Gangsters in Blue

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Minneapolis police officer in Fong Lee case facing domestic ... Pioneer Press, MN Minneapolis police spokesman Sgt. Jesse Garcia confirmed that Andersen was the man cleared last month in the shooting death of Fong Lee. A federal jury found Andersen did not use excessive force when he shot Fong Lee eight times and killed him in 2006. ... Officer in Fong Lee shooting back in court in July Minnesota Public Radio Cop who shot Fong Lee charged with domestic assault Minneapolis Star Tribune Officer who shot Fong Lee charged with domestic assault KARE all 9 news articles

In the above video, we see a Fresno, CA police officer punch a homeless man at least four times while he is lying on the ground on his side, and then once more when the man is face-down on the ground with his hands behind his back.

At the end of the news report, notice the after-the-fact pretext that the police department offers and that the news dutifully reports: there was another fight between this man and police five years earlier. Is this supposed to reassure and convince us that if a person has EVER previously had a fight with police than ANY level of force is permissible in subsequent altercations?

Wasn't the police report that supposedly "explains" today's beating written by the police themselves? It's a trite formula now that whenever the police exceed by a mile their authority, they offer some past alleged bad act by the victim to justify the police behavior of present.

"Yeah, we shot him in the bag, but he was arrested for possession of marijuana back in 1966." Often the police offer mere past allegations and privacy-protected documents from secret files to justify behavior.

This video shows vividly why police should not have access to electrocution devices. Although punching a man repeatedly when he is defenseless is cowardly, yet it is not as likely to kill the victim repeated 50,000 volt shocks with an electrocution device.

Just remember this: Every member of the public has a right to self-defense when police exceed their authority to use force. And every member of the public has a right to defend another member of the public when police exceed their authority to use force. Once members of the public defend themselves from police, police will charge them with assaulting an officer, etc., and usually the charges stick. So members of the public have to choose between being beaten senseless and offering no resistance or defending themselves first on the street and then once again in a court of law.

"Defense of another." No member of the public is obliged to stand by and helplessly watch police brutality occur. In fact, public action in the face of excessive police force may save your life or someone else's.

Another woman comes forward to claim she was sexually assaulted by the rogue police narcotics unit in Philadelphia.

Germany set to ban violent video games.

Oklahoma officials plan to charge the paramedic, not the cop, in the fallout from the videotaped confrontation, in which the cop pulled the ambulance over, then gripped and choked the paramedic’s throat, all while a patient was inside the ambulance.

Poker Players Alliance vows to fight fed seizure of players’ winnings.

Envisioning a post-secession United States.

The man I wrote about earlier who was imprisoned an extra 16 years because of an opinion joined by Judge Sonia Sotomayor before DNA exonerated him, now has an op-ed in the Politico questioning her alleged “empathy.”

Via P.J. Doland, “play us off, keyboard otter.”

Israeli Police and Military Brutalize Peaceful Protesters at ... Huffington Post, NY The journalist was taken to a local police station and released an hour later without charges. Mr. Barry was treated overnight at the hospital. The CODEPINK delegation has requested the Israeli police and military investigate the brutality used by ...

The NY Times Nicholas Kristof says the drug war has failed. Meanwhile, New York Gov. David Paterson says it’s time for a conversation about legalizing marijuana. Which isn’t exactly courageous, but it’s a start.

So you wanna’ be pals? Will be sad the day the pig catches the pup eating a Beggin’ Strip.

Oklahoma officials finally release dash cam video from the car of the cop who choked the paramedic. The cop also had his wife in the passenger seat when all this went down.

A day at the wiener dog races.

Another DNA exoneration in Dallas County, Texas.

NYPD cops go on trial for fabricating a drug bust. Were it not for the club’s security cameras, two innocent men would almost certainly be in prison.

Via ABC News and AFP-via-Google-news:

Man ‘cooked’ to death in Australian prison van

SYDNEY (AFP) — The family of an Australian Aboriginal elder who died after being “cooked” in the back of a scorching hot prison van may sue after a coroner branded his treatment inhumane.

A coroner Friday described the treatment of the 46-year-old man as a “disgrace” and inhumane, saying he would ask prosecutors to consider criminal charges over his death from heatstroke in Western Australia in January 2008.

The elder, known only as Mr Ward as his first name was withheld for cultural reasons, was transported 360 kilometres (225 miles) to jail in temperatures of up to 50 degrees Celsius (122 F) in a van with faulty air conditioning.

