Gangsters in Blue

The Los Angeles Police Protective League Board of Directors, on their understanding of Officer Safety:

This time it was a Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel, essentially ruling that unless an officer is actually under physical attack, he/she cannot use a Taser to subdue a suspect. And, for good measure, these starry-eyed jurists, who probably have never been in a physical fight in their lives, opined that police officers should not fear irrational suspects defying officer commands as long as the suspect stays 15 feet from the officer.

As every street cop knows, any suspect within 15 feet who is actively resisting verbal commands is a threat to officer safety.

If a suspect complies with an officer’s commands, the use of force or a weapon is unnecessary. When a suspect fails to comply with verbal commands, it means the situation is rapidly escalating and some form of force will be required to gain compliance.

—Los Angeles Police Protective League Board of Directors, lapd.com: The Official Blog of the Los Angeles Police Protective League (2009-12-30): The Ninth Circuit’s year-end ‘gift’ to law enforcement

(Via William N. Grigg.)

See also:

• GT 2010-01-11: Tiny weapons searches
• GT 2008-10-25: Translation from cop-speak to English
• GT 2009-10-12: The Police Beat: Officer Marc Rios, the Bronx, New York, New York
• GT 2008-06-30: Law and Orders #8: Memphis cop Bridges McRae exceeds expectations by punching Duanna Johnson repeatedly in the face with handcuffs over his knuckles for failing to stand up on command in the booking area at 201 Poplar
• GT 2008-06-13: Law and Orders #7: Portland cops Erin Smith and Ron Hoesly find it would be necessary to pull Phil Sano down off his bike, beat him up, and taser him repeatedly, for biking without a headlight
• GT 2008-02-01: Law and Orders #6: Pigs at the Trough
• GT 2007-12-23: Law and Orders #5: Daytona Beach cop takes control at Best Buy by shocking an unarmed, retreating woman
• GT 2007-12-07: Law and Orders #4: Wichita cops take control by shocking a deaf man for not following orders he couldn’t hear
• GT 2007-12-01: What a shock.
• GT 2007-11-27: Law and Orders #3: John Gardner of the Utah Highway Patrol tasers Jared Massey in front of his family for questioning why he was pulled over
• GT 2007-10-11: Law and Orders #2: Florida cop was within bounds when he punched and pepper-sprayed a 15-year-old girl for breaking curfew
• GT 2006-11-16: Law and Orders: UCLA campus police found it necessary to repeatedly taser an Iranian student already lying helpless on the ground
• GT 2009-07-29: Clown suits
• GT 2008-10-06: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter… (#7)
• GT 2008-05-11: Cops are here to protect you. (#4)

So here’s something a judge on the Massachusetts Appeal Court recently said — in reply to government cops who forced their way into Wilbert Cruz-Rivera’s car, without any warrant, and opened up a pill bottle while rummaging around in his things, and then claimed that this invasive warrantless search, conducted on the private property of a man who was not accused of any criminal offense, was justified as an officer safety search:

On this record, it simply was not reasonable to believe that the defendant might, upon his release with a message that he was free to go, enter his car, reach into the console, open a pill bottle, extract a weapon smaller than four-and-one-half inches by one-and-three-fourths inches, and use it in an effort to harm the two nearby, fully armed police officers who had just released him.

—Quoted in The Boston Globe (2009-12-17): Court: Concern about tiny weapons didn’t justify search

I suppose I am glad that a judge said this. But the fact that a judge had to say it — to clarify to a gang of pushy government cops that officer safety really is not a excuse reason to go on a warrantless search for tiny weapons hidden in closed pill bottles — and that to do so they had to overturn a lower court’s ruling, which upheld this ridiculous opportunistic lie — does not really make me very optimistic about the reliability or effectiveness of those constitutional brakes on police power that the court is supposedly out to save.

From Mike Gogulski (2009-10-22): Report on Slovak State Police attacks against Mike Gogulski, 5 September 2009. Mike has asked that this information be republished as widely as possible in order to spread the word about it, and, I presume, in order to make it impossible to suppress the information by suppressing a single distribution point. I lazy-linked the story as soon as possible after Mike let me know about it; now, in the interest of spreading out the record as far as possible, I will also reprint it in full. If you have a blog, you might do the same. Here you go:

To all who pledged to support me in this matter, I would ask that you republish the below information as broadly as possible, and without delay.

Also available in MS Word 2003, PDF, and MS-Word exported filtered HTML formats.

REVISION HISTORY

• v1.0 – 20090906
  • Original version, real names, episodes 1-9, 6 image attachments
• v1.1 – 20090908
  • Name labels harmonized in preparation for generation of 2 versions
  • Forked into full and no-names versions
  • Minor cleanup throughout
  • Added WITNESS
  • Added offense “Abuse of Authority by Public Official”
  • Introduction added to Episode 1, including first interaction with WITNESS
  • Episode 9 expanded
  • Episodes 10 and 11 added
  • Catalogue of injuries added
  • Tables of contents and figures added
• V1.2 – 20091022
  • Release version, with relevant, known names

TABLE OF CONTENTS

REVISION HISTORY.. 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS. 2

CAST.. 3

LOCATIONS. 4

CATALOGUE OF INJURIES (created 8 September 2009) 5

EPISODE 1 – Saturday, 5 September 2009, inside building, BAR.. 6

EPISODE 2 – 5 September 2009, courtyard, BAR.. 7

EPISODE 2 – 5 September 2009, courtyard, BAR.. 8

EPISODE 3 – 5 September 2009, courtyard, BAR.. 9

EPISODE 4 – RESIDENCE.. 12

EPISODE 5 – POLICE STATION.. 13

EPISODE 6 – POLICE STATION.. 14

EPISODE 7 – POLICE STATION.. 15

EPISODE 8 – POLICE STATION.. 16

EPISODE 9 – POLICE STATION, Kramáre hospital, RESIDENCE.. 17

EPISODE 10 – RESIDENCE – Saturday, 5 September 2009. 18

EPISODE 11 – RESIDENCE – Sunday, 6 September 2009. 19

EPISODE 12 – RESIDENCE, POLICE STATION – Monday, 7 September 2009. 20

CAST

Michael Jude Gogulski – Bar patron, victim, complainant, victim, prisoner, victim, patient, witness.

WITNESS – Female who frequents/works at BAR. Brunette, short hair, late 20s to early 30s. Knows me by sight and by name.

BARTENDER – Early-30s female, black hair. Bartender/supervisor at BAR.

ATTACKER – Manager/owner of BAR. Early 40s (?), moustache, straight greasy hair. Presumably Ján Kurtulík, owner/officer of KELLE, s.r.o., operator of the BAR.

BLONDE – Unknown blonde female associate of ATTACKER’s, possibly his business partner.

MIROSLAV PAŠEK – Police officer and main police attacker, about 5’10”, muscled, close-cropped hair, early to mid-30s. Standard police uniform. Identified by name tag pinned to uniform chest, left side. Two-stars plus wings rank insignia (uncertain).

