‘new cop’ by anthony freda
Yes, it appears that it’s going to be a long, hot summer for not only killings by police, but also extreme violence and brutality against our citizens, and not only black ones, of course. Videos have been surfacing in both areas, but I’ll focus on the killings since some of the vicious beat-downs, even by gangs of police, didn’t cause actual death. Some are too painful to watch, in the manner of the gang murder of Kelly Thomas, for whom death may have been a blessing.
July 8 WaPo: ‘Police officers shot and killed more people so far in July than during any other week this year’
From RT: Number of police departments using stun guns, Tasers increased by 10 times – report‘
Oh, the epic cluelessness: ‘‘Eric Garner did not die in vain ‘: De Blasio comforts family at Staten Island memorial service’
Well, unless he means that the city just settled with Mr. Garner’s wife for $5.9 million, and Officer Friendly walks free. Man, it’s creepy to see Rev. Al in every Garner family photo…
TRNN: ‘Baltimore Police Chief Allowed Looting to Discredit Protestors, Says Union; Veteran police officers Kenneth Butler and Neill Franklin discuss a report issued by the Fraternal Order of Police that accuses recently fired Chief Batts of ordering police to stand down during looting so protestors would be blamed as the aggressors – July 10, 2015.
Via koat.com (h/t ChéPasa) in ABQ: ‘City agrees to pay James Boyd’s family $5 million; Boyd was shot and killed in 2014’ He was homeless, mentally ill, and camping ‘illegally’ in the Sandia foothills, for which he was gunned down like a rabid animal. Part of the helmet cam video is at the link.
Can you stand a bit of mega-irony? ‘Gov. Cuomo signs order giving Attorney General Eric Schneiderman authority to probe police-involved deaths’ You remember him, the fearless AG who was gonna prosecute Wall Street mortgage-fraudsters up the ass? Ooopsie; he fined a few firms. Yeppers; he’s jut the man for the job. Honest. He and Lanny Breuer were twins separated at birth. Honest.
Via the LA Times: ‘This is the shooting video Gardena police didn’t want you to see’
“Video of the shooting that killed Diaz Zeferino was unsealed by a federal judge Tuesday after months of legal battles between the city and media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times.
The grainy videos, captured by cameras mounted in two patrol cars, show three men mistakenly suspected of stealing a bicycle standing in a street under the glare of police lights. With their weapons trained on the men, officers scream at them to keep their hands up.
While two of the men in the videos remain motionless, Diaz Zeferino appears confused by the officers’ instructions. He drops and raises his arms repeatedly, showing the officers his hands and stepping backward and then forward a few paces. A laser dot from an officers’ pistol can be seen on his shirt. After Diaz Zeferino removes a baseball cap from his head, officers standing to the side of the men unleash a volley of gunfire.”
From the July 14 Denver Post: ‘Paul Castaway’s family disputes Denver police account of shooting’ Witnesses agree, and so do those who’ve seen the relevant video.
From AL.com:
“Six Tuscaloosa police officers involved in a Friday night arrest that ended with a suspect dead have not been placed on leave, authorities said Saturday.
Anthony Dewayne Ware, 35, died Friday in police custody. Police said Ware was pepper sprayed while resisting arrest.
Sgt. Brent Blankley said investigators of the Tuscaloosa County Metro Homicide Unit have been assigned to look into the death of the suspect, which is standard procedure for unnatural deaths in the Tuscaloosa area.
Fox 6 reports police do have video footage of the arrest and plan to release it when investigators complete their review.” They predict their review will be completed by the Twelfth of Never.
Ebony.com: Sandra Bland changed lanes without using a turn signal while she was driving back to her alma mater, Prarie View A&M to interview for a job. She was arrested, jailed for three days for booked for “assault on a public officer”, and was found dead in her cell not long after someone had posted her bond. They say she hung herself. Her arrest video is at the link.
From the Guardian: ‘Family of 17-year-old killed by police at station is ‘not going to stop fighting’
“Kristiana Coignard’s family has filed a lawsuit claiming that her civil rights were violated after a jury declined to indict the officers who used excessive force.” And that’s putting it mildly.
July 10 Guardian: ‘Mississippi police accused of choking unarmed man to death with flashlight; Stonewall police chief denies claims made by attorney for family of Jonathan Sanders, 39, who suffered ‘some kind of asphyxiation’ during altercation’
“State officials in Mississippi are investigating the death of an unarmed black man who was killed in a physical struggle with a police officer while saying “I can’t breathe”, according to his attorney.
Jonathan Sanders suffered “some kind of asphyxiation” during an altercation with white officer Kevin Harrington on Wednesday night, in the small town of Stonewall, in the eastern part of the state, said the attorney, J Stewart Parrish.
Sanders, 39, was a father of two children including a one-year-old, according to his family.
Parrish told several local media outlets that Harrington pulled Sanders from a horse and choked him to death with a flashlight. Parrish told the Guardian on Friday that allegation had come from relatives who live beside the site of the struggle and witnessed it.”
The only repercussions so far in the drive-by assassination of a black youngster: WLWT.com: ‘Supervisors disciplined for not vetting officer who shot Tamir Rice’
“Northeast Ohio Media Group reports one officer received a two-day suspension and the other a written reprimand. The officers were accused of failing to check Timothy Loehmann’s personnel file at a suburban department before his hiring in Cleveland last year. An evaluation in the file said Loehmann had dismal handgun performance and was emotionally immature.” (mumble, mumble: grand jury…)
Simply inspirational, even for an apatheist like me:
Race, Faith & Justice in the Age of Ferguson & Baltimore: Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou (of the black prophetic tradition, and only 18 mins.)
Killed by police on Facebook: At least 627 people have been killed by U.S. police since January 1, 2015. And Eric Garner was choked to death one year ago today, may he find peace in the afterlife. A grand jury failed to indict Killer Kop Pantaleo, who’d told jurors that he hadn’t meant to kill him. Meanwhile, the NYPD has been harassing the two people who filmed his murder.
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
Pay to $lay; wurkz for WashPostin’ dronin’ ObamAssassin, down to watcher-in-the-hood Zimmerman. BTW, can you retrieve the Freda guillotining of Mr. Monopoly ‘toon (It’s becoming mo’ apropopo month by bloody month). Thx. (Here’s my alternative to knight of the living Jeb:
https://meaxylon.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/lancelotdulac02.jpg?w=480&h=289
http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/jeb-bush-s-plan-to-expand-the-economy-by-workers-putting-in-more-hours-is-based-on-a-lie )
if you’re trying to say that the po-po are the protectors of the status quo, and that drone assassinations are a tool for resource profiteering i agree. as for electoral politics, i really don’t want to get involved in that theater, at least for now, maybe never. but sure, serfs exist to make capitalist masters richer. that’s why more and more blacks are calling for slavery reparations.
at the justice for Eric Garner protests in NYC yesterday, the po-po blasted sound cannons, and made arrests:
The Wehrmacht helmets and jackboots are a nice “touch”, still need that Freda Wall Street bankster literal ‘haircut’ cartoon link.
i’m not sure what you’re asking, bruce. for me to fetch it for you? this work?
oh, ish; it was huge from the url, and i don’ know how to resize it.
Close enough for post-gummint werk (the bigger they get; the harder they fall!). Thank you so much.
Was doing some local history research of my environs this week and came upon something I had seen before but not realized the importance. I was listing the non-farm occupations of people in the 1850 census out of curiosity about how pervasive the slave system was and how far it extended into my area of the county, which because of all the wetlands, tended to have smaller farms. (No disappointment on that score. Only one or two higher drier ridges had any slaveholders at all.) But to get this information I had to wade through information about the section of the county where the largest slaveholder in the state of NC held forth (900 slaves total over several tracts in several counties). And I noticed some interesting settlements in his area. Each one consisted of an overseer, one or more “mechanics” (people who built or repaired slave housing), one or more blacksmiths, and one or more “waggon makers”. There were about six or seven of these in this area of the county in addition to a deputy sheriff and three constables. It hit me like a ton of bricks for the first time what the blacksmiths and waggon-makers were about. And if I were a little slow, it hit me when I looked at the age/sex data in the 1850 slave census for this guy. Most of the slaves that were being held in 1850 were either very young or very old. The very old were caring for the very young until they grew of age to be salable to the West. The economic value in 1850 for the coastal states like SC and NC and VA and GA came less from the labor in growing crops and more from the sale of slaves to the West. The blacksmiths were needed to forge and repair chains. The wagons for transport of what few supplies the slave “drover” needed for the trip.
