Gangsters in Blue

Communities Against Police Brutality in the Minneapolis/St. Paul twin cities area, a group of that says it is comprised of "survivors of police brutality and members of the community working together to fight for justice," highlights the Maria Inamagua case. According to their report:

Maria Inamagua was an Ecuadoran immigrant living in the United States. She was arrested on an immigration violation and detained at the Ramsey County Jail in St. Paul. While there, she reported severe headaches and dizziness. Over the five weeks she was there, she repeatedly asked for health care. The jail responded by giving her Tylenol. She was never allowed to see a doctor.

On April 13, 2006, jailers found Maria unconscious and severely ill in her cell. Instead of taking her to the hospital just a few blocks away, they watched her health deteriorate for four hours. By the time they finally took her to the hospital, it was too late. Maria Inamagua died of a massive brain infection late that night.

To fight against abuses like this one, they offer a links to many organizations working to stop various forms of police brutality. I haven't personally contacted the groups below, but I would be very interested in comments from readers about their experiences. The list is as follows, with a hat tip to Communities Against Police Brutality, which compiled the list:

Organizations Working on Police Brutality and Accountability
October 22nd National Coalition: http://www.october22.org/
ACLU Police Practices Project: http://www.aclu.org/PolicePractices/PolicePracticesMain.cfm
Idriss Stelley Foundation: http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeo9ewi/idrissstelleyfoundation/
National Coalition on Police Accountability: http://www.citizensalert.org/ncopa.htm
National Lawyers Guild, National Police Accountability Project: http://www.nlg.org/npap/
Police Complaint Center: http://www.policeabuse.org/
Police Crimes: http://flyservers.registerfly.com/members5/policecrime.com/
Refuse & Resist!: http://www.refuseandresist.org/altindex.php
Stolen Lives Project: http://stolenlives.org/
Law Office of Blake Horwitz (attorney specializing in police brutality cases): http://www.police-watchers.com/

Reports on Police Brutality:
Amnesty International's Race, Rights and Police Brutality: http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/usa/document.do?id=133746465C2D34CA8025690000692D98
Amnesty International's Report: Police Brutality and Excessive Force: http://www.amnestyusa.org/rightsforall/police/nypd/index.html
Amnesty International's Torture Report: http://www.webnetarts.com/socialjustice/aitortrpts.html
Human Rights Watch's Shielded from Justice--Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States: http://www.hrw.org/reports98/police/index.htm

Misconduct by Men in Blue (youth police brutality project): http://misconduct.weebly.com/index.html