CURLY – Police officer with short dark curly hair, fat with prominent belly, early to mid-40s. Equal in rank or superior to MIROSLAV PAŠEK. Standard police uniform.

ROOKIE1 and ROOKIE2 – Early-20s police officers wearing blue jumpsuit type police uniforms.

DISPATCHER – Emergency police dispatcher responding to my call at telephone number 158.

MARTIN – English-speaking police officer assigned to interpreter duty. Late 20s to early 30s.

FRIEND1 – My friend who I called from jail.

GUEST1 and GUEST2 – Two female couchsurfing guests from Slovenia staying at my residence.

FRIEND2 – My friend who met me at the hospital and drove me home.

LOCATIONS

POLICE STATION – Police station where I was taken. Šuňavcova 2, Bratislava – Nové Mesto

BAR – “Erotic Salon” establishment at Mikovíniho 2, Bratislava, Slovakia. Called variously “Wild Angels” and “Nymfa Salon”. Operated by Kelle, s.r.o., operated in turn by its officer, Ján Kurtulík. Location of attack by ATTACKER.

RESIDENCE – My flat.

CATALOGUE OF INJURIES (created 8 September 2009)

1. 2-cm round dermal abrasion, outer left elbow Possible Source:  Falling to ground after being struck by ATTACKER; Falling to ground after being struck by MIROSLAV PAŠEK at bar or in cell
2. 1.5-cm oblong dermal abrasion, inner left elbow Possible Source: Scraped BAR wall while being held in pain-lock hold against wall by MIROSLAV PAŠEK
3. Several other dermal and epidermal small abrasions on outer left elbow Possible Source: Uncertain
4. 2-cm round dermal abrasion, inner right elbow Possible Source: Falling to ground after being struck by MIROSLAV PAŠEK at bar or in cell
5. 1-cm epidermal cut, right index finger Possible Source: Uncertain
6. Two .5 to .75-cm dermal abrasions to head, 3cm above hairline at forehead Possible Source: Head smashed into wall at BAR by MIROSLAV PAŠEK (multiple times)
7. 3-cm dermal laceration, behind left ear Possible Source: Uncertain
8. 1-cm dermal abrasion, top of left knee Possible Source: Falling to ground after being struck by ATTACKER; Falling to ground after being struck by MIROSLAV PAŠEK at bar or in cell
9. 1.5-cm light dermal abrasion, front of left knee Possible Source: Falling to ground after being struck by ATTACKER; Falling to ground after being struck by MIROSLAV PAŠEK at bar or in cell
10. 6-cm x 5-cm deep contusion, inner side top of left knee. Purpling bruise Possible Source: Falling to ground after being struck by MIROSLAV PAŠEK at bar or in cell
11. 5-cm x 4-cm light contusion, left thigh, 10-15-cm from kneecap. Light bluish bruise. Possible Source: Uncertain
12. 8-cm x 4-cm contusion, upper right inner arm. Banded and jointed pattern reflecting 2 or 3 fingers’ grip. Possible Source: Attack by MIROSLAV PAŠEK in holding cell
13. 6-cm x 2-cm light contusion, right side of back below scapula, near side. Possible Source: Punched by MIROSLAV PAŠEK or CURLY at BAR
14. Contusion to right pectoralis. Possible Source: Punched by MIROSLAV PAŠEK at BAR
15. Contusions to ribs and connective tissue below right pectoralis. Possible Source: Punched by ATTACKER1, by MIROSLAV PAŠEK or CURLY at BAR, or by MIROSLAV PAŠEK in cell
16. Contusion to upper lumbar spine Possible Source: Punched by MIROSLAV PAŠEK or CURLY at BAR
17. Contusion to lower tip of right scapula Possible Source: Punched by MIROSLAV PAŠEK or CURLY at BAR

EPISODE 1 – Saturday, 5 September 2009, inside building, BAR

~4:00 AM: I arrive at BAR and order a whiskey. As I walk to a free table, WITNESS sees me and calls my name. I’ve introduced myself to her by name and spoken to her at length during two previous visits. We greet each other and I offer here some of my whiskey. She drains the glass instantly. I get another from the bar.

~4:35 AM: I am told “You must leave” by BARTENDER. She has been giving me trouble for only buying drinks rather than the other services on the menu as well.

After refusing to leave for no valid reason, and after dashing briefly upstairs in reaction to hearing a woman screaming but finding nothing amiss (WITNESS had gone upstairs with a patron), BARTENDER makes a phone call. Shortly after, ATTACKER appears in BAR with BLONDE. ATTACKER has a conversation with BARTENDER, stands behind bar looking at me. He is clearly the owner or manager. BLONDE also stands behind bar, and I observe her doing paperwork. ATTACKER and BLONDE retire to back room.

There were several other people in the establishment who witnessed me reacting to the scream, and being asked to leave and refused service: three presumably Slovak patrons, and 3-4 female staff.

After relenting to her demand and while asking a final time for a last drink (she told me they had stopped serving, then went to deliver drinks to some guests), I take a photograph of BARTENDER with my mobile phone and exit the building into the courtyard. As I leave, I observe BARTENDER hurrying into the back room.

EPISODE 2 – 5 September 2009, courtyard, BAR

Between Episode 1 and 4:53 AM

I approach the outer gate to the courtyard and find it locked. I turn around to see ATTACKER emerge from door to back office and walking toward me. ATTACKER carries some sort of blunt weapon (metal baton?) in right hand, resting the weapon against the back of his head as he approaches me.

ATTACKER approaches me and a verbal exchange begins. I demand the door be unlocked. ATTACKER demands that I delete the photo of BARTENDER. I refuse. ATTACKER makes threatening gestures and continues approaching me more closely. Exchange continues until ATTACKER strikes me at least once, possibly twice, on right side of upper body with his left hand. He then strikes me open-handed on right side of face, causing my glasses to fly off and clatter to the floor of the courtyard somewhere.

I tell ATTACKER now that I will delete the photo of BARTENDER. I take the mobile phone (Nokia 6120c) from my pocket. He takes it from my hand and begins looking for the photo. I snatch it from his hands, show him the screen, locate the photo of BARTENDER, delete it, then page through other photos until he is satisfied it has been deleted.

ATTACKER now opens the gate to the courtyard and walks back into his the back room office, inside which I can see a number of active video monitors. He sits behind a desk looking toward me, while BLONDE sits in a chair in front of the desk, facing the video monitors. I search for my glasses on the ground and cannot find them.

CHARGEABLE OFFENSES: False Imprisonment, Assault and Battery (all to ATTACKER)

EPISODE 2 – 5 September 2009, courtyard, BAR

Still in the courtyard, I dial 150 on my mobile phone at 4:53 AM. I tell respondent I need police. I’m told this is the fire department, and to call 158. I hang up and call 158 to be answered by DISPATCHER at 4:54 AM.

I tell DISPATCHER that I may have been robbed of my glasses and that I have been physically assaulted, requesting the police to come. I give him the location and address.

