/16/congress-police-killings-debate-reform
(i also changed the original title of the post; it was just about the stooopidist one imaginable. i just couldn’t manage to translate the image in my mind to actual words.)
Hello wendyedavis
A summary of some of the events in Madison WI pertaining to protests intended to bring awareness to racial injustice and police brutality. The later seems to have been exercised on some select individuals when the “law enforcement,” decided it was time for everyone to leave in the evening.
http://malcontends.blogspot.com/2015/04/violent-arrests-by-madison-police.html
On the phone with this blogger regularly. Worth the occasional look from those of you outside of the state.
Spring is hitting full force for this week in a good way. Warmer temps and some needed sun.
i’m pretty sure we’re concerned for all of those people and cities that are on the receiving end of police brutality, nonquixote. ;-) but i suppose that’s not what you really meant to say…
well, that’s egregious, and those women (i assume including your friend) were pissed off Mama Bears protecting their young (even though not their ‘bairns’). good on them. it made smoke came out of my ears just reading. and the pigs smashed all the evidence, including the camera? well, fuck.them. it’s exactly why some states try to outaw filming the police. the opposite laws should be passed: fire every cop who does that, or turns off their body cams, or claims “the battery was low!”
i need to go start some more seeds in the greenhouse, but i’d like to say how nice it is that you’re friends with a member of ygb. (and yes, i had to check the org to recall what it stood for).
and they hadn’t even ‘failed to obey’ or ‘failed to submit’. jezum crow. where does the rage come from?
They’re afraid, the po po, scared for their very lives they are.
Sometimes they’re just blowing off steam, roid raging, or being as bad as they wanna be because they can. Who’s gonna tell ’em no, right?
Who would dare?
But when someone they take orders from tells them “no”, and tells them what the consequences will be if they don’t stop… they… stop.
Evidently, that order has only gone out in a very few places, one of them not Madison.
I guess their PD’s Best Practices Manual hasn’t been updated with the latest protest suppression models. (Allow protest until the protesters wear themselves out, then ratchet the rules to weaken subsequent ones, until finally, the protests go away…)
yes, you may be right, and my question wasn’t rhetorical, really. it’s just that while i can go on about their reflecting the larger US ‘culture’, for lack of a more precise term, being that ‘force is always the answer to every ‘problem’, it’s hard for me to get inside their heads, even with grossman’s ‘killology’ training and humanity divisions.
i wanted to say that i had another crap night, and the 4 o’clock blue meanies had me wondering about what you’d said about some of the protestors (if i got it right) living this as almost ‘entertainment’, like witnessing/addiction to war porn (cuz they are similar, as this is a war).
but i got to fretting about whether than might be true for myself, and that each killing, each beat-down, each new case of police malfeasance and ugliness, kinda confirmed my bias. i will say that i fervently hope it’s not so.
i also wanted to let you know that as far as what some are advocating as far as community control of police isn’t simply controlling existing PD ‘officers’. i dunno if you had seen this post, or the one video from it. it may not be a perfect solution, but again: it’s a start, as is fania davis, et.al.’s, ‘restorative justice’ for certain crimes against people.
No, I hadn’t seen the Dave Brown video before. I was somewhat put off by the visuals of the bulked up Threat Managers in their black shirts and camo pants on their training runs — with guns. Visually, it’s even more alarming than the usual RoboCop routines we see from the police every day. Maybe that’s the point…
However, what he’s saying is right: the violence that police employ/enjoy is almost never necessary. Nearly every encounter with the “bad guys” can be defused non-violently if there is the will to do it and police-people are trained how. This is the complete opposite of Dave Grossman’s “Killology” — which revels in the bloodshed and does not seem to accept the possibility of outcomes other than death and destruction of whoever is deemed to be a “wolf.” Which unfortunately means anybody who doesn’t submit immediately or who doesn’t fit certain strict guidelines of behavior and appearance.
I feel your comprehensive posts on this and other issues are informative rather than “entertainment”; so much information is so rarely assembled so well, and I find many threads running through your posts that I might otherwise overlook.
My reference to those who see police violence and murder as “entertainment” was primarily to those who defend it, not so much to those who protest it. They’ve prolly watched “COPS” all their lives and think cop-on-perp violence is like a thrill-ride that they want to be on.
Activism and protest can be a rush, too, but that’s a little different… ;-).
I suppose the problem of focus will always be with us. There are so many issues that have to be dealt with. There’s been so much neglect of so many things for so long; Power players have been causing so much misery and destruction for so long to so many people; Justice has been absent for so long… Stopping or reversing any of it can seem to be impossible. So it’s natural to focus on what we feel can be done.
Violence and murder is rooted deep in the DNA of the institutional make up of most American police forces. Stopping it seems like an impossible task, but it isn’t. The order to stop has to come from the top, and it will come when the people together with segments of the power structure put enough pressure on those who control the police to make the stop-order a necessity.