The Abolitionist were in the situation of #blacklivesmatter. And that explains why the war was over the extension of slavery in the West and secondarily over protecting slavery in the states like SC.
Enough of the historic interlude. But the debt slavery that replace this system is what people who migrated to Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York after the Civil War and especially during the KKK terror that began in 1910 and extended into the 1960s were seeking escape from. And their own federal government redlined them in real estate, then looked the other way as drug dealers ravaged their neighborhoods, and then started worrying about “crime’.
Some of my relatives a friends are all panicked about the growing movement to blast the Confederate memorial off the side of Stone Mountain, which sits in 74% black population Stone Mountain GA. What has come out as a result of this controversy is the history of Gutson Borglum, who blasted four of the worst anti-Indian Presidents (violation of the 1767 line, Louisiana Purchase, execution of 35 Indians as one of the first acts of office, and was responsible for transfer of millions of acres of land from Indian ownership to federal ownership) into the side of a mountain the Lakota sacred Paha Sapa (Black Hills). Borglum’s venture into carving on the side of Stone Mountain (which preceded Mount Rushmore) was the result of the KKK having used the mountain as an altar for its trademark fiery cross ritual upon its declaration of rebirth. Borglum began work even as the first Southern president since the Civil War, Woodrow Wilson, was looking the other way as yet another reign of terror began in the South. The second incarnation of the KKK held its largest march on Washington during the 1920s and had chapters in most of the states of the Union.
There is a lot of “secret” history coming out (hidden in plain sight) for those with an interest in seeing how a 150-year-old propaganda campaign was kept going with the complicity of allies outside the South.
‘ton of bricks’, indeed. and i’d never thought about that slavery profiteering being such an incentive. (i’d quibble that extending slavery into the west was one of the main reasons for the war, but not the only.)
i’d misread your comments on borglum, so i spent lot of time reading his wiki, a well as the stone mountain entry, and some errata, as well. one account has it that there are klansman in the bas relief, but i don’t remember them, or see them in the images i pulled up.
are meaning lincoln hanging the 38 santee sioux? by the by, i also read along the way that flipping eisenhour dictated lakota removal to the cities, which resulted in many returning to the reservations, and the development of AIM. i hadn’t known that, either.
but yes to the ongoing culture of negro farming and indun farming, oh my goodness.
hate to bring a spoiler if you haven’t seen chris eyre’s ‘Skins’, but…i will. it’s too much fun to hold back, considering your comment. ;-)
Here’s the KKK connection:
As for in the bas-relief, only if Lee, Stonewall Jackson, or Jefferson Davis were members of the KKK. They are the only figures in the carving as far as I know.
Why yes, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, western Tennessee, and Texas were very much concerned about their own slavery. They were the destinations from the “farms” on the Atlantic Coast. And, as I remember offhand, South Carolina’s rice industry was still a going concern.
it may have been by the way of metaphor that klansmen were seen behind The Three (angels of the apocalypse?) . i can’t see them. but for now, i clipped ‘skins’ with only 12 or 16 minutes before the ending.
we raised an indun and a black/azecta child in a neighborhood with heavy klan histories. who knew? naive or clueless?
sleep well, if ya can.
added on edit: i thought i’d remembered that mary phagan was raped as well, so i dug up a page that said it looked to be so, although the MW found no sperm, just extensive tissue trauma. but clueless as i am, i never realized that leo frank was jewish, and it seems he may have been the only jew the klan ever lynched, but i dunno if it’s so. have you seen ‘birth of a nation’?
Pretty sure that Schwermer (sp?) and Goodman were Jewish. Cheney, the third freedom rider killed in the KKK action chronicled in Mississippi Burning, was black.
i just checked a few sources, lemoyne, and one says they were ‘beaten and murdered‘, one said ‘shot and buried in an earthen dam’, but by “a white mob”, how coy. actually, i’d remembered a mind-picture of three sncc workers murdered in a car, too, somehow. dunno where that came from. but no mentioned of hanging that i found. still, so so so evil.
Heard recently on DN! the brother of one of the victims cite one of the participants as saying they straight up shot the white kids – pulled them out of the car and Pow! Cheney broke away and ran, was chased down, severely beaten and shot. Then they were buried in the dam under construction. Their bodies were found only because of a tip that they were in that dam.
Definitely collusion of the sheriff and the KKK: followed after their release from the jail, pulled over by a sheriff’s deputy, driven off into the woods and lynched by the KKK.
Looks like the police killing spree is on track to break all records this month. I think the pace is now up to 5 a day, double the historic rate of police killings which have run closer to 2.5-3 a day.
They keep looking for more targets, more victims, more bloodshed, and revel they in more death.
Candidates Bernie and Martin were confronted by BLM activists in Phoenix and all the chatter is how very rude it was for these uppity Negro women (mostly) to interrupt these Dems who are “on their side” about an issue “that has been addressed. So sit down and shut up.”
Except that neither Candidate Bernie nor Candidate Martin has so far been able to wrap their minds around the idea that — perhaps — the po-po ought to stop killing us. Actually stopping the killing doesn’t enter their world-views, nor has the idea quite penetrated Candidate Hillary’s thick shell.
They will say — after being confronted — “Oh, why yes, of course, Black lives matter” (somewhat, in some situations, under some conditions, if they behave and are respectful…) but when it comes to the issue of police shooting people down in the streets or killing them in custody in all manner of ways, they have nothing to say, not a word.
The political class isn’t ready to “address” the real issue; anything but that.
Every other issue, but not that.
And the killing goes on…
will the minimal daily killing requirement keep rising, then? i’d seen the ‘if you want to make friends and influence political leaders, don’t be so rude!!!’ meme out there. crikey. and yet, as i was just saying to THD on the open menu, the BLM twittersphere is eating bernie’s schtick up. as long as they continue to captive to the D party…well, you know the rest.
and it’s doubly weird in that in bernie’s case, with his allegiance to israel and the military complex, because there’s been so much solidarity with the mass killings in gaza. beats.me.
but goddammit, another deadly traffic stop: ‘Cincinnati Campus Cop Kills Unarmed Black Man’. it reads as though the killer kop just had to kill him for trying to speed away for mebbe not having a DL. avoiding arrest is a ‘legally’ killable offense in some venues, isn’t it?
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/20/cincinnati-campus-cop-shoots-unarmed-black-man.html?via=twitter_page
Back in the day, fifteen-twenty years ago, we used to comment about the fact that police couldn’t help themselves, they were forever shooting at fleeing Negroes, sometimes so carelessly as to strike bystanders, telephone poles and plate glass shop windows, among other random objects. But they had to shoot: the Negro was fleeing!
It happened across the street from us (in California) one day. We heard screeching, sirens, shouting and gunshots. Oh, shit. What was going on? It seemed a Negro on a bicycle was attempting to flee the police and was trying to get away through the neighborhood. Well… when the police car caught up with the young man, he fell off his bike and started running. The cop shouted and fired several shots in the general direction of his quarry — who stopped and held his hands up. Much relief as he was cuffed up and, as they say, “transported.” There were neighbors walking their dog nearby, of course, and children and elders at home, and after the adrenaline of the whole thing dissipated we got to talking about how crazy it was. There was no call to shoot under the circumstances. None at all. The young man was suspected of stealing the bike. WTF? Somebody could have been killed. Ya know?