I continue searching for my glasses, to no avail, remaining in the courtyard. Several times I approach the open door to the back office where ATTACKER and BLONDE sit as described above, tell them that I’ve called the police. Over the course of ~10 minutes waiting for the police to arrive, I make an escalating series of demands for money from ATTACKER to simply leave and forget the incident, starting at €500 and ending at €3000. ATTACKER is impassive, says nothing. BLONDE never looks in my direction, and I don’t hear them speaking to each other.

EPISODE 3 – 5 September 2009, courtyard, BAR

~5:05 AM. Two police cars arrive, carrying MIROSLAV PAŠEK, CURLY, ROOKIE1 and ROOKIE2.

I stand behind open gate to courtyard, smoking a cigarette. Police stalk past me and enter ATTACKER’s office directly. Presumably a conversation occurs between ATTACKER and/or BLONDE and one or more police officers.

Either ROOKIE1 or ROOKIE2 remains outside the office. I tell him that I’m the one who called DISPATCHER. He says something to other police officers, who emerge from office.

Officers begin asking me questions, which I have trouble following. I tell them that ATTACKER attacked me, knocked off my glasses and that I can’t find them – presumed stolen.

Main interrogator quickly becomes MIROSLAV PAŠEK, who is short-tempered and aggressive. He asks more questions about incident. I try to respond as best I can in broken Slovak. MIROSLAV PAŠEK grabs my cigarette out of my hand and throws it to the floor. “What are you doing?” I ask (or something to this effect).

MIROSLAV PAŠEK: „Občiansky preukaz.” (“ID card.”)

Me: „To nemám.” (“I don’t have that.”)

MIROSLAV PAŠEK: „Pas.” (“Passport.”)

Me: „To nemám.” (“I don’t have that.”)

There may be more words after this exchange. My memory is cloudy.

At this point, MIROSLAV PAŠEK strikes me several times in the right side. At least the first blow is with his left hand. I cry out in pain and fall to the ground.

I cannot remember the remainder of the sequence of events which occurred at the BAR courtyard clearly.

MIROSLAV PAŠEK demands I stand, and I comply. I tell him this is going to make an interesting story for tomorrow’s SME or Pravda, featuring his name. He becomes enraged, strikes me again at least once, grabs my right arm, pushes me to wall of BAR building between entry door and back office door. Pushing me into the wall causes my head to impact the wall. MIROSLAV PAŠEK pins my upper body to the wall and wrenches my right arm up behind my back, putting extreme strain on my right shoulder and elbow. MIROSLAV PAŠEK says something to the effect that he doesn’t want to hear anything about seeing himself in SME or Pravda.

During all attacks by MIROSLAV PAŠEK, I cry out in pain and terror. Neighbors may have heard, and should be interviewed.

Other incidents during Episode 3:

Police finally understand that I have neither an ID card nor passport because I am a stateless person. They demand to see my Travel Document, which is not with me.

At one point, either CURLY or MIROSLAV PAŠEK makes some sort of threatening remark referring to “Američan.” I laugh. MIROSLAV PAŠEK strikes me again several times, and I collapse again.

I am pressed up against the entry door to the building in the pain-restraint hold as before. With my left hand I attempt to open the door to escape MIROSLAV PAŠEK’s attacks. It is locked. MIROSLAV PAŠEK and others observe me. MIROSLAV PAŠEK strikes me several times in the lower back, right side, and spine. At least one other police officer strikes me in the ribs, spine or lower back.

After more insults and threats, demands for respect and compliance, “speak this way”, etc., I am turned around and released to face MIROSLAV PAŠEK. I gaze at his name tag and memorize his name. MIROSLAV PAŠEK observes this and asks what I am looking at. I don’t respond. MIROSLAV PAŠEK strikes me several times and places me back in the restraint hold, smashing my head into the wall again. He asks again what I was looking at. I laugh. He wrenches my arm much harder, either forcing me up the wall or causing me to rise onto my toes. The pain is extreme. “Nothing,” I say.

At one point after being struck by MIROSLAV PAŠEK, falling to the ground, beaten by MIROSLAV PAŠEK while on the ground and then demanded by MIROSLAV PAŠEK to stand, I remained sitting and raised both arms with wrists crossed, asking to simply be taken to jail. Laughter resulted from MIROSLAV PAŠEK and several other officers, followed by MIROSLAV PAŠEK’s repeated demand to stand.

At some point they may have demanded proof that I deleted the photo of BARTENDER from my mobile phone. I laugh and say that proof of this is impossible, but page through my photos anyway until they are satisfied it is gone.

Ant some point during this encounter in the BAR courtyard, one of the police officers (not MIROSLAV PAŠEK) walked to the outer gate which was standing open. He closed the gate, making exit or observation impossible.

Toward the end of this engagement, one of the female staff, WITNESS, opened the door to the building and looked out. She looked me directly in the eyes, I believe as I was sitting on the ground, freshly beaten. She closed the door quickly.

Eventually, agreement is reached that we will go together to my flat to retrieve my Travel Document so they can verify my identity. I am bundled into a police car, back seat right side. I can’t recall the driver. ROOKIE1 or ROOKIE2 sat in the back to my left.

CHARGEABLE OFFENSES: Assault and Battery plus Abuse of Authority by Public Official (MIROSLAV PAŠEK and unknown officer who struck me in ribs), Failure to Report Crime (other 2 officers)

EPISODE 4 – RESIDENCE

ROOKIE demands I wait in the car, opens car door, demands I exit and stand by car. I am then escorted to front door of RESIDENCE building. I open front door with my electronic key. Officers ask on which floor I live, and I tell them the 5^th. Two officers (one ROOKIE and another not recalled) take the stairs, while I ride the elevator with the others. ROOKIE takes position in front of my door, demands I opened it, asking if anyone else is in the flat. I tell them two couchsurfers are present, GUEST1 and GUEST2.

ROOKIE allows me to open door with my key and reach inside to turn on lights. I call to GUEST1, asking her to bring my backpack to the door. I retrieve my Travel Document from the backpack and give it back to GUEST1. Officers take Travel Document. I tell GUEST1 repeatedly to call FRIEND1, tell her what was happening, that I was going to jail, and that she could find info on my computer.

Police officers demand I come back down stairs with them, load me back into car and drive me to POLICE STATION.

EPISODE 5 – POLICE STATION

My memory is increasingly cloudy. I am trying to hold on to a single fact, the name of MIROSLAV PAŠEK. I am told to sit on a bench while discussion goes on inside an office near the entry to the building of my case. The officers have my Travel Document with them. ROOKIE1 or ROOKIE2 stands in hallway outside office watching me.

ROOKIE1/2 demands I empty my pockets, take off belt, turn off mobile phone, leave all objects on table opposite holding cell door. I comply. I am led into holding cell. I ask for water and to visit the toilet and am told “soon”.

There is part of a bottle of water in the cell. I drink it and place the empty bottle next to another one in the cell.

I lay down on the bench to rest. I notice my jeans are wet on the back side, presumably from falling on to wet ground at the BAR courtyard. I take off my jeans and lay them on the bench to dry, and lay down again. A passing officer tells me I must put my jeans back on. I refuse, telling him they are wet. He says that I must, since other people are passing by the open-bar door of the cell. “Prežijú,” I tell him – “They will survive.” He goes away.