Information on "Less Lethal" Weapons Including Chemical Irritants and Tasers
A Short and Sordid History of Pepper Spray: http://www.nopepperspray.org/sordid.htm
An Appraisal of the Technologies of Political Control: http://www.iwar.org.uk/sigint/resources/stoa/stoa-atpc-so.htm
Bibliography of "An Appraisal of the Technologies of Political Control": http://www.aib.de/nsa/eu/stoa-bib.htm
Chemical Cops: Tear Gas And Pepper Spray Can Be Deadly: http://www.commondreams.org/views/030900-103.htm
CPRC Report, Oleoresin Capsicum in Buffalo: http://www.cprc.org/tr/1995/04/tr-04-95E.pdf
Dugway Report (Great info on chemical composition of Freeze + P): http://www.capstun.com/english/cap-stun/reports/dugwayreport.html
The Effect of Police Officer Confidence on Officer Injuries and Excessive Force Complaints (includes info on cop killed by bad pepper spray training): http://www.sashley.com/Articles/EffectofPoliceOfficerConfidence.htm
FBI Report, Oleoresin Capsicum Training and Use: http://www.capstun.com/english/cap-stun/reports/fbireport.html
HowStuffWorks: What does tear gas do?: http://science.howstuffworks.com/question340.htm
Inmates Sue Florida Over Pepper Spray, Tear Gas Torture: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0%2C2933%2C97214%2C00.html
Is CS Gas Dangerous?: http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/320/7233/458
Montreal Medical Team Exposes Documents on Tear Gas Danger: http://www.afn.org/~iguana/archives/2001_05/20010512.html
Pepper Spray Gets in Their Eyes, Media Missed Militarization of Police Work in Seattle: http://www.fair.org/extra/0003/pepper-spray.html
Pepper Spray Madness (deaths from pepper spray): http://mediafilter.org/caq/CAQ56pepper.html
Personal Defense Sprays: Effects and Management of [Ocular] Exposure: http://www.pwdistributing.com/OC%20Eye%20Test.html
Police Sprayed Deadly Toxins at WTO; Accused of "Chemical Warfare" by MD: http://www.sparklehouse.com/awake/cp/gas_1.html
The Power and Controversy of Pepper Sprays: http://www.sunbeltshows.com/dave/pepperspray.html
Preparing for "Sudden Death!": http://www.laaw.com/cdsldm.htm
Protester First Aid (Black Cross Collective Guide): http://www.mts.net/~slord/FIRST%20AID.htm
Study by a Street Medic Suggests Long-Term Effects of Tear Gas: http://www.montrealmirror.com/ARCHIVES/2002/091902/news3.html
Tear Gas and Pepper Spray Reference for Medics: http://urgencemanif.meagerman.net/chem.html
Treatment of Riot Control Agents: Tear Gas and Pepper Spray: http://free.freespeech.org/a20/teargas.htm
U.S. Government Use of Chemical Weapons Against U.S. Citizens: http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/02/10/11_chemical.html
The Use and Abuse of Pepper Spray (Legal article by By Lynne Wilson, Seattle Attorney): http://www.pcworks.demon.co.uk/magazine/documents/pepperspray.pdf
Use of Aerosol Weapons by Law Enforcement: http://www.sashley.com/Articles/UseofAerosolWeapons.htm
Use of CS Gas in Gulf is Illegal, says Red Cross: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0309-05.htm
Virtual Naval Hospital, Textbook of Military Medicine: Medical Aspects of Chemical and Biological Warfare: Chapter 12, Riot Control Agents (Definitive website for detailed info on medical effects of chemical irritants): http://www.vnh.org/MedAspChemBioWar/chapters/chapter_12.htm
Wikipedia Article on Pepper Spray: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_spray

Information on Positional Asphyxia and Hogtying
Asphyxial Death During Prone Restraint Revisited: A Report of 21 Cases: http://www.charlydmiller.com/LIB/2000asphyxrevisit.html
Patient Restraint & Restraint Asphyxia Newz Directory: http://www.charlydmiller.com/ranewz.html#directory

Information on Handcuffing and Handcuff Neuropathy
AfterCare: Handcuff Injuries: http://www.action-medical.net/library/aftercare/handcuffs.htm
Cheiralgia Paresthetica (Handcuff Neuropathy): http://www.ncemi.org/cse/cse0920.htm
Complaints of Pain After Use of Handcuffs Should Not be Dismissed: http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/318/7175/55
Focal Neurological Complications of Handcuff Application: http://aafs.micronexx.com/PDF/JOFS/JFS4651124/JFS4651124.pdf
Handcuff Neuropathy: Two Unusual Cases: http://www.aapmr.org/education/archive/emg9706a.htm
Handcuffing, Advance Stacking Techniques: http://www.angelfire.com/oh2/pti/
Liability Constraints on Human Restraints: http://www.laaw.com/finalre2.htm
Orthopedic Injuries Experienced by U.S. Prisoners of War During Operation Desert Storm: A Descriptive Analysis: http://infoventures.com/osh/abs/mili0005.html
PC Wins Handcuff Damages: http://www.cuffs.fsnet.co.uk/Handcuffs_docs/Pc%20wins%20handcuff%20damages.PDF

Communities Against Police Brutality says, "If you have a suggestion for a link, please email it to mgresist@minn.net

,"

On August 5, 2009, we reported here that a policewoman in Whitehall, Ohio flipped an 84 year-old Black woman over, banging her head on the ground and causing her head to bleed. The police had been called because the elderly woman was walking around a mall parking lot with her walking cane in one hand and a steak knife in the other.

www2.nbc4i.com news reports:

[Virginia] Dotson, who is believed to be 84 years old, was treated and released from Mount Carmel Medical Center for the head injuries she received when she was taken to the ground.