Then there was the time the police surrounded our house — thinking there might be a fleeing Negro in our backyard. That was(n’t) fun…
whoa, yes; shooting a fleeing Negro in a busy residential neighborhood is criminally cavalier and tunnel-vision insanity. wonder if he got a nickel ride?
dunno how i missed this one, but around the time sandra bland allegedly hanged herself (why does hung sound better?), this young woman also died by hanging in an alabama jail. thing is, she was only at the station for an hour, and her past ‘crimes’ might have put her in the soup.
i did read of a white man who was mebbe high on acid when he was arrested, or being taken for ‘mental health help’, whom they hog-tied and lay face down on the stretcher, and when he said he couldn’t breathe, was *maybe* denied his inhaler. i may have seen it a Killed by Police, but it happened in the past day or two. goddam.
Re: the hogtied asthmatic:
Could this be he?
So obviously, dude needed killing. America. (h/t DeRay)
oh, my yes. different source, no video, but that’s indeed the dude who was snuffed for Running While Strange. aaaaand: bassem seems to be in jail. again. dude ought to never drive again, methinks.
too weird that the concert was ‘widespread panic’. sigh X 3.
ack: in holland, a 13-year-old was recently handcuffed to a cop’s motorcycle, and forced to run all the way to the po-po station. not America. ;-)
added: i kept a few op-eds on bernie, and apparently he has never called for any reduction in the military budget, leaving people to wonder how he’d go about creating all the yummy things like free college, health care for all, yada, yada. so not that, either.
added on edit: this seems so quaint now, eh? it’s been around for a lotta years, at least since our son was a junior in high school. hmmmm….15 years or more?
There is signifcant evidence that Bernie has been aware and active in the matter of black lives for some time. One: he attended the ’63 Poor Peoples’ March on Washington and he quotes King’s I Have A Dream speech with some verve and authenticity. Two: before the NetRoots #BlackLivesMatter action, the closing of his stump speech was already a call for people to respond to division by race, etc. with solidarity.
Sure enough Bernie might have handled the NetRoots action more smoothly and responded more directly at that time. Please note, the moderator pushed back on the demonstration harder than Sanders.
The real kicker is this, Three: the same weekend, Bernie Says.Her.Name [‘Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, … and many, many more’] just before the conclusion to his speech and clearly places it in the historical context of racism beginning with indigenous genocide.
to 11,000 in Houston 7/19:
And again to 5,000(?) in Dallas 7/19:
i’ve seen him burnishing his cred: and with photos!/s really the gripe for so many activists was that he had never mentioned the issue in his stump speeches. i’d saved some of the opinion pieces that said where, when, but i’ve perhaps blessedly mislaid them.
but oh, yeah, they say he rawked at la raza! but srsly, as i said, many of the #BLM folks are thrilled with him, but they were also wowed by POTUS’s eulogy for rev. pinkey, ergo: he is a god now. cognitive dissonance, imo.
but i’m glad you’ve found a candidate you believe in, lemoyne. and i do know this was ché’s to answer, not mine. sorry.
Hey no prob WD. I still say Bernie placed the issue at the climax of his speech before the NetRoots protest, but he was not explicit. Now he names names.
I do NOT believe in Bernie as a magic bullet, but I do believe him for what he has done and in what he says. Sensible pol wonk talk a few weeks ago noted that Bernie was weak with the youth and people of color. He drew 10,000 at Univ. of Houston, got applause and cheers for almost every sentence and he said “Sandy… Sandra Bland” at the top of his list of names. Right there is more recognition and solidarity than any of the other candidates can or will authentically provide #BLM.
Bernie will not remain weak with the youth and p-o-c demographics: they will be an active part of his organizing base and his insurgency’s source of new voters. The $20B that he and Sen. Bingaman inserted in the ACA for low-cost health clinics has likely made health care available in poor black areas (rural and urban) where the Medicaid expansion has not gone or isn’t enough. He has cred, it will be noticed and he will work for more. Sally-Alice has been campaigning at UNM for Bernie…
Look Out Billary.
The DN! segment this AM with the founders of BlackLivesMatter shows them saying rhetoric is not enough – they want specific policy prescriptions. I get that and I believe Bernie will do the further work necessary to win them as allies. Either they will become his clear allies (in 6 months to a year) or he will fail in his attempt to galvanize movements into a political revolution (big bump in turnout and ?Bill Black is back?). In other words, expect BlackLivesMatter to come on stage after Bernie accepts the nomination B-D
sounds like he should offer you a staff job on his campaign! well, thanks for the info, although i’ve learned over the past six + years that pretty prescriptions don’t mean diddley-squat.
i have read that he’s seemed to have repositioned himself a bit over israel, but i dunno that he’s not another neo-con in sheep’s clothing, myownself. i sure haven’t seen him buck the military industrial/etc. complex, either. but then, i really don’t care much about electoral politics any longer, after having been very, very active in the dem machine for decades.
but sometime, drop in at BAR, blackagendareport.com. those black radicals take no prisoners in their anti-obama, anti-sanders polemics.
I’ll grant that Candidate Bernie has been somewhat better regarding the constellation of issues surrounding the oppression and exploitation of black folks in this county, but the problem endemic to the political class — including Candidate Bernie — is a failure to address the issue of violent policing and murder by police that has become such a huge hot-button issue nationwide over the past year thanks to the protests against police killings in Albuquerque — which opened the lid on the issue — and the subsequent protests against the killing of Mike Brown and so many others.
It isn’t just the killings by police, though that is the immediate emergency, especially in communities of color, it is the almost universal pattern of violent policing and the literally insane policing policies and the racist/classist/”otherist” fear that seems to be driving so much police violence.
These are issues the political class as a whole and individual candidates in particular did not and would not address.
Thus the BLM action at Netroots Nation, and good on them for doing it.
Candidate Bernie and Candidate Martin have at least acknowledged that there may be a problem with inappropriate and sometimes racist policing that ought to be sorted out. But neither of them — so far as I can tell — will address the demand being made to “stop killing us.” It’s almost as if it is beyond their comprehension.
The political class — including Candidate Bernie — needs to come to an epiphany about the deadly scandal of violent policing and murder in this country, and they haven’t done so.
yes: this, and i apologize for not zeroing in on the key issue/s. he wants to ‘reform the police’ now.
Lookee at what Jason Leopold came up with.
Vice, Jason Leopold, “The DHS Planned to Plug Federal Officers into the Freguson Protests Documents Show
https://news.vice.com/article/the-dhs-planned-to-plug-federal-officers-into-the-ferguson-protests-documents-show
Meanwhile Herr Zeppelin Trump is diverting attention from everything.
good on jason leopold; he’s been dogged in pursuing his foia requests, hasn’t he? out of all that he reproduced, it was the fukkery about a ‘reunion of sorts since katrina’, causing us to see again the police snipers on bridges and building tops killing black americans almost for sport…because they could, an because they considered them animals.
mr. pinkney’s spoken version of his essay was very good, especially the paradox that his fear was always of the police…morphing into asking himself how it was that he became so fearful of young black males ‘skulking in the shadows’ or however he portrayed his initial misapprehensions.
the gentle cadence of his voice narrating the perpetual media/societal plan to cajole white amerika to agree that Being Negro meant Being Dangerous to the social order, therefore deserving of death is of course, the nugget of it.
his message to the black youth to vote as a radical action to ‘take it back’ falls deaf on my own ears, i admit, but that’s a far longer conversation about who officials become once elected, black, white, or brown. fuck the system, indeed.
but dhs has been pretty plain about all of the categories of protestors they’d deemed ‘terrorists’, eh?
but speaking of ‘plug’ and herr zeppelin’, one mexican man took a bit of revenge on his ugly rhetoric. mind you, i don’t really want to know the purpose of said item…
The full dashcam video of the Sandra Bland arrest came out today and it is interesting in the fact that it has been edited and looped to extend the sound track or suppress part of the video. That’s the first interesting thing.
The start of it is the second. Bland turns left into a four-lane boulevard. The cop approaches from the direction she is heading, makes a U-turn and races up to follow her. He is moving so fast she moves to the right lane without signaling. He then flips on the lights and siren and she pulls over to the curb.
This raises a bunch of questions. How many young black women in this home of a historically black college has this cop pulled over? Or alternatively, were the police given a photo of Bland, knowing she was an activist and coming to work at Prairie A&M with some instructions to make her day?