After some time I am led out of the cell into an office. A male officer with short dark hair and a black laptop computer wants to interview me. He is assisted by another officer, female with long blonde curly hair. I answer a few basic questions. Female officer asks me for my mother’s name. I tell her. She doesn’t understand, asks me to write it down. I ask her if I may have paper and pen to make notes. She refuses. I refuse to write anything unless I can take my own notes. Eventually she relents and writes down my parents’ names herself with spelling assistance from me.

The male interrogator is asking a series of questions about the events of the evening. He asks why I took the photograph of BARTENDER. I state that I don’t want to answer. I am told that I must answer. I tell the officers that I’m not going to answer any more questions without an interpreter and an attorney.

During interrogation I state that I was beaten by police at BAR courtyard. Police officers are impassive.

During interrogation CURLY appears at the door to the room. When I turn to look at him he turns away before I can view his name badge, while he looks me in the eyes.

I am taken back to my cell, and lay down again. I am in extreme pain all over the right side of my body. I cannot lay on that side, and moving is painful. I feel extremely cold, and parts of my body are trembling at random.

POTENTIAL OFFENSE: Failure to Report a Crime (two officers)

EPISODE 6 – POLICE STATION

MIROSLAV PAŠEK comes to the door to my cell after a few minutes. MIROSLAV PAŠEK demands that I sit up. I ask why. He says I must obey him. I refuse and lay down. He calls me insulting names and threatens me. I ask if he really wants to do that while on video (camera mounted at back of cell near ceiling) and he snarls. MIROSLAV PAŠEK enters the cell, demands again that I sit up. I ignore him. MIROSLAV PAŠEK grabs my shirt collar and right upper arm with his left hand and attempts to haul me up, loses his grip. MIROSLAV PAŠEK grabs me again, hauls me to my feet, strikes me several times in right side, and on head. I fall to the floor, striking my head on the floor. MIROSLAV PAŠEK demands that I get on the bench and sit. I comply.

CHARGEABLE OFFENSES: Assault and Battery, Abuse of Authority by Public Official (MIROSLAV PAŠEK)

EPISODE 7 – POLICE STATION

An English-speaking police officer who calls himself MARTIN appears at my cell door saying he’s been asked to help me with the interview since my Slovak is not so good.

I ask MARTIN if I’m being charged with anything, and he says no. I ask if I’m free to go, and he says no, I must give a report. I tell him I’m not giving any information without an attorney.

MARTIN goes away and comes back several minutes later. Normally I would give the attorney’s name to them and they would call, because it’s “not like America here”. But they give me my mobile phone. I call FRIEND1, explain situation, ask for help. I turn the mobile phone off and return it to MARTIN, who places it back with my items on the table opposite the cell.

I remain sitting. I am dizzy and in great pain. My head hurts like nothing before. I feel like my temperature is dropping rapidly. I continue to experience tremor in my extremities.

Some time later I stand and go to the cell door. MARTIN sees me, asks if I am all right. I tell him about my symptoms. He asks if I want a doctor. I say yes. He says a doctor will be here shortly. I ask him if there is a rule that I cannot lay down on the bench. He says no. I ask him then if his friend Miro (MIROSLAV PAŠEK) is still here, since he beat me in the cell because I would not sit up. He states that MIROSLAV PAŠEK has left, his shift having ended.

POTENTIAL OFFENSE: Failure to Report a Crime (MARTIN)

EPISODE 8 – POLICE STATION

MARTIN returns to my cell and leads me to another office. Two more senior police officers are there. One is typing something on a typewriter. They ask me a number of questions about answering questions for the report, which I refuse to do. MARTIN interprets. I again state that I was beaten by police officers at BAR, and then by MIROSLAV PAŠEK in the holding cell. They seem incredulous.

POTENTIAL OFFENSE: Failure to Report a Crime (MARTIN, two interrogating officers)

The older officer sitting on the right side of the office at one point says that I can leave if I pay a penalty of €30. I refuse, saying I’m not paying anything.

Two paramedics arrive. One speaks English and asks me about my condition. They decide to recommend that I go to the hospital, and I agree. They fill out and ask me to sign a Patient Agreement. I comply. I demand a copy of what I signed and they refuse, saying “You don’t need that, that’s just for us,” until finally they give me a blank copy of the same document (ATTACHED).

MARTIN tells me that I’m to be released with a “predvolanie” order to appear at the police station at 8am Monday morning (ATTACHED), and that I’ll be taken to the hospital without escort “So it doesn’t seem like you’re a murderer or something.” I agree, and sign an envelope (ATTACHED) indicating my receipt of the predvolanie document.

The paramedics call the ambulance service. There is trouble because I don’t have my insurance card with me and can’t remember the name of the insurance company. The paramedics require €2 in payment for something. I have a five-euro note, which I give them. They don’t have the proper change. They return a €2 coin to me, and I tell them to keep the change. They give me a cash receipt (ATTACHED).

Knowing I’m released, I ask to make a phone call. My phone and other items are given to me. I phone GUEST1 at 8:34AM, who has already left my residence with her friend.

EPISODE 9 – POLICE STATION, Kramáre hospital, RESIDENCE

I go with the ambulance personnel and am taken to the hospital at Kramáre. Female paramedic takes my blood pressure and presumably pulse prior to departure. At the hospital, I am given an intake examination in the emergency room. I am then X-rayed 3 times for the head, twice for the chest. I am given a physical examination by one doctor. I am given an ultrasound examination of the abdomen and lower chest. I am given a second examination of a sort (see below), during which the doctor reviews the X-rays. I am discharged without admission or treatment, with a medical report (ATTACHED).

Between examinations I lay on seats in the hallway and try to sleep. I cannot sleep. The pain in my right side is debilitating, and I continue to experience peripheral tremors.

During the second general examination (largely verbal) in the emergency room, I point out to Dr. Michal Magala that I have a number of cuts, scrapes and bruises that I received while being beaten by the police. I ask that they be examined and noted in the file. Magala tells me that these are “somariny” (“jackassery”), and that I could have gotten them anywhere. I insist that I’m here for a medical examination after being attacked, and want all of my injuries noted in detail. Magala yells at me, again saying these are “somariny”, approaches me threateningly and smashes his left fist into a cabinet between us for emphasis.

My friend FRIEND2 meets me at the hospital and drives me home, where I arrive about 11:20AM, Saturday, 5 September 2009.

Deficiencies in the medical report:

1. The notation “Homans negat.” indicates that a physical test for indications of deep vein thrombosis was conducted. No such test was conducted.
2. “bez vytoku krvi genitalu” indicates there was no discharge of blood from the genitals. No questions about this were asked, nor was I ever asked to remove my trousers for the necessary examination.
3. The report claims that a pelvic palpation examination was conducted. No such examination was conducted.
4. The report claims that an examination of the legs was conducted. No such examination was conducted.