All seemed said and done with the incident until the video hit YouTube.

Now, Whitehall police are receiving phone calls from around the nation—even though there was little outrage in Central Ohio when the incident occurred.

“We’ve had people from Hollywood calling. We’ve had people from St. Louis, Houston, New York,“ said Whitehall Police Chief Richard Zitzke.

Zitzke estimates the department has received between 100 and 150 calls, some which tied up the phone line for an hour.

“We’ve had one or two people that just called and yelled and hung up the phone. We’ve had actually some death threats towards the officer,“ he said. www2.nbc4i.com

As far away as the United Kingdom, the DailyNewsOnline has reported on the case and posted the YouTube video, taken by a Black man on his cell phone at the scene.

Even the white supremacist "White Power" group Stormfront has felt compelled to report on this case, with Stormfront quoting an article by Elizabeth Gibson of the COLUMBUS DISPATCH newspaper, saying, "Police said Dotson [the 84 year-old woman] has Alzheimer's and lives at a nursing home. She was not charged with a crime."

I said at the time that if the Black woman had instead been a grizzly bear or an alligator then there was no way that police would bloody the animal's head in the process of corraling it and taking it to a game reserve. Have you ever seen a police officer shoot a dog in the back or beat a dog over its head with a night stick?

Even as some newspapers bend over backwards trying to justify the police response, they are unable to explain why the case makes news at all, if not for the shocking violence of the police response, against an old woman, walking with a cane, who lives in a nursing home with Alzheimers Disease. Beating up an old woman is shocking even when it's the police who do it, or particularly when it's the police who do it.

The police treated this woman more brutally and with less care for her safety than they would a wild animal. Would a bear, a moose or a deer or a dog have been smashed over on its head and left the scene bleeding?

Police don't treat Blacks like animals. They treat us worse than they treat animals.

Seems like the next logical step for reality TV, doesn’t it?

Living bridges.

The drug war continues to plague the war in Afghanistan.

Might want to rethink that particular talking point, Mr. President.

Redheads endure more pain at the dentist.

The Washington Post has an editorial that’s pretty critical of the police in Charlottesville, Virginia for arresting the crazy lady who was blogging about the members of the local narcotics task force.

At right you see the cover of Naše Vojsko — Vojesnký a policejní magazín (”Our Military — The Military and Police Manazine”), a Czech publication. This is issue 3/2009, and the magazine is in its fifth year of production.

I picked up this issue at Svět Knihy Praha 2009, the annual Prague book fair, earlier this year. The cover photo really caught my eye.

The article which goes with the photo is entitled “Teleskopy v akci” (”Telescoping batons in action”). It features a series of photographs in which men dressed in clown suits military and police uniforms can be seen using these telescoping police batons to:

• Immobilize a man in a pain hold which threatens to break his elbow
• Subdue a prone man
• Project an image of power
• Conduct close combat with an unruly crowd
• Smash a train window
• Smash the window of a van
• Threaten the resident of an apartment during a raid
• Inspect the underside of a vehicle with a mirror extension

There is also another photo accompanying the article, with the telescoping baton filling the role of striptease club dance pole, complete with a beautiful young lingerie-clad pole dancer.

Rather than project my own thoughts here, I’d like to invite you, gentle reader, to share yours. Your comments on the image are most welcome, but if you really want to have an impact, click through on the picture for the full-resolution version, and make your own blog post, Facebook note or whatever with it, alongside your own commentary.

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Tags: clown suit, combat, defense, Facebook, lingerie, military, pole dancer, police, Prague, sex, state, striptease, violence

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I've come across another anti-electrocution blog called, "Electricity is for Lightbulbs"

, which reports the case of a Native American girl who was seriously injured after being shot in the head with an electrocution device.