The cop orders he to put out her cigarette. When she refuses and asks to contact her lawyer, he demands that she get out of the car? How many women would obey that order on a mostly deserted street in a Texas town? Yet all the big brave men who are commenting say they would certainly of course obeyed the police because a Supreme Court decision allows the police to order you out of your car without cause (sweet that one, eh?)
So what prompted the cop to make his U-turn. It certainly wasn’t for the failing to signal because that hadn’t happened yet. Interesting.
Oy; thanks for the synopsis, tarheeldem. here it is, but i’m just on a brief break from getting ready for our daughter’s family to come soon, so i can’t imagine i’ll have time to watch. (on other breaks i’ve been working on a Jumble post of loads of interviews, commentary, and videos for those few days of visitors.)
the 2 minute cnn version:
on edit: dayum; i’d meant to pass you by unless you’d at least chortled at the revenge on Trumpet-lips. :-P
Texas DPS is apparently claiming that YouTube uploading software caused the “glitches” in the initial video. They’ve now corrected the appearances of looping/editing. Ohhh… I see.
Of course the question of looping and editing in the dashcam video led to questions about the 3hr jail video that showed no one entered Ms Bland’s cell prior to the discovery of her body hanging on the partition. Why would anyone believe the jail video wasn’t looped and edited too?
Several things stood out to me about the dashcam video. Brave Officer Encinia is first seen interacting with another driver he has stopped for (speeding?) who has no proof of insurance, yadda yadda. He lets her go with a cheery warning, and tells her she can have her father email her proof of insurance… ok.
Some observers claim this driver was white, but I can’t tell from the video. She is a student, taking two summer school classes, and apparently the stop was made just off the campus of Prairie View A & M (not sure, but that’s what it looks like).
Brave Officer Encinia almost immediately turns around and tails Sandra Bland. She did not stop at the stop sign before entering the road Encinia is on, and that may have been what caused him to tail her, but he does not cite or warn her for that. The only thing he says about why he stopped her is that she failed to signal a lane change when she moved into the right lane as he barreled up behind her, and he was going to “warn” her about that.
But then she got all uppity. In fact, until he asks her to put out her cigarette, it appears to be a very normal stop. Ms. Bland is not happy to be stopped, says why but she’s cooperated, and she is otherwise cordial with the officer. When he asks her to put out her cigarette she says she’s smoking in her own car and he says “You can step on out now.” It’s pretty obvious she doesn’t know what’s going on and refuses. He doesn’t say why he wants her out of the car. She continues to refuse, saying she’s not under arrest, and he says yes, she is, as he escalates his demands/commands, finally pulling out his taser and threatening to “light you up” with it. She says “Wow,” and gets out of the car. I was surprised at how tall and thin she was.
The video doesn’t show most of what Brave Officer E is doing to her on the sidewalk, but she’s definitely pissed about whatever it is (sounds like he’s putting her in handcuffs using pain compliance techniques) and she says so. At one point he orders her to stop moving around, and she says something like, “I’m standing still, you’re the one pushing me all around.” Then I guess he throws her to the ground and holds her there with a knee on her back until backup arrives (apparently a black female officer) and an argument ensues. The female officer says to Sandra Bland, “I’m not listening to you.” Ms Bland complains about being thrown to the ground, hitting her head, being unable to hear, and feeling pains in her wrists and shoulder. She’s (apparently) put in the back of the other officer’s car.
Both the officers are escalating the situation — Encinia by refusing to answer why he wants her out of the car and what she’s being arrested for, then shouting and trying to grab her out of the car, even pulling his taser, the other officer for refusing to “listen” to her. It’s all about asserting power over a civilian as far as they are concerned, but from what I see and hear in the video, it’s not enough that Bland comply. She must… submit, and she won’t do that.
I don’t know what happened in the jail. But if it was “suicide,” I’ll bet it wasn’t intentional on Bland’s part.
The question is, will we ever know?
The whole thing, however, was unnecessary. The stop was unnecessary — I’m betting Encinia didn’t see her blow through the stop sign, but if he did, he didn’t cite or warn her for it. Signaling a lane change under the circumstances, with a police car on your tail, is hardly a priority. There was no necessity to tell Bland to put out her cigarette — and when she questioned why, to order her out of her car and then start a physical struggle with her. All of this adds up to deplorable police work.
The backup officer doesn’t want to know what’s going on. Doesn’t even try to be a good cop.
Like so many other incidents of police violence, there was no need/necessity for it. There should be no excuse.
i appreciate your observations, ché, since i still haven’t had time to watch. it’s all so hideous, and each time you remind us that police require ‘submission’, my heart contracts.
is it true that the twittersphere is saying about sandra’s mug shot…showing her dead? that is so cold and horrific i can’t quite get my mind around it this morning.
but as for ‘will we ever know?’ this just adds to the suspicions. mr wd and i had been talking the other day about the coroner’s questionable, imo, report of suicide, and how cozy MEs often are with law enforcement.
but y’all will be glad to know that bernie sanders is now on the case./s
Very strange. If he didn’t see her blow the stop sign, why did he single her out to be followed? Was she targeted? How else can the actions of the officer be explained, especially in the light of the cordial treatment he had just given the previous motorist.
“It should be very clear that this was no random stop for any traffic violations. Trooper Encinia had targeted and singled out Bland. He been closely tailing Bland in his patrol vehicle, then suddenly speeded up behind her car to force her over. He forced her from the car and deliberately physically pushed her out of police dash cam range to further harass, antagonize and infuriate her, then manufactured an assault/battery charge against her that took place outside of range of the camera.”
As always, make what you will of the author’s “theories”, he obviously has researched this niche very thoroughly.
i’d go with Occam’s Razor here, with several directions possible at play in the ‘she was targeted’ idea. yeah, maybe the author tries to bring in far too many symbols, notions, and extraneous themes and secret societies. 2L2R for me.
here are her sister and the family’s attorney on DN! what they’re reporting about the information being dribbled to them after the media has bits of it is horrific. the lack of genuine autopsy protocols is as well. they believe sandra was targeted, but it wasn’t clear how. there’s speculation that she may have sustained a closed head brain injury bleed and died, so…a cover-up. the MJ issue is just plain muddy as hell, not that it should matter one whit.
the cuttings to her wrist seem questionable, but in any event, disturbed teens often engage in the practice, but as far as i know it has nothing to do with suicide.
Anonymous calls for the immediate arrest of Brian Encinia and the resignation of both Waller County’s District Attorney and the Waller County’s Sheriff.https://wordpress.com/read/post/feed/30971553/762332923
“If you do not take Brian Encinia into custody, we will come after all of you. All your secrets will be leaked. You will all be vulnerable. We all know where you live.
This is for Sandra Bland. No mercy for murderers.”
they can easily do that, eh?
Does 2L2R mean Too long to read? Yeah, I didn’t read it all either
As for how she was targeted? She had a cell phone, did she not? We are all carrying around tracking devices. She was on Tracebook, so the trackers likely knew of her itinerary. We are all under surveillance in ways that have yet to be revealed. The question is how this info in Bland’s case was transmitted down the channels of law enforcement. If she was targeted then there was a conspiracy and those orchestrating it have agents in law enforcement. While mindassassins may be too long to read, I think the author is looking in the right direction. Apparently many police officers belong to secret societies.
http://boingboing.net/2015/05/07/police-department-of-ancient-s.html
oops. scratch that last statement
wooof, yes: waaaay too long to read, and far too confusing, as the dude brings in so many organizations that seemed extraneous. yep, she’d apparently texted a couple folks from jail, one was her sister. the ‘why she was targeted’ may lie in the fact that she made her own Sandra Speaks videos, and i dunno what else, but on twitter, it seems, as well. but many in the twitterverse are calling her ‘a truth-teller’. her last one i just found on youtube:
Rest in Peace if you can, Sandra.
Yeah, yeah. Good to see that. I was just retracting my ‘cops belong to secret societies” statement because the link I gave was not good proof. I also thought of this. A St. Louis cop with military and secret service ties predicting both racial turmoil and Ukraine supposedly back in 2012.