EPISODE 10 – RESIDENCE – Saturday, 5 September 2009

I take 800mg of ibuprofen, make some phone calls and fall asleep around 12:30, for about sixteen hours. I’m in extreme pain. I cannot lay on my right side, my head hurts, I feel dizzy, moving my chest in any fashion causes great pain. The tremors have ceased. I am terrified, and can’t think clearly.

EPISODE 11 – RESIDENCE – Sunday, 6 September 2009

I begin writing this report, and share early versions with a number of people.

I photograph some of my injuries with my mobile phone camera and a mirror.

A friend comes and photographs my injuries, and takes with him the unwashed clothing I was wearing during the attacks.

I am supposed to give a statement at 8am on Monday. Numerous contacts to lawyers result in failure. All are either not certified for the criminal system, on vacation, don’t speak English, or otherwise unavailable.

I make contact with a court-certified interpreter, and arrange to meet at her flat at 7:30am.

I go to a restaurant to have dinner around 8pm. A friend’s contact calls to give me the number of a qualified lawyer. I arrange with the lawyer that I will phone him at 7:30am, and he will call the police station to exercise my right to postpone the interview until I can have counsel present.

I go home and make phone calls and other arrangements. I cannot sleep. I am terrified, in pain and can’t think clearly. I set five alarms on my mobile phone to awaken me before 6am, and finally get to sleep around 4am.

EPISODE 12 – RESIDENCE, POLICE STATION – Monday, 7 September 2009

I awaken at 10:40, having not heard 5 alarms or a call from FRIEND1 at 8:11am.

I shower, dress, take 800mg of ibuprofen and go to a restaurant to have coffee. I phone the interpreter and ask her to call the lawyer for me, for him to call the police station, apologize for me and to arrange another time. She phones him and calls me back, saying that I should just contact them myself. He doesn’t want to represent me now, because he does not speak English.

I walk to the POLICE STATION, appearing there around 11:45am. Since I have no interpreter, they will arrange one.

While I am waiting, I briefly catch sight of CURLY entering the building. I am terrified.

The police tell me that the interpreter will arrive at 1:00pm. I leave to meet a friend, and show her an early version of this report in hardcopy.

I return to the police station, part with my friend and enter at 1:00pm.

Around 1:15pm the interpreter arrives.

The interviewing officer is the same one who told me to put my jeans back on while in the cell, and who attempted to conduct the interview previously. The interpreter is presumably another police officer, unknown to me previously.

I apologize profusely for being late. The officers seem to accept this.

I ask if I’m being charged with anything. No. But I could be charged with a breach of public order offense, a misdemeanor which carries a €100 fine.

I tell them that I want to move the interview to a time later in the week when I can have counsel present. It’s not clear whether or not this is permitted, but they insist on carrying out the interview now.

The parameters of the interview are set such that I can discuss things with the interpreter at length, and he will then dictate a summary in Slovak to be entered into the report.

I tell them that I am reluctant to give any information, because I was beaten by the police at the scene and while in the holding cell. They seem incredulous and shrug this off.

I tell them I don’t want to file any charges or register any complaints.

I end up signing a “witness statement” of some sort, which contains a very vague description of events, roughly this:

Around 4:00 AM on Saturday, 5 September 2009 I went to BAR. I had a couple of drinks. There was a conflict between me and the bartender. As I left, I could not find my glasses. I called the police. The police arrived and asked me for my ID, but I didn’t understand. The police took me home to retrieve my ID, and then to the police station to file a report. I was released to the hospital for medical treatment.

I was not resisting the police in not providing my ID, there was a misunderstanding.

I sign two copies of the statement, and ask for one copy. I am refused, the interpreter telling me that they are not allowed to give me a copy.

I leave the police station around 2:30pm. I go home, take 800mg of ibuprofen and sleep for six hours.

—Mike Gogulski (2009-10-22): Report on Slovak State Police attacks against Mike Gogulski, 5 September 2009

• Officer Justin Barrett. Boston, Massachusetts. The Boston Police Commissioner recently suspended and moved to fire Boston patrol cop Officer Justin Barrett, after being forwarded a racist-ass e-mail that Barret wrote in response to Yvonne Abraham’s Boston Globe column criticizing Sergeant James Crowley for his stupid arrest of Henry Louis Gates. All the news stories have mentioned how Barrett stated I am not a racist, but I am [prejudiced] towards people who are stupid and repeatedly described Gates as a banana-eating jungle monkey. Some also mentioned active patrol cop Barret’s statement that, had he been in Crowley’s place, he not only would have arrested Gates but would have pepper-sprayed him in the face. None of the mainstream media articles I’ve read so far have mentioned that active patrol cop Officer Justin Barrett also complains that Your defense [4th paragraph] of Gates while he is on the phone while being confronted [INDEED] with a police officer is assuming he has rights when considered a suspect. He is a suspect and will always be a suspect. (Brackets in original; emphasis mine.) Or that, alongside the violent racism and explicit totalitarianism, he adds some crude misogyny, writing to the immediate target of his letter, Yvonne Abraham, that You are a hot little bird with minimal experiences in a harsh field. … You have no business writing for a US newspaper nevermind detailing and analyzing half truths. You should serve me coffee and donuts on Sunday morning. He later repeats the joke about coffee and says that you just need to get slapped. Officer Justin Barrett, when not a racist, sexist, police-statist patrol cop, is also a veteran of the United States government’s Army; he felt comfortable forwarding his racist, sexist, police-statist e-mail to a few of his buddies in the Boston police force and several of his buddies in the Army National Guard. Since the story hit, Barrett has complained to the media that in the uproar over his repeated use of the phrase banana-eating jungle monkey, People are making it about race. It is not about race, and that, although he made a poor choice of words, I didn’t mean it in a racist way. I treat everyone with dignity and respect. His lawyer says that he plans to fight to hold onto his cop job at the upcoming hearing.

• Disorderly conduct. Patrolman Robert Lang, Patrolman Jared Bock, and Patrolman Shawn Panchick. Brackenridge, Pennsylvania. Three white patrol cops in Pennsylvania are being investigated by another local government’s cops in response to allegations that they beat and robbed a three black teenagers who they arbitrarily commanded (why?) to clear off of a friend’s front porch where they were hanging out late at night. I don’t know whether or not the allegations of robbery are true — one of the victims, Kyle Dudley, claims that he was beat down and robbed of his watch and money by a group of cops possibly different from the three who originally responded to the call, which makes it hard to compare stories — but I do know that, whether or not those allegations are true, the story that the cops all agreed on for their report is more than enough reason to call their conduct belligerent, violent and stupid. Cops have exactly no business singling out black teenagers to be hassled, or for forcing them down and arresting them on a disorderly conduct beef simply for refusing to obey arbitrary bellowed commands that they leave a private residence where they have been invited to hang out with their friends, or a neighborhood where they are hanging out on public property. And once again, it is clear that disorderly conduct charges are the sheepdogs’ favorite threat for making that the sheep stay just where they’ve been herded, regardless of whether or not anyone is actually doing anything that would threaten anyone’s rights even in the slightest.