Tasing A 14-Year-Old Girl In The Head

From NM (and of course some police fanboys come to this cop's defense in the comments):

A 14-year-old Tucumcari girl is recovering at an Albuquerque hospital after being shot in the head with a Taser dart by Tucucmari Police Chief Roger Hatcher.

Now, her parents say they want the police department to review its policies for using the Taser.

The girl was hit in the head Thursday by one of two darts fired simultaneously as she was fleeing, Hatcher said.

The other dart lodged in her hip.

Hatcher said be believed he had no other option.

“There’s a lot of issues,” Hatcher said. “She committed a delinquent act. She was running from police across traffic without looking.”

Let's keep an eye on the electrocution news reported at the Electricity's for Lightbulbs blog.

…there doesn’t seem to be much at work in this story.

When Donald Ross’s sister passed, more than 100 people attended her funeral mass in Spokane.

The burial was scheduled for a nearby cemetery, but Ross and his family only made it a quarter of a mile when flashing lights forced them to the side of the road.

“Harold, his (my husband’s) brother, said, ‘You pulled us out of a funeral procession,’” said wife Shirley Ross.

But the deputy kept them there, writing up five citations because the driver and the passengers were not wearing a seat belts…

Those five tickets took 12 minutes to write. By the time Ross and his family members got back on the road, the burial was over.

The police department has apologized and reprimanded the officer. Just kidding!

…the sheriff’s department says [the deputy] had every right.

“We’re out here trying to prevent funerals, not disrupt them,” said Dave Reagan of Spokane County Sheriff’s Office.

Police officers don’t have rights, they have powers. And the fact that they have them doesn’t mean they always have to use them, even in those situations where the law allows them.  Seems to me that making a woman miss her brother’s burial in order to write her a ticket—not for endangering others, but for not buckling her own seat belt—would be one of those times when some discretion might be in order.

Thanks to reader Judy for the tip.

The Economist takes on U.S. sex crimes laws.

Another airline holds passengers hostage on the tarmac, this time for nine hours.

New York City continues to lead the world in marijuana arrests.

Amazing pictures of Saturn’s rings from Cassini.

That’s a might tiny horse you have, there.

Gay cop accused of sexually assaulting illegal immigrant men. Sad comment thread at news site degenerates into competition between gay-bashers and immigrant-haters.

This interview was published, in Slovak, by Markíza Magazine on 2 July 2009.

The English text here is a loose back-translation of the Slovak text of the published article, which is available at mojacasopis.sk.

This is a translation of a translation of my own interview responses, and a bunch of things inevitably get lost in such a process. In a couple of cases, I’ve footnoted things that I feel I ought to clarify, but, with that, the text:

Verbal Aspect Bothers Me!

Text: Ľuba Kukučková – Photo: Oles Cheresko

Mike Gogulski has a Polish surname, was born an American and today is a citizen of no state. He has worked in the USA and in Belgium. Lately, he’s dropped anchor in Slovakia and has been living in Bratislava for five years.

To the east, he’s been as far as Košice, Guatemala to the south and Vancouver, Canada to the northwest. He doesn’t feel like a globetrotter, and he’s very pleased to be in Bratislava!

Mike’s paternal grandparents emigrated to America at the start of the 1900s. His mother’s ancestors came from Germany. Most of today’s Gogulskis live in the area of Poznań, Poland, but Mike doesn’t know them personally. Like many European emigrants at the beginning of the twentieth century, his ancestors, too, wanted to break their bonds with their motherland and become Americans. They had difficult lives, too, and there remained no time to preserve the Polish language and culture for their children. But now their great-grandchild has come back to Europe after all. He speaks four languages and, thanks to his spontaneous approach to people, has made many friends in Slovakia. In this way, he might be called a true world citizen. Mike Gogulski, however, has no citizenship. He renounced his American citizenship, and for the moment is only considering becoming a Slovak citizen…