These are some very prescient statements coming from this officer. He predicted Ukraine here. And he predicted Ferguson, saying that a racially provocative event would happen that would result in a militarized response. And the Don Lemon segment has all the appearances of a staged event designed to highlight and identify this officer.
I don’t know why the putative perpetrators of the psyop would want to highlight this individual. It’s almost as if they are flaunting their plans and taunting the people.
i’d have to see official verification of his military and secret service (or fbi, iirc) service to believe anything the asshole claims. good griefers. i don’t know that he’d ‘predicted’ anything more than plenty of other folks have, but he one incendiary hater and liar, isn’t he? insider? i doubt it, but that’s just an instinctual opinion. but i found this as well, and nope, don’t have time to note anything but the headlines: ;-)
from Mother Jones, august 24, 2014: ‘More Audio Surfaces From Dan Page, the St. Louis County Police Officer Suspended After Racist Remarks’
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/sandra-bland-autopsy-custodial-death-report
Well, whoever those other folks are I never heard them.. No one was talking about a militarized response to a racial event or Ukraine in 2012. What he said was these issues were going to go mainstream, which is exactly what happened. The provenance of the video can be questioned as well as the veracity of his credential claims. And yes he’s an asshole. Nevertheless he indicates a networking of police military and FBI that would be deployed against protesters. Just as we see being done in tracking BLM members as potential terrorists. And of course he is not in the deep inner circle where all of the planning goes on. Those guys, likely, don’t come out of the shadows.He’s a useful idiot, put on display in a transparently staged way for some reason
i know i should just cry ‘Uncle’ and be done with this man’s prescience. but what he’s talking about is essentially ‘the lower classes in the ghettos acting out due to society breaking down (i.e. ‘the ATMs don’t have cash’). yes, as wealth inequality deepened, even the IMF and folks at davos warned against what would happen, as did loads of folks wring about FEMA camp round-ups (dissents as terrorists were named in different ways), the ten gazillion rounds of ammunition that the federal govenrment bought and distributed to every single federal agency (including NCAR in boulder, yada, yada).
but here he was speaking more of those dusky, violent muslims, and to people of his ilk, i do believe that muslims = blacks, as he said about obama. consider for how many xenophobic patriots like page call muslims ‘sand n*iggers’.
dhs had labeled almost any form of dissenters as ‘terr’ists’ long ago, allowing many acronym agencies to monitor them, of course…not the cliven bundys or white mass murderers, oh, no.
‘ukraine’ was a throw-away, but consider how many folks have been seething over the fact that kruschev had ‘gifted’ the crimea to ukraine long ago, and interpreted any G in kiev as rotten, corrupt, etc., but were fine with the first maidan coup of an elected government.
i dunno, i just hear him very differently than you do; sorry.
on edit: and there i was, preparing my eggplant for dinner…when i remembered the military response to hurricane katrina. plenty of help, to be sure, but military snipers on bridges dispatching Negroes, police confiscating even legal guns, etc. yeah, it’s been a-brewin’ in plain site.
ack; now hold the phone. i admit that i was in sorrier shape than usual when i’d looked at the link, but: i thought part of his woven-together premise relied on the fact that sandra bland was a member of a sorority that believed in some sort of blood-lust…something. but oh, dear, i’d hate to back and try to find the parts i kinda thought i’d read. ;-)
but hell, lots of cops in ferguson attended an annual ball that really was akin to the Klan, and a few BLMers got a few photos. iirc, that’s what led to the hashtag on twitter: ‘Operation Hoods off”, and they outed a boatload of them. not so secret, but hiding in plain sight? well, here’s one version of it, click any of the #s….
https://twitter.com/operation_kkk/status/597141741569871872
sorry. the reply above actually belongs here
‘This is a Movement, Not a Moment’, by Sonali Kolhatkar at truthdig
“On July 24, the Movement for Black Lives National Convening will bring bringing together activists from all over the United States, organizing under the banner of Black Lives Matter. The organization will meet in Cleveland.
Among those activists will be such prominent leaders as Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, the original founders of Black Lives Matter. Also present will be hundreds of members and local chapter leaders like 28-year-old Jasmine Richards, a powerful activist in Pasadena, Calif., where I live.
Today she faces a slew of legal charges, including assault, trespassing, failure to comply with a peace officer, failure to turn down amplified sound, making criminal threats and, most shockingly, making terrorist threats. The charges stem from a bold action she participated in on March 21 to mark the third anniversary of the fatal shooting by Pasadena police of 19-year-old Kendrec McDade. Richards and others blocked streets in Pasadena’s Old Town, bringing traffic to a standstill to make a statement about police brutality.”
and yeppers, folks seem to have crowd-sourced her bail of $90,000; remember: she was charged with ‘terrorism’. but here she is, dunno how the cleveland conference is going, but here’s the hashtag.
Mvmt 4 Black Lives @mvmt4bl
The 1st ever Movement for Black Lives Convening: July 24-26, Cleveland State U., OH. ALL black lives are needed; mind, body, and soul.
and from the superb revolutionary rapper/commie boots riley via the Guardian, no less: ‘If you want a living wage, be prepared to go on strike for it. The fast-food workers movement’s Fight For $15 is encouraging – but these struggles won’t succeed unless they become more radical’
Some observations about what has come out in the Sandra Bland case recently.
The body was taken to the “white” funeral home instead of the “black” funeral home from the jail. No indication who did either of the autopsies. There was supposedly an independent autopsy. Or where.
The injuries on the wrist might be symptomatic of overtight handcuffs that barely broke the skin and three days healing. Police routinely use square-edged (sharp) handcuffs as extrajudicial punishment by closing them too tightly and ensuring bouncing in the cruiser.
Deray McKesson is asking where the $100 that she supposed had at the jail (too low to put down on bail, how convenient) went to. It is not listed in the inventory of property in the police report. Neither is her purse. Nor is her car inventoried. There might be missing documentation or suppressed information or the excuse of “using for evidence”.
There is now clarity that she was turning right out of the campus of Prairie View A&M, possibly after a meeting with her new department. There is speculation that she failed to signal that right-hand turn and that is what triggered the cop to pursue on a “driving while black” revenue generation pursuit. I can’t tell from the video whether her signal is flashing or not. For now, I’m thinking SOP black student revenue generation stop as the original motive.
However, we know from the Intercept that DHS has been tracking #blacklivesmatter since it began last year in Ferguson and have also been trying to infiltrate it. We also know that DHS has been tracking movements in Chicago at least since Occupy Chicago showed up in October 2011. There have been enough events since then for Sandra Bland to have shown up in at least several of them. We also know that the NSA has triggers that add events to searches of people already being tracked. The mechanisms are there for the local police department to have gotten notice of Sandra Bland’s appointment in Prairie View just as a courtesy contact from DHS. The only possible recognition factors likely available to the cop doing a stop would be the year, make, model, and color of Bland’s car. That could have triggered the U-turn even knowing that there might be dozens of similar cars on the Prairie View campus. But for now, revenue generation is more likely.
The silence from Prairie View A&M about the case speaks to the political pressure on the administration. The failure of any summer school student activism save for a banner at the site is also instructive. As is the local community reaction. One has the sense of a lockdown. Don’t know that that’s the case; just the vibes.
Prairie View is in the northeastern part of Waller County, TX, an exurban county on the edge of the expanding Houston-Sugarland-Woodlands TX urban area. This is Tom DeLay country. The county population is 33,000. But the county sheriff has an armored vehicle.
how interesting about the right turn ‘failure to signal’; is that a new bit of truthiness? i see your point about the cuts on her wrist possibly having been made by handcuffs, but how then that they say ‘various degrees of scabbing and healing’ or something. anyhoo, this AJE piece notes that the US prosecutor reported that the handcuff lacerations and abrasions v. self-inflicted cuts on her left wrist, but i didn’t see it in the following autopsy report, small wonder given my…reading skills.
i had seen the black funeral home’ v. ‘white funeral home’ speculation that the ‘white one’ may have had a coroner more friendly to the police, though. i also saw the outrage that all forensic evidence was turned over to the Waller county sheriff, iirc, meaning: that’ll go down the rabbit hole. so yeah, where are her belongings, then?
but this one notes: ‘autopsy was performed at the harris county institute of forensic sciences by sarah n. doyle, assistant ME’ (chief ME seems to be luis a. anchez, m.d.) on cnn or whatever the family attorney was claiming the county wanted a do-over, no? so…i dunno about a second one.
sure and it’s no surprise about dhs and prolly a horde of other acronyms tracking BLM activists, given the history of occupy and fusion centers, the drones above the BLM protests, etc. terrorists are everywhere, according to the PTB.
good deduction on Negro farming being the incentive, though. again, occam’s razor. ‘on lockdown’, heh.