• Cops are here to keep us safe. (Cont’d.) By sideswiping our cars while they tear down the road at 20 mph over the posted speed limit with no lights and no sirens on. Then by concealing information or flat-out lying in the accident report and to the media about how fast they were going, until they finally reveal, a couple days later, that the accident was, after all, clearly the fault of the cop’s speeding. Where have I seen that before…? I guess his victim is lucky that he wasn’t doing 100; if he had gotten himself hurt or killed in the crash he caused, she probably would have been arrested for reckless driving and smeared as a cop-killer all over the local papers.

• Fun for ages 7 to 70. Unnamed patrol officer, Knoxville, Tennessee, and Deputy Chris Beize. Austin, Texas. In Knoxville, a government cop, who had important business to do Investigating reports of some neighbor kids getting into a fight, has been accused of trying to coerce a 7 year old boy into talking more candidly by handcuffing the child and cussing him out, while the boy was crying and asking for his mother. The 7-year-old was not involved in the fighting and was never suspected of, or charged with, any crime. Officials refuse to so much as disclose this dedicated public servant’s name, but they promise that the matter is being Internally Investigated.

  Meanwhile, in Texas, Deputy Chris Beize tasered Kathryn Winkfein, a 72-year-old great-grandmother, twice during a routine traffic stop, after she refused to sign a ticket and he decided to escalate the situation by ordering her out of her car, instead of just mailing the damn thing to her home address. Beize claims that she swore at him (which is not a crime) and that she pushed him into oncoming traffic (no she didn’t; the dashcam video clearly shows that he lunged over and grabbed her and shoved her back several feet, when she tried to de-escalate the situation by sidestepping him to get back to her truck). Then he blasted her with a 50,000-volt electric shock from the taser, and then tasered her again while she was lying on the ground. Then he arrested her for resisting arrest. His superior officers in the paramilitary chain of command have defended Beize’s hollering belligerence, physical assault, and torture by repeated electrical shocks, against an unarmed, 4′11″, 72-year-old great-grandmother who never threatened any physical harm and was guilty of nothing more than a moving violation and contempt of cop, as an appropriate reaction to a dangerous situation. By the by, when Beize is not busy shocking the hell out of elderly women, he is a taser instructor for the local police.

• Officer Morris Taylor. Springfield, Missouri. Officer Morris Taylor, a cop formerly on the Springfield, Missouri city government’s police force, is facing misdemeanor assault charges for beating John Sedersten, a prisoner under his authority, after Sedersten had been restrained and booked in the Greene County Jail. The story’s in the news because Sedersten, the victim of the beating, recently decided not to testify against Taylor in the criminal case, on advice from his attorneys, because of the danger that his testimony will open him up to lines of questioning that the government can use against him in his pending criminal cases. Sedersten is pursuing a separate civil lawsuit against Officer Morris Taylor for the beating; apparently he’s just not particularly interested in working closely with the same government office that is trying to lock him up in other cases, particularly not for so minor a vindication as a misdemeanor assault conviction. Even without his testimony, apparently portions of the assault are recorded on video.

  Besides having spent 11 years in local government police forces, Officer Morris Taylor also has experience in dealing with prisoners from working as a government soldier in the U.S. government’s war and occupation in Iraq.

• Deputy Marcus Smith. San Joaquin County, California. San Joaquin County Sheriff’s deputies stopped a car on a routine traffic stop near Manteca; Charles Inderbitzen was riding in the car. Inderbitzen was ex-con out on parole, and believed that he had a warrant out on him, so he got nervous around the cops. He tried to leave the scene without the cops’ permission; even though the police had no reason whatever, at this point, to suspect that he had committed any crime, or even (since he was not the one driving the car) of even the most minor civil infraction. But government cops in America aren’t actually interested in dealing with crimes; they are interested in targeting suspects, and are more than willing to summarily declare you a suspect sort of guy based solely on your failure to follow their arbitrary bellowed commands, or your decision to try to leave the scene when they are present. So a gang of police chased Inderbitzen down, cornered him in a back yard, drew their guns on him, and ordered him to get on his knees and put his hands on his head. After Inderbitzen complied with their orders, with several cops pointing guns at him and while physically at their mercy, Deputy Marcus Smith hopped the fence, kicked Charles Inderbitzen in the gut, punched him in the back of the head, kicked him two more times in the stomach, and then punched him about 5 or 10 more times until Inderbitzen was beaten unconscious. I guess he’s lucky they didn’t taser him to death instead.

• Oops. Our bad. Deputy Matthew Paul. Seattle, Washington. Christopher Harris was trying to get away from a group of King’s County police (or rather, a gang of beefy, heavily armed strangers, dressed all in black, who didn’t bother to identify themselves before they started hollering and chasing after him late at night). Turns out he didn’t actually do anything wrong (they were chasing him because a witness fingered him as having been involved in a bar fight; the witness was wrong). But rather than risking the possibility that someone possibly might get away from the cops (even when he had no way of knowing they were cops, who had every right to leave the scene, who posed no physical threat to anybody, and who, at the very worst, was suspected of some minor-league drunken fighting), Deputy Matthew Paul, who outweighed his victim by about 100 pounds, decided to put an end to things by waiting until Christopher Harris slowed down to a walk, and then body-tackling him so hard that he knocked him eight feet into a wall, slamming Harris’s head into the concrete so hard it put him into a coma. The story’s in the news because Deputy Matthew Paul’s coworkers in the King County government’s prosecutor’s office have announced that, as far as they’re concerned, Deputy Matthew Paul did not violate Christopher Harris’s rights and the only personal consequence that Deputy Matthew Paul will face, for putting his falsely accused, completely unarmed and physically harmless victim on life-support, is having been given a paid vacation from his job for a while during the investigation. According to the county government, It’s a tragic incident. Well, oops. I guess he’s lucky they didn’t just shoot him in the back instead.

• Non-Lethal Force (Cont’d.) Unnamed officer, Officer Debra Lynn Indovina-Akerly and Officer Charles Watson. Swissvale, Pennsylvania. Last summer, a 37 year old unarmed black man named Andre DeMon Thomas was extrajudicially electrocuted by a gang of three Swissvale cops, who tortured him with three 50,000-volt electric shocks, handcuffed him, and, after he was handcuffed, kicked him, punched him, and crushed him until he vomited, passed out, and died. They were electrocuting him, incidentally, For His Own Good, after he begged neighbors to call the cops to help him out. He was unarmed; he wasn’t acting aggressively; none of the neighbors felt threatened by him; he was never at any point charged with any crime at all by anyone; he seemed disoriented and terrified, and he wanted the cops there to keep him safe. But in cop-think, being terrified and disoriented means acting erratic, and acting erratic in the judgment of a cop, even if you pose no threat to anyone and even if you have not been so much as accused of committing a crime and even if you are yourself seeking help, is reason enough for you to get Served and Protected good and hard until you are physically subdued. Or dead, whichever comes first. [And]((http://radgeek.com/gt/2009/06/22/the-police-beat-3/) yet again, it became necessary to kill Dre Thomas in order to save him. The case is in the news again because the family has filed a lawsuit and the coroner’s autopsy report, which revealed deep and widespread bruising all over Thomas’s body, contradicts the Medical Examiner’s initial report absolving the cops and claiming that Thomas died from a mythical made-up condition called agitated delirium.