School, LSD and Beer

Michael was born on 8 August 1972 in Phoenix, Arizona. His father got a job as an electro-mechanical engineer in Orlando, Florida, and there Mike lived with his family until he was 25 years old. Afterward, he roamed a number of states following jobs, from Minnesota to Connecticut and from California to Wisconsin. Eight years ago, his father died of cancer. His mother, Joan, lives in Florida. Mike’s younger sister, Karen, who works as a nurse, is raising two adorable boys – Cole and Chase – in Orlando with her husband, Billy. Mike sees his nephews only in photos, though. “In 1990 I started studying information technology at a university in Orlando, but then my interest shifted to LSD and beer,” he openly confesses. He quit his studies after the first semester. But he’s found his footing in life quite successfully. He has a ten-year information systems career behind him as a systems administrator, network engineer and IT infrastructure manager. He moved around a large area of the western parts of the US after work.

In 2004, in the wake of many work as well as personal expectations and failures, Mike left America. His girlfriend at the time wanted to teach English in a European country, someplace in the eastern bloc. She sent out inquiries and got a response from right here in Slovakia. They both moved to Bratislava and, though their paths parted later, Mike became fond of Bratislava. Since 2006 he’s begun devoting himself more to language, rather than to computers as in the past. He has become a translator, proofreader and editor.

Slovaks are Quieter

“Bratislava has its good and less-good sides,” the American native muses. “I never lived right in the city in the past, in the US. I thought that I’d hate the city, but that’s not so. I find living here pleasant. I like that Bratislava is small enough to offer a peaceful life while being big enough to have everything you’d expect from a city.” He has friends, lovers, ex-lovers as well as enemies here… He has been to Žilina, Košice, Prešov, Banská Bystrica and Zvolen. He has heard that Slovakia is a beautiful land and looks forward to discovering it over time. Does he sometimes compare Slovaks to Americans? To Mike, good and bad people are found everywhere. As a matter of principle, however, he judges people as individual beings, not as members of some group based on place of birth or the geographical divisions of the world. Mike believes that Slovaks, in general, are quieter than Americans. He’s had some awkward moments, though, with the hazards of Slovak. He’d been in Slovakia barely three months when he approached a group of girls at work with whom he often went to smoke outside the building. He asked: “Would you like to smoke?” And they took this a bit differently… They stopped laughing after a bit and explained the sexual undertone* of the question.

At one time he defended his trouble with the language by saying, “my Slovak is good enough for taxi drivers and waiters,” but since then he’s improved dramatically. He reads well in Slovak, in his humble appraisal, writes like a respectable schoolboy but has trouble, though, understanding responses in conversation. He works as a translator, and so he hasn’t mastered slang; he says his Slovak is more lawyerly. Really understanding a language demands growing up in the country. “I didn’t want to live in some sort of isolated bubble with other Americans and English-speaking people,” Mike says. “I would have felt cut off from reality. Many Slovaks say that Slovak is one of the most difficult languages in the world, but I don’t think so. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s easy. I took two years of Latin in school, so Slovak declension didn’t surprise me. Still, I’m not good at recalling when and how I should use the various cases. And the hardest thing for me – and perhaps for many westerners who come to Slavic lands – is verbal aspect. I want a magic key that would make it clear for me when to use the perfective aspect, but no such key exists!”

Mike is “Polyamorous”

Besides working with Slovak, Mike also translates official documents from Czech into English. He has simplified his lifestyle, and so he’s also living off smaller earnings. If he travels to the Czech Republic, he gets by in Slovak, and says the local people there observe him with interest. He once spoke Spanish very well, but has forgotten a lot. He believes, however, that if he traveled for a month to Spain or Mexico he would speak fluently by the third week. Though he behaves like a world citizen, he hasn’t traveled that much more of it. “In the US I moved from city to city every two years. I have been as far east as Košice, as far south as Guatemala, and as far north and west as Vancouver, Canada. I have been satisfied living here in Bratislava, and I don’t have any urge to move someplace else soon.” Mike got married in the US at 23, but the marriage lasted for only six years. From the marriage he has a nine-year-old daughter, Kyra, who lives with her mother in Georgia. Nobody from his family has visited him in Bratislava yet, though maybe they will come when his nephews grow up. Is he sad to be alone? “No. These days I am polyamorous (author’s note: in love with more than one person) and I’m not interested in an everlasting relationship of the marriage type.”**