Some additional thoughts on the Sandra Bland matter to throw into the mix:
Though it is claimed that she was stopped and arrested by a white officer, Brian Encinias would not be considered “white” by a thoroughgoing Anglo in Tom DeLay’s Texas. He is Hispanic, and his partner in the arrest was apparently a black woman. This may make a difference in the perception of what happened in due time (the sheriff, for example, may point to the fact that the arresting officers were not white in order to excuse what happened…)
According to the autopsy report that’s been released, Sandra’s body was covered with injuries. She was badly messed up — mostly, it seems, from being manhandled and thrown to the ground during her arrest — but my question would be whether she was also roughed up in jail.
She had multiple contusions, lacerations and abrasions, and not just on her wrists, but on her back, shoulder, arms, head, and elsewhere. Some of her injuries are fairly obviously from too-tight handcuffs. Others no doubt came from being thrown to the ground (there was still leaf debris in at least one wound). But the focus has been on supposed “cutting wounds” on her arm. I’ve seen nothing at all about her other wounds and injuries — except in the autopsy report itself. From that evidence alone, a case can be made that she was badly injured in the arrest and received no medical treatment at all. She likely was in a great deal of pain and discomfort during her time in jail.
From the dashcam video it appears that Encinias was on traffic patrol that day, probably had a quota to meet, and was “just doing his job” when his encounter with Sandra Bland took place. That stretch of road outside the campus of Prairie View A & M was probably chosen because it provided excellent opportunities for ticketing motorists (a 20mph speed limit is ideal as it is a difficult speed to maintain…). He had just issued a warning to one motorist (for speeding, apparently) before making his U-turn to chase after another — Sandra Bland.
She did indeed fail to come to a complete stop at the stop sign (barely visible in the video) before turning onto the road on which Encinias took after her. She did not appear to signal her turn, either. But whether he saw those infractions is difficult/impossible to tell. In any case, he did not cite her for them. He cited her only for not signaling a lane change — a lane change, btw, which only took place when the single lane road became a double lane past the stop light.
Drivers who go straight past the stop light will be in the left lane. Bland moves over to the right lane almost immediately (doubtless because she sees the patrol car moving up fast behind her, but also because driving in the right lane is standard unless you’re going to turn left or are passing another car…) Signaling a lane change under those circumstances is pretty much moot — maybe one would (say if there was another car in the right lane), maybe one wouldn’t, but it’s hardly an infraction for which an officer needs to stop the motorist, unless, of course, he had a quota of stops to meet, and/or the out-of-state license plate was too tempting to resist.
Whether Bland was on a #BLM watch list maintained by DHS or someone else and that information had been communicated to Encinias is an interesting question… don’t know how we’d find the answer, though. There’s no overt sign in the stop itself that that’s the trigger. It looks like a routine traffic patrol stop that gets out of hand when the driver is not sufficiently submissive to the Authority of the cop.
The extent of Bland’s injuries listed in the autopsy report was surprising — and shocking to me. The idea that she might have had a brain injury when she was thrown to the ground isn’t supported in the report, but it may have happened anyway. Apparently she was taking anti-seizure meds, but not while she was in jail, and the lack of medication and/or medical treatment could have contributed to he eventual death.
DeRay’s questions regarding her purse, money, meds, and phone are germane. What did happen to them? Likely they were inventoried with her car after it was impounded. They were apparently not on her person.
I’ve seen a video of the inside of the cell where she was held; there is a pay phone in the cell, and my understanding is that that is the phone she used to call friends, her family and the bail-bond person. As far as I know she did not have her cell phone while in jail.
yes, you’re right that it must have been the pay phone she’d used. i went back and (ack) read the transcript of the DN! interview, and i see i’d confused the various ‘texts’ and voicemails.
yes, i’d meant to mentioned the abrasions and leaf detritus on her shoulder wound, but i wonder how that might have made it through her clothing? one brain slide was mentioned in the autopsy, but depending on whether or not an ME wanted certain results, one could choose which area to slice.
you may have already seen this, i only came upon it accidentally over the past hour or so, but you’ll find some of it very noteworthy, imo. ‘medical attention’ in jail seemed to be only relevant to ‘medical conditions contributing to death’.
MJones: ‘Texas Authorities Just Released a Detailed Narrative of Sandra Bland’s Time in Custody; Important new documents shed light on what happened in the Waller County jail cell.’ later i’ll try to read the ‘summary of how the death occurred’. (all upper case, and hard to read.)
but what in the world was attorney cannon ___ referring to about ‘sandra must have brought in MJ to ingest in jail’? perhaps the ‘suicide, intoxication, or illness/natural causes’ section?
I’m somewhat puzzled by Attorney Cannon Lambert’s statements as he appears to be stipulating facts not in evidence (re: marijuana in her system) and is simply wrong in other cases (re: her right turn into 290 — where she did not stop and she may not have signaled though he claims she did nothing wrong.)
The tox report was apparently released today, and though I know nothing (much) about the chemical analysis (and have no reason to believe it in any case) I’ve read that the actual amount of THC in her system was “residual” not at all a significant amount. So the issue of whether or not she ingested marijuana in jail may well be a red herring — that Lambert, for some reason, is fostering.
The autopsy photos show a very narrow mark on Bland’s neck. It’s consistent with strangulation by use of the trash-liner noose — which appears very narrow in the photo — but there are a number of problems with the theory that she hanged herself, or if she did, that it was intentional.
First, it seems that the height of the beam or y-brace (there have been different reports on that) was essentially too high for her to reach, especially with an injured shoulder. Second, if she could reach it and fashion a noose, the question arises how she got her head through it, as it was pretty small, and the entire apparatus was only some 21″ long. In order for her to get her head in the alleged noose, this beam or y-brace would have to have been quite low, and the video of the cell shows no such beam or y-brace. Initially, the report was she’d hanged herself from the partition brace, but that story changed.
Third, if she somehow managed to fashion and secure this apparatus and she was able to get it over her head and around her neck, it’s difficult to imagine she would have intentionally strangled herself, as all she would have had to do is stand up to prevent strangulation. It would be almost reflex to do so if she were in serious danger of strangulation. But if she had a seizure while this noose/ligature were around her neck, she quite likely couldn’t manage to stand and thus may have unintentionally strangled herself.
Of course, Occam and all suggest that she didn’t do it to herself; it was done to her by a person or persons unknown — as there were potential motives for someone other than herself to commit… murder. But unless someone comes forward — who witnessed and/or can credibly testify to what happened — I don’t think we’ll ever know.
Meanwhile, I read somewhere that the contents of her cell-phone were being “analyzed”. In the dash-cam video, the phone remains on top of the trunk where Bland placed it until the female officer removes it and Encinias’s clipboard (which he had placed there after handcuffing Bland and retrieving it from the hood of the car). She removes them and appears to place them in the trunk of the car while she searches. She returns the clipboard to the top of the trunk after she finishes her search. I can’t tell if the phone is also there, but later, when Encinias goes to the back of Bland’s car, he appears to retrieve his clipboard and… a cell phone.
Still leaves unanswered what happened to her money, purse or bag, and medications.
The issue of the other many injuries she sustained
(not including the supposed “cuttings”) is so far all but unmentioned. It’s claimed she refused medical treatment when EMS arrived after she’d been placed in the other officer’s car, but that claim is made by the police and is not credible without verification. She may have, but there are many other possibilities. It could be she was refused treatment after an initial assessment that indicated she wasn’t injured seriously enough to intervene in the arrest process. But she had numerous injuries, and the fact that she said her head was slammed into the ground — all by itself — should have been sufficient to transport her to the hospital for observation rather than to jail to be neglected.