• Gang cops (Cont’d.). Gang Strike Force, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Seven victims of racist shakedowns by a multi-agency paramilitary Gang Strike Force in the Twin Cities have filed suit against the members of the Strike Force, the city governments that put it together, and the boss cops who commanded it. The Strike Force was permanently shut down earlier this month after repeated complaints about the cops on it making improper seizures, which is to say armed robberies under color of law, of money and property from innocent people with no connection to gang activity, but who happened to be immigrants (hence easy targets). If only we had some warning, had some way of knowing, that an elite gang police unit with an unlimited mandate, overwhelming force, and extremely broad legal powers to roust people and take their property with minimal legal accountability, might end up just acting like the baddest gangsters on the block. But who could possibly have foreseen that? It’s not like anything like this has ever happened before.

• Detective Keith Alfaro. San Antonio, Texas. A couple years ago Detective Keith Alfaro of the San Antonio police department got himself involved in what the media at the time dignified as a poolside scuffle with a teenager. By which they meant that he punched an 18 year old girl in the face, then, after he knocked her down, got on top of her, put her in a chokehold, and, according to an unrelated witness, pummeled her black and blue while she was on the ground. After Alfaro ran away from the Sheriff’s Deputies who responded to a call, Vaughn had to be taken to the hospital; she still couldn’t open her jaw for weeks after the attack. The reason he did this was that she told him to put out a cigar he was smoking; the community pool had a no-smoking rule. Tamara Vaughn claims she asked him politely; Alfaro claims she copped an attitude, got up in his face, dared to say some vulgar words in his hearing, and tried to swipe the cigar out of his mouth. Apparently, even if we grant his story to be true, Detective Keith Alfaro believes that that’s good enough reason for a grown-ass man to throw the first punch, then beat the living hell out of an 18 year old girl while she’s lying on the ground, and that doing so was totally defensive … It was her own actions that forced me to take those measures. Perhaps that’s also what forced him to answer her request that he not smoke a cigar at a non-smoking pool by telling her to take that East Side attitude back over there; maybe that’s also what forced him to call her a nigger and a half-breed while he was beating the hell out of her, or to tell Vaughn, who is a lesbian, that You wanna look like a man, I’m gonna treat you like a man.. Detective Keith Alfaro testified that his problem was not with her race but with her attitude (you know, the East Side kind), and that She though she was talking to a child, … She thought she was talking to someone she could bully — not an adult family man. Apparently Detective Keith Alfaro believes that an adult family man deals with tense social situations by punching 18 year old girls in the face and dislocating their jaws. In any case, this adult family man bragged in an online profile for an Ultimate Fighting website about his countless street KO’s.

  The story is in the news again because Keith Alfaro finally ended up going to trial this year on a misdemeanor assault rap, along with some resisting and evading arrest for having run away from the Bexar County Sheriff’s deputies. And just today, after the judge refused to allow Bexar County prosecutors to tell the jury about the online bragging about street fights, or about the numerous existing complaints against Alfaro in his internal affairs file (complaints which, of course, never endangered his position with the San Antonio Police Department, until he got into a fight on another police agency’s turf), the jury voted to acquit Alfaro on the assault beef. They convicted him on the misdemeanor evading and resisting arrest charges, because apparently busting up an 18 year old girl’s jaw is OK, but they’ll be damned if they’ll let anyone get away from the po-po.

• Rapists on patrol. Officer Feliciano Sanchez, Los Angeles, California. (Possible trigger warning.)

  Officer Feliciano Sanchez, formerly hired muscle for Los Angeles County’s Bell Police Department, recently plead guilty to using his police powers to abduct a woman he had detained on a traffic stop, drive her to an isolated location, and then flashed his gun and coerced sex from her before he would let her free. Bell Police Department Captain Anthony Miranda says he is shocked to hear that a male cop might use his government-granted legal powers and his arsenal of deadly weapons to intimidate and violently coerce sex from women who come under his power. He says that he’s in disbelief because he’s never heard of such a thing before. Well, I’m not. I have.

• 18 shots for running a stop-sign. Officer James Arnold. Fort Wayne, Indiana. The city government in Fort Wayne, Indiana just spent $335,000 of other people’s money in order to cover Office James Arnold’s ass after he shot an unarmed immigrant named José Baudilio Lemus-Rodriguez 18 times, after Lemus-Rodriguez refused to pull over for a routine traffic stop for running a stop sign.

  Fort Wayne Police Officer James Arnold, by the way, was just four months on the force when he lit up Lemus-Rodriguez’s car; before that, he had years of combat experience as a United States government Marine fighting for the U.S. government’s occupation and counter-insurgency operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Allen County Prosecutor Karen Richards refused to file any criminal charges; the city hired on a PR flack to declare Arnold’s actions objectively reasonable. The city’s main concern in settling the family’s lawsuit, besides using taxpayer money to cover Officer James Arnold from any personal legal liability for his lethal actions, is apparently as a bribe to ensure that the objective video record of the objectively reasonable shooting remains permanently concealed from the public.

Here’s a snippet from a recent New York Times profile on Henry Louis Gates, the renowned Harvard professor of African-American studies, and Sergeant James Crowley, the stupid, belligerent, and violent Cambridge cop who stupidly arrested Gates on his own front porch, allegedly for committing disorderly conduct in the foyer and front porch of his own home.

From 2 Cambridge Worlds Collide in Unlikely Meeting, in the New York Times, 26 July 2009:

Friends say he has a large circle of friends in Natick and in Cambridge, where he grew up. Sergeant Crowley plays on a men’s softball team and coaches his daughters’ softball and basketball teams.

I have always thought of him as the most noncop person that I know, said Andy Meyer, a friend who plays softball with him on a team named the Black Mariahs. Mr. Meyer’s wife, Betsy Rigby, said: When he has the uniform on, Jim has an expectation of deference. But when he’s not in uniform, he’s just a regular guy.

Yes. Exactly. And therein lies the problem.

Sergeant James Crowley believes that putting on a uniform and a badge puts him above just-folks like you and me and Henry Louis Gates, and so that it entitles him to special treatment — to deference, that is, willing subordination — that he would never think of demanding from his friends, his neighbors, or any other of his equals when he’s living life out of uniform, like any other just-a-regular-guy.

And that’s why, when he is in uniform, he’s willing to bully, browbeat, and physically coerce you into handcuffs and jail, just to violently punish you if you should dare to tell him off in your own foyer — because he stupidly believes that his work clothes entitle him to command, and to expect obedience from, people he doesn’t even know. That’s stupid. But typical: stupidity, violence and petty tyranny are in fact his line of work as he has been led to understand it. And when he showed up at Ware St., he was indeed just doing his job.