Why did Mike renounce his American citizenship? “In its political, governmental essence, the USA appears to be a criminal organization. I don’t want to be connected with it in any way. I’m not against supporting society, but I am against taxes, which the state criminally demands of me from birth, and I don’t want to support others’ privileges. For me, ridding myself of citizenship was a way to bring my legal and social status into harmony with my beliefs. Perhaps later I will apply for Slovak citizenship, but that will be only for practical reasons, so that I can travel. I don’t want to have any sort of connection with the criminal organization known as the state. And, perhaps, I will not be a citizen of any country until the end of my life.”

* The Slovak verb fajčiť means, literally, “to consume by smoking”, as by smoking a cigarette. In slang it also means “to perform fellatio”.

** My actual words: “These days I am openly polyamorous, and not interested in a state marriage of any kind.”

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Tags: anarchism, Bratislava, information technology, libertarian, marriage, polyamory, renunciation of citizenship, translation

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The feds this time:

An east Charlotte woman who’s going through cancer treatment said she was startled early Wednesday morning when federal agents burst into her apartment searching for suspects in a drug trafficking ring.

“It was a case of mistaken identity,” Rosie Lee Bright told Eyewitness News.

But Federal Bureau of Investigation agents didn’t figure that out before they ordered her to lie on the floor and handcuffed her…

A spokeswoman for the FBI told Eyewitness News that the address mix-up appears to have been an honest mistake since agents had been working on the assumption they were targeting the right apartment.

Oh, well in that case…

You sort of hope they wouldn’t intentionally target the wrong apartment. There is at least this:

Bright said once they realized their mistake, agents apologized and offered to pay any medical bills she might have because of the raid.

It’s not often I feel compelled to write a book review, but reading Gene Callahan’s Puck was quite an adventure!

Described simply as “A Novel” in its subtitle, Puck is really something quite more than that. A fictional story, yes, but also a tour of some of the “weirder” aspects of Gene’s universe — and mine.

I won’t try to describe much that goes on, save to say that the story takes places in two parallel(?) universes, and sometimes in the spaces between them. You got your swords ‘n’ wizards fantasy adventure, you got your romance, you got your mystery and intrigue, you got your modern psychological drama, you got your science fiction — everything, indeed, that one could ask for in a modern novel.

But there’s more…

Puck is a book on several different levels. It’s loaded with references to mythology, anarchism, religious traditions, history, the odder bits of physics and a whole bunch of classical literature to boot. I consider myself a fairly learned guy, but Mr. Gene has been treading this planet a bit longer than I have, and his learning shines through brilliantly. To paraphrase another great novelist: this book is like a mirror; if a monkey looks in, no Korzybski looks out.

From page 105:

[Doc and Sophia] shared several passion-filled years, but by the time Doc was finishing graduate school — when the loudest political voices in the Village were proclaiming that AIDS was a government plot against the gay and minority communities, and were fighting pitched battles with the police over control of Tompkin’s Square Park — he had grown disillusioned with what he had come to regard as the posturing of bored, rich kids. It wasn’t that he had no sympathy for their grievances, but rather that he now perceived their activism as more a palliative for their own boredom and frustration than as a real attempt to address the injustices that were their purported motivation. He suspected that their protests were a contemporary manifestation of the same impulse that had motivated Uncle Franz’s Cabala studies. The radicals he knew seemed to believe that if only they could arrange their political slogans in accord with some occult formula, then the ruling elite peacefully would release the reins of power, liberate the masses, dismantle the military-industrial complex, and sow flower gardens over the obsolete missile silos.

Read with caution, ready to remember just how flimsy your paradigms are, and just how liable they are to slip, like flimsy masks, off the face of reality.

Puck you! Puck me! Puck everyone!

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Tags: activism, anarchism, book review, Gene Callahan, Korzybski, liberty, parallel universe, Robert Anton Wilson, ruling class

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