Much more will come out eventually, but this steady drip-drip interspersed with lies and deceptions is doing a wonderful job confusing the issue and muddying the waters. Almost as if it were intended…
to say the truth, my impression was that cannon lambert isn’t the brightest bulb in the box, no disrespect intended.
i just stuck in the alleged ‘initial’ tox report link in, and i will say that the ‘experts’ may not be that. there was also quite a hubbub raised when colorado lawmakers created the cannabis DWI standards; many said they were quite divorced from the science on the subject (thc being stored in fat cells i dunno what all, really).
thanks for thinking through some possible permutations. we may never know, but the drip, drip, is indeed infuriating. ‘…almost intended’. yes, that.
BYP100 @BYP_100 · 4m4 minutes ago
Follow #M4BL right now. Cops have a 14 year old boy under arrest and have pepper sprayed folks trying to protect him.
(supposedly arrested because he boarded a bus w/o fare)
Per twitterverse cops have released the 14-yr old without arresting him. Thanks to the quick, peaceful, protective response of the #M4BL people.
nice to see you, marym; hope that you’re doing well. lemme see if this works…half as well as the rapid and protective community response did. pepper spray? fuck the police.
‘down in mississippi: Native American activist found dead in jail just one day after Sandra Bland’, by Jorge Rivas
jackson free press version
‘Family of woman found dead in jail outside of Cleveland asks for answers; Ralkina Jones, 37, was arrested Friday night in altercation with ex-husband’
She was taken to a hospital on Saturday night and released a few hours later
‘Experts: Report shows Sandra Bland may have used pot in jail’
“The amount of THC, one of the active components of marijuana, in Bland’s system was 18 micrograms per liter, according to the report released Monday. That’s more than three times the legal limit for drivers in Colorado and Washington, states that permit the recreational use of marijuana.
“I don’t think it’s possible to rule out the possibility of use while in jail,” said University of Florida toxicology professor Bruce Goldberger, who reviewed the report for The Associated Press. Bland was impaired by marijuana at the time of her death, Goldberger said.”
‘Paramilitary Police With MRAPs Lock Down Florida Town After Cops Kill Former Cop’ By John Vibes on July 28, 2015
an insanely twisting story, but blue on blue would be, wouldn’t it? searching houses without warrants? ‘ya never know when you’ll need to’, says top cop. ISIL terrorism threats!!
‘Sarah Lee Circle Bear Died While in Police Custody; Family Seeks Justice’
“On July 6, 24-year-old Sarah Lee Circle Bear of Clairmont, South Dakota, was found unconscious in a holding cell in Brown County Jail in Aberdeen. Circle Bear was jailed on a bond violation.
Witnesses stated that before being transferred to a holding cell, Circle Bear pleaded to jailers that she was in excruciating pain. Jail staff responded by dismissing her cries for help, telling her to “knock it off,” and “quit faking.” Inmates cried out for the jail staff to help Circle Bear, to which they eventually responded by picking her up off of the floor, dragging her out of the cell, and transferring her to a holding cell. Circle Bear was later found unresponsive in the holding cell.”
according to the rapid city journal: “Brown County coroner Mike Carlsen says the results of an autopsy conducted Monday were inconclusive. He says he’s waiting on toxicology and tissue results to determine Circle Bear’s cause of death.”
Jeezum crow; how many more will die before it stops? ” Two precious sons, age one and two, are now without their mom”. May you find rest in time, miz circle bear.
St. Louis anti-police brutality and killings activists have created a website: the power behind the police. some of the key organizers spoke to sarah jaffee at rolling stone; fascinating digging that proves that ‘the police work to enforce the statsu quo and generate profits for the 1%’, not to protect citizens, of course. via jaffee’s piece:
here’s the klanesque fraternity, nomad: ‘The Veiled Prophets’
“The organization had originated with the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. In St. Louis, black and white strikers acted together to shut down rail freight for a whole week before being brutally put down by police and federal troops. The very first Veiled Prophet — the figurehead of the organization, whose whose outfit and veil Green likened to a Ku Klux Klan robe — was St. Louis Police Commissioner John G. Priest, who had been instrumental in quelling the strike.” (the piece says that ‘it used to be all-white’, whatever that signifies now.)
And it goes on. I am to the point of asserting that we are now in a situation of DHS Fusion Center witnessing of the immediate aftermath of police extrajudicial killing and being more interested in unrest than in the fact that a domestic terrorist organization is now networking police extrajudicial murders. The “judge” in Waller County is and elected executive official of the county, like a county commissioner in other states or a county executive in big counties. His opinions are not necessarily informed by either and understanding of the law or of police procedures. The role of the Waller County TX judge seems to be damage control. I’m still a little bit stunned by the silence from the university itself. That speaks to some heavy intimidation.
And the killing continues–Cincinnati this time. University cop blow off a guys face; the body cam apparently caught the entire incident, which officials at the moment are saying they are appalled at but have not released the body cam video. There apparently is no independent video of the incident. Delays have been used to edit video footage from dashcams.
Cincinnati officials are “fearing unrest”, which means they are already huddling with the DHS Fusion center and trying to come up with a soothing story.
The coverage of these incidents is getting more intense, but the number of incidents are increasing as cops angered about the coverage are more likely to pop off. And small town cops are more likely to run their own operations of resistance to scrutiny.
We are approaching a Boston Massacre moment. And Trump is firing up the Republican base. What possibly could go wrong? Political opportunism and 330 million guns in private hands. And in a currently ambivalent position are oodles of militarized small-town police forces. And we are not to August yet.
The helpful part at the moment is that #blacklivesmatter can count on the discipline and good judgement of their supporters. But that also has inflammatory effects on the cops who want the whole movement shut down.
You saw that with Lt. PepperSpray in Cleveland. Bogus charge from a transit cop and then gratuitous pepper spray from a transit cop. Who authorized that tactic?
i’m of course curious about what your spidey senses tingling ‘a boston massacre moment’ as related to trumpet mouth. not so much a dhs action, but a ‘concerned militia’ action against the Uppity Negroes and their white/asian, et.al. allies? that even with the various pressures at play, the killings are *increasing*, as is the abject brutality just short of death, is horrendous. many days my stomach roils, and my brain feels as though it’s bleeding.
who gave ‘Robert G. Schwab, Sergeant, Cleveland RTA’ the order? i looked at some still photos of him as he sprayed, and he seemed rather matter-of-fact about it, not scared as some reports claimed: “those darkies closed in on him, surrounded him!!!” it was as though it were just…his job.
i believe it was the Waller county judge who did the voiceover on the newly compiled video that *proves* that sandra bland was alive when they took her mugshot photo.. very arcane that *that’s* what he reckons is the issue of prime importance to protestors, isn’t it?
yes, from RevoNews: ‘‘Police bodycam video of Sam Dubose being shot and killed is so bad, Cincinnati prepares for riots’ (with mention of the 2001 ‘riots’ over the assassination of another unarmed black man).
same site: ‘Denver PD arrests Paul Castaway protesters, not the driver who hit them’, and yes, we saw that in minneapolis.
after reading yesterday at a couple ‘librul’ websites on both sandra bland’s death (can we call it murder since she never should have been put in jail at the very least?) and those uppity black women, oso and cullors who’d DARED to interrupt o’malley and sanders in phoenix, it struck me once again that the privileged white libruls are exactly what is keep the movement stuck. on the latter issue’s discussion, the defense of bernie as ‘but his passion for economic equality and “peace” (?) will win everything for blacks and POC!’ was sincerely disturbing. has he upped the ante in his vaunted ‘new stump speech’ to say: The Killing Must Stop?
Protest tonight covered on local ABC news.
https://twitter.com/ChicagoRising/status/626227641201356800
amazing that the movement’s finally forced some MSM into covering protests, vigils, and direct actions, isn’t it? the light brigade wouldn’t have had the potential for ‘riots and blood spilling’ hyperventilating, either.