Ward, who was arrested a day earlier for drink driving, spent four hours in the searing heat between the mining towns of Laverton and Kalgoorlie, suffering third-degree burns where his body touched the metal floor, the inquest heard.

Western Australia Coroner Alastair Hope found that Ward was effectively “cooked” to death and heavily criticised the state prisons department, the private security firm that operated the van and the two guards who escorted Ward.

“It is a disgrace that a prisoner in the 21st century, particularly a prisoner who has not been convicted of any crime, was transported for a long distance in high temperatures in this pod,” Hope said.

The hearing was told that when Ward eventually arrived unconscious at hospital in Kalgoorlie, his body was so hot that staff were unable to cool him down. After an ice bath, which failed to save him, he had a body temperature of 41.7 degrees Celsius as opposed to a normal temperature of 37 degrees Celsius.

Mr. Coroner Alastair Hope has it wrong, of course. The disgrace is that the uniformed gangsters roaming the countryside being paid with money stolen from innocents and kidnapping people, throwing them in chains and metal boxes in order to take them to larger cages made of concrete and steel where they’ll be kept like animals, all without said kidnap victims having harmed anyone, don’t wake up one fine morning to find their severed heads mounted on pikes along the palisades of the free cities.

But, oh, geez, I forgot. That wouldn’t be “civilized”, now, would it?

I’m sure it’s a great relief for the people of Occupied Australia that the two outsourced thugs from G4S aka Group 4 Securicor contracted for prisoner kidnap victim transport, “have now been suspended,” a year and a half later.

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Tags: Australia, crime, death, drunken driving, Gangsters in Blue, kidnapping, negligent homicide, outsourcing, prison

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British government tells photographers there are some locations where photography isn’t permitted, but won’t say which locations.

This reminds me of my encounter with the dense Gene Koprowski.

High-speed video of bullets on impact.

Good early review for Agitator pal Ryan Grim’s new book, This Is Your Country on Drugs. You, Agitator readers, helped Grim out with editing suggestions last summer.

Draw this man a giraffe.

Fascinating, and sad, tale about what happened when a bunch of LAPD cops fielded a rec league soccer team.

One has to wonder how many Black men are in prison simply because white (and Black) people have a tendency to perceive a Black man as a criminal, and more easily so than they perceive white men this way. There's an excellent article at MSNBC exposing this question, and I quote from it here liberally:

PHILADELPHIA - It's an old lie, claiming that The Black Man Did It.

But it was trotted out again last week when a white mother from suburban Philadelphia said two black men snatched her and her 9-year-old daughter from their SUV and abducted them in the trunk of a black Cadillac.

Blacks across the country were outraged after Bonnie Sweeten was found in a luxury hotel at Disney World. Authorities quickly unraveled the hoax, but not before an Amber Alert, frantic searches and national news coverage that played into images of marauding black men.

( . . . )

Racial boundaries are slowly dissolving in America, with President Barack Obama the most obvious example. Yet Sweeten's story, plus the killing of a black New York City cop by a white officer days later, was a reminder that old ideas remain burned into many minds both black and white. [Racial boundaries will not completely dissolve until the media and the public acknowledge that "race" does not exist in the first place, and it never did.]

( . . . )

The Black Man Did It lie last made news as recently as October, when a John McCain volunteer claimed a 6-foot-4 black man carved a B into her cheek (For Barack, evidently). Charles Stuart told it in 1989 after he killed his wife in Boston. Susan Smith told it when she drowned her sons in 1994 in South Carolina. Unknown numbers of black men were hanged for it back when lynching was a common practice.

And those are the ones we heard about. Law professor Katheryn Russell-Brown documents 67 racial hoaxes in the period between 1987 and 1996 in her book "The Color of Crime." MSNBC

If white and even many Black people are primed to see Black men as criminals, then how many Black men are in jail simply because the hoaxes were not discovered before their cases went to the (frequently all-white) juries? And how many Black men are in jail longer because when Blacks and whites are convicted for the same crimes, whites are more likely to be perceived as susceptible to change and progress, simply because they are white?

The outrageous number of Black people in prison in the United States is directly related to answers to the above questions.

Imagine him seeing his favorite gun ad targeting the black community -- "you need big guns" -- against the oppressive government -- in this case, the "gangsters in blue." Posted by: John M 307 | June 14, 2009 2:18 PM ...