(Via Jacob Sullum @ reason 2009-07-29.)

See also:

• Roderick Long, Austro-Athenian Empire (2009-07-25): Best Defense
• Roderick Long, Austro-Athenian Empire (2008-01-28): Vigil Injustus Non Est Vigil
• GT 2008-02-01: Law and Orders #6: Pigs at the trough

• Police torture in the U.K. Metropolitan Police Department. London, England. Narcs working for the London city government’s Metropolitan Police force are under investigation for allegedly waterboarding prisoners in order to coerce evidence in an interrogation for a marijuana case.

• Botched SWAT raid. Officer Allen Hill. North Richland Hills, DFW, Texas. In 1999, a paramilitary SWAT squad stormed a house in North Richland Hills (a little city near Fort Worth) based on a search warrant based on a confidential informant’s uncorroborated claim that the house was full of marijuana. When a bunch of heavily armed strangers broke down his door and stormed into his house, Troy James Davis allegedly grabbed a gun and pointed it at the home invaders. (His mother believes that the gun was planted by police. I don’t care whether it was or not; a man’s got a right to defend his home when armed strangers bust their way through the door.) The cops gunned him down. Turns out there were no drugs anywhere in the house. Turns out that the warrant was based on a completely unvetted e-mailed tip from an anonymous snitch. Even the cop who gunned Troy Davis down now says it was a wrongful death and he never should have been there. Now, ten years later, after a long lawsuit, the city government has settled up with the victim’s parents for $100,000. They will, of course, send along the bill for this murder to a bunch of innocent North Richland Hills taxpayers, who had nothing to do with it.

• Rapists on patrol, (cont’d.) Officer Thomas Tolstoy, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Officer Thomas Tolstoy, a narc in Officer Jeffrey Cujdik’s increasingly notorious shake-down squad, used the opportunity of his team’s repeated evidence-less hyperviolent paramilitary drug raids to repeatedly pull women in the houses being raided into side rooms in order to sexually assault them [possible trigger warning]. At least two women have come forward independently so far to testify against Tolstoy. Tolstoy has not yet been charged with any crime; the department’s response so far has been to reassign this accused serial rapist to an easy desk job for the past three weeks. (Via Radley Balko 2009-06-02; as Balko says, If these were normal citizens, and not cops, they’d have been indicted by now.)

• Officer Anthony Abbate. Chicago, Illinois. Officer Anthony Abbate has finally been convicted of aggravated battery by a Chicago judge. Abbate was caught on video throwing, punching, and kicking a 26-year-old woman named Karolina Obrycka. She was tending bar when Abbate, who was drunk and off duty, tried to shove his way behind the bar to steal a drink after she refused to serve him anymore. After she told him to move and he refused, Obrycka tried to shove him back out from behind the bar. So Abbate beat the living hell out of her, and then called it self-defense when he came up for trial. Well, why not? After all, he hit his little head, and he only had, what, about 125 pounds on her? Abbate waived his right to a jury trial, knowing that out-of-control agents of the State have much better chances with a government judge; he was initially charged with 15 different counts, all of which but one were dropped in the course of the two-day trial. Had he been on the clock rather than drunk out of his mind when he did the battering, that one would almost surely have been dropped, too. We know this because of…

• She fell. (Cont’d.) Officer Wayne Simoes. Yonkers, New York. See William Grigg, Pro Libertate (2009-05-30): Just a Child With A Temper [Trigger warning. Includes graphic images of and video of Irma Marquez’s injuries, suffered at the hands of a male police officer.] In which the male State once again once again assumes the role of a stereotypical abusive husband. A 44 year old woman named Irma Marquez tries to get a look to see if her niece, who was injured in a fight that had just been broken up, is O.K. The medical worker on the scene shoved her away; she stumbled back into the cops. At which point Officer Wayne Simoes tries to wrench her arm behind her back in order to arrest her (for what?); she tries to shake his hand off of her arm, and he responds by picking her up and body-slamming this drunken middle-aged woman face-first into the floor, then jamming his knee onto her back and cuffing her in order to arrest her for disorderly conduct and interfering. [Trigger warning.]

  The story is in the news again because a jury just recently voted to acquit Officer Wayne Simoes on all charges.

• Bashers on patrol. Brooklyn, New York. In Crown Heights last month, a gang of cops rolled out to investigate a call about unruly and intoxicated people outside a night-club. When J.G. (Jeanette Grey, a 31 year old black lesbian) and Tiffany Jimenez (a 19 year old Latina lesbian) heard the noise outside and ran out to see if their friends were O.K., the cops (who were busy ordering bystanders to disperse when the two left the club) then grabbed them (for interfering, or whatever), slammed them to the ground, beat the two women with nightsticks while they tried to surrender, shouting You fuckin’ bitch-ass dyke and We are having some dyke pussy in here tonight during the beating, and then arrested them for resisting arrest. The NYPD assures us that the complaint is being internally investigated.

• Now they want a task force. Officer Andrew Dunton. New York, New York. Meanwhile, also in New York, David Patterson, arbitrary Governor over the state of New York, wants a high-profile special political task force to investigate the fatal shooting of an innocent black man by a couple of NYPD cops while the man was trying to use his handgun to protect himself from a criminal trying to break into his car. The cops had a history (1, 2 of repeated civilian complaints [sic] year after year. Wonder why Patterson would put his neck out to demand this high-profile independent task force instead of the usual internal investigation? Oh, yeah, because the victim was an off-duty cop.

• Warminster Police Department. Warminster Heights, Pennsylvania. Rich Pietras, Bucks County Courier Times (2009-05-29): Moms complain of excessive force by police. Lydia Isaac’s car got clipped in a hit-and-run and she pulled into a laundromat parking lot to confront the man who did it. The argument got heated and the cops got called. While they were busy Investigating, Lydia’s son 13-year-old son Marc Isaac got on his cell phone to call his dad to let him know what happened. The cops ordered Marc to wait where he was; when he continued walking, trying to explain that he was on the phone with his dad, five of the cops grabbed him, slammed him down onto the hood of his mom’s car, and then, while this 13-year-old boy was being physically restrained by five grown-ass men, beat him on the side of the head with a flashlight or baton, and then maced him.

• Officer Kristen Johnson, Officer Nicholas Webster, Officer Robert Buquo, Officer Glenn Pearson, an Lieutenant Lynn Young. Mesa, Arizona. Four Mesa police officers and a lieutenant are under separate internal investigations. In the one case which has grabbed all the headlines, a woman miscarried a 12-to-14-week pregnancy in a motel room; when the manager called 911 and three cops showed up, they reckoned the most appropriate thing to do with a woman grieving the loss of her baby was to arrest the father on some drug charges and then wrap up the miscarried fetus and flush it down the motel room toilet. Meanwhile, Officer Nichoas Webster is being Internally Investigated after he was caught on tape slamming a hand-cuffed man’s head against the trunk of his police car and then slamming him into a chain-link fence. This Dangerous Individual was being transported to jail on suspicion of urinating in public and jaywalkinng.

• Sergeant