It’s great when Light Brigades or Food Not Bombs come out in support of different actions and causes. Solidarity.
yes. and i’ve been musing about the many gaps and holes in solidarity, but that’s a much longer discussion. for now, i’m glad that many of the actions (including cleveland) are being organized around lgbtq folks and that odious to me word: intersectionality. ;-)
breaking: ‘University of Cincinnati Officer Indicted in Fatal Shooting of Samuel DuBose‘
NYTimes: “A University of Cincinnati police officer was indicted on murder charges on Wednesday in the fatal shooting of a driver this month.
In the indictment handed up by a grand jury in Hamilton County, the officer, Ray Tensing, is accused of killing the driver, Samuel DuBose, during a traffic stop near the campus on July 19.
At a news conference, the county prosecutor, Joe Deters, said that Officer Tensing “purposely killed” Mr. DuBose after the officer lost his temper.
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years. This is the most asinine act I’ve ever seen a police officer make, totally unwarranted,” Mr. Deters told reporters. A video of the episode was also released.”
(i swapped out the video; this one is much clearer.)
good on county prosecutor Joe Deters, but ‘asinine’, not ‘evil’ or ‘sociopathic’?
hella burned fingertips tonight; i’ll be back in the mornin’ if the creek don’t rise…or something.
meanwhile, more judicial roadapples:
A number of things pop into mind, in no particular order…
1) Denver cops are some of the biggest cowards of any police force in ‘Murka. They have shamed themselves time and time again, and here we see it one more time… cluelessness, obliviousness, uselessness, brutality … DPD should be one of the first Big Time PD’s disbanded. But they have plenty of competition. Far too much competition…
2) I’ve had a chance to look at some of the intake video of Sandra Bland at the Waller County jail, and damb, it’s unlike practically anything I’ve ever seen of the sort… (Proviso: what I saw was heavily edited, so how truthful it is, I can’t say…) My immediate impression is that Waller County’s jail is highly informal, not particularly rigorous and rule-bound at all, and almost certainly without the kind of routine brutality that characterizes so many urban jails and private prisons.
It’s a lock-up lite, in other words.
Sandra Bland is obviously in bad shape when she is brought in… trying to preserve as much of her dignity as she can, but by this point in her short stay with the Waller County authorities, that isn’t saying much. She’s crying, she obviously appears physically hurt in various ways, and she’s lethargic. It doesn’t appear that anyone in the jail is mistreating her, but neither are they showing any particular concern about her condition. If I can tell from rough-cut video monitoring that she’s in bad shape, why didn’t those on scene? At any rate, they don’t seem to notice or care and treat her as any normal, routine prisoner would be — not overtly “bad,” but they aren’t paying attention, either.
This official disinterest touches on any number of in-custody deaths recently highlighted. Injuries aren’t treated, necessary medications are withheld, violent responses to requests or inability/disability are routine. People die because of it, and the System turns a blind eye.
From appearances in the edited videos, Sandra Bland is at a minimum deeply depressed and potentially badly injured (shoulder, head, wrists), and those conditions are simply ignored as she is cycled through the jail’s routine intake procedures. She’s compliant but listless. She is eventually put in a cell by herself where there is no camera and no regular monitoring. I’ve read that she did not eat the entire time she was (alive) in that cell, though food was provided, and I’m curious whether she was drinking fluids and whether the jail was air conditioned. These factors could have seriously impacted her state of mind.
As for her alleged suicide, there is no indication one way or the other — not from these video snippets. The ME’s definitive statements are pretty meaningless. There’s just no way to tell at this point. On the other hand, if she was “suicided” I don’t know how we would ever know — unless someone involved comes forward.
And about that alleged marijuana ingestion before she died: I’ve read that the amount in her system (18mg) was “low-residual” and/or that it was “high-intoxicated” and recent. The discrepancy seems to be due to the fact that regular users may have relatively high residual levels of THC but are not intoxicated. Someone who rarely uses marijuana, on the other hand, would have to ingest a fairly large quantity fairly recently to have a blood level that high and would be intoxicated at the time. In other words, it all depends… As far as I know (which isn’t much) marijuana will not put one in a suicidal frame of mind, but the anti-seizure meds she may or may not have been taking in jail could have made her feel suicidal. I tend to think the marijuana issue is a red-herring in any case.
3) That poor lion. But hunting and killing for the sport and the thrill of it is American as apple pie. Lion hunting in Africa is a special variety of the domestic people-hunting that police (and others) engage in. Police kill because people like David Grossman tell them over and over and over again that killing is their highest accomplishment — it is what they are there to do. Much the same belief infects big-game hunters. Killing lions, elephants, giraffes, rhinos and whatever other big game they can find is the highest accomplishment these deeply twisted people can achieve. It’s what they believe they must do to validate their own otherwise empty lives.
Killer-police seem incapable of recognizing that they’ve done anything wrong. Just so with the likes of the lion-killer. How could he have done anything wrong when he was so careful to “follow the rules” as he understood them? Police get away with their constant killing because in so many cases they’re “following the rules” — of hunting and killing people.
The idea that they shouldn’t do it at all is simply too alien for them to imagine.
yes to all of this, and thank you. reactions in no particular order. ;-)
the murder of the park’s beloved cecil fit with the thread quite well, as you note. he apparently left a pride of 24 that the park preservationists expect will now be killed by other lions. (the lion doesn’t always lie down…with the lion.)
yes, denver cops are cowardly, but they are also cruel as hell, especially with the ones they’ve murdered while in custody. my favorite street preacher marvin booker, mentally challenged lovely man, was assassinated for trying to retrieve his only pair of shoes. no sir: they’d called him to the booking desk, and that was that.
we do know that some of them know they killed without cause, like tensing who blew off sam dubose’s head, then lied up the wazoo about being ‘dragged by the car’ as it sped away, and he even got his partner to say the same thing. lies, all lies. and we’d never know it without the camera footage, nor would we know that he hadn’t been able to ‘speed away’: cuz he was dead. goddam.
the cannabis ‘experts’ seem to be anything but, to me. it’s a tricky science, including various strains that do or do not release cannabinoids of different sorts when ingested uncooked (most don’t, iirc). and some say that yes, fat cells can or do store thc, and maybe that’s what they’re thinking about, i dunno. but sure, she’d have likely gone to sleep, but sure would have eaten ha she been a bit high. but oof: i’d never heard she’d never eaten. going without liquids that long, esp.water, would have played mega-havoc in her different bodily systems.
i did watch some of the in-custody tape, and you’re right that she was lethargic, they were nonchalant. i read in the twittersphere that she’d made six or seven call from the intake desk phone, dunno if they’ve figured out to whom (that should be easy to get from their phone provider).
but no, unless someone comes forward, sandra will be another hashtag, remembered by all who loved her (even after death), and a symbol of police cavalier disregard at the very least.
today is the last day of july, and i’m wondering how soon i’ll be moved to put up a august post of police bad news for citizens. but for now, loose ends on earlier exterminations of unarmed citizens by police:
Remember the police murder of charly ‘africa’ keunang in LA in march? well, officer friendly volgasis swore ‘he has my gun!’™ for the camera. well, jeff sharlett just reported on the ‘more detailed’ coroner’s report fivenths later, and it turns out 2 of the 6 bullets in africa…we direct contact ones. that means that a gun or guns were pressed against his chest while he was lying on the sidewalk, fully under police control, after having been tased a number of times. remember the woman who picked up a cop baton from the sidewalk, and did nothing with it? she’s in jail and:
“The homeless woman, Trishawn Cardessa Carey, 34, has been charged with assault with a deadly weapon against a police officer and resisting arrest, and could face 25 years to life in prison under California’s three-strikes sentencing law for repeat offenders.”
sharlett points out that once again, the LA times (which he dubbed ‘the lapd’s local paper) spent way more ink on the small amounts of meth and thc in africa’s blood. i remember his little doggie finally turned up, but not more than that.
will the LA prosecutor…charge any of them?
you may remember larry jackson, another unarmed black man who was murdered in 2013, and there still has been no justice. killer kop kleinman assassinated him under a bridge. his crime was trying to get into his (locked) bank.