That’s not usually elected officials, though they play a role.
Restorative/reparative justice, “threat management,” (real) community policing — even disarming/disbanding currently constituted police forces — are all viable alternatives to the bloody business (“three a day, one killed by police every eight hours”) we’ve been enduring for too long.
The killing must stop.
The violence must stop.
It can and it will…
Hope your morning-tide is a little better… something got me up at 3:00a.
yes, the bulk (and a bit of flab) may be part of the point. and his linked-in shows the background in which he was trained. apparently he learned what *not to do* over time; knowing what caused him to evolve might be interesting to hear. but to see a guy like that talk about the importance of love in policing as a prerequisite, and especially as contrasted to police training as first: ‘keep yourselves safe’ was impressive to me.
but, ah; thank you for explaining your ‘entertainment’ remark. it all of a sudden stuck me that like during the first gulf war, i may have engaged in some self-indulgent pain and angst, almost as though i could feel every ‘bomb over baghdad’, and sunk into depression. i didn’t want following this issue to come to that. yesterday was a bit of an anomaly in that RL was also a bit dodgy, and my reserves were depleted.
i did get a bit more sleep last night (and i’m sorry you didn’t), but woke up to discover the glass reading 22 degrees. goodbye to most of the fruit.
but reading and watching the shutDownA14 events yesterday that marym alerted me to added to my mood. the white shirts were out in NYC, and so many were arrested, brutalized, including reporters, and keegan reported this much of what he knew.
i reckon you already know what would be in the RT video i snagged, so i don’t need to bring it, but i will say the po-po particularly focused on a small person in a kufiyyeh (is that the word?).
yes, the killing must stop, and the brutality.
and juliania, i did read the camera piece, and once i get some of my chores taken care of, i’ll be back.
You are correct, I wanted to simply interject that true concern and care about the issues has not subsided here. The rage you refer to at the end of your comment comes from the contradiction to the senses of the “powerful,” when faced with the reality of truth? These are my sisters and brothers, these are my children, these are my neighbors and these are my friends and then comes, this is my income that provides for my “well being and that of my family,” so I must choose a side. Divide and conquer defined.
Luvs to stop by when I am able. Thanks for your ever thoughtfulness.
(just a note, and i forget most of the time: i enabled nested comments to see how it works out. there’s a reply button above each comment box now)
guess i’m feeling lowly wormish, but when i read about cops who sic their k-9s on a ‘suspsect’ and they hew off his face, rage and despair battle inside me. and on a day when i get a call from our daughter, and there is nothing i can do to help her solve some of their grievous difficulties, i let the despair win. yes, i grow flowers, watch birrrrds, cook food to share, and sometimes it’s just not enough. more meditation is required, yes?
anyhoo, i am so glad you could provide your young adult bairn with her difficulties. reason to believe:
You were posting as I was typing and thinking so damn slowly. Appropo, senior discount day at the grocery and I left my checkbook there. Not quite ready to say just shoot me, yet. ;^)
Oh and my youngster adult phoned for advice from me to help resolve a problem. Big things in small packages, reasons to believe.
peace and resolve.
(chéPasa; i’m posting this again here. for some reason the one in reply to you up yonder doesn’t show up in the recent comments list. i’d thought it had disappeared into the ether, and i was vexed.) ;-)
yes, the bulk (and a bit of flab) may be part of the point. and brown’s linked-in shows the background in which he was trained. apparently he learned what *not to do* over time; knowing what caused him to evolve might be interesting to hear. but to see a guy like that talk about the importance of love in policing as a prerequisite, and especially as contrasted to police training as first: ‘keep yourselves safe’ was impressive to me.
but, ah; thank you for explaining your ‘entertainment’ remark. it all of a sudden stuck me that like during the first gulf war, i may have engaged in some self-indulgent pain and angst, almost as though i could feel every ‘bomb over baghdad’, and sunk into depression. i didn’t want following this issue to come to that. yesterday was a bit of an anomaly in that RL was also a bit dodgy, and my reserves were depleted.
i did get a bit more sleep last night (and i’m sorry you didn’t), but woke up to discover the glass reading 22 degrees. goodbye to most of the fruit.
but reading and watching the shutDownA14 events yesterday that marym alerted me to added to my mood. the white shirts were out in NYC, and so many were arrested, brutalized, including reporters, and keegan reported this much of what he knew.
i reckon you already know what would be in the RT video i snagged, so i don’t need to bring it, but i will say the po-po particularly focused on a small person in a kufiyyeh (is that the word?).
yes, the killing must stop, and the brutality.
and juliania, i did read the camera piece, and once i get some of my chores taken care of, i’ll be back.
well, now i feel like even more of an idiot; the first one appeared like magic. this place hates me, i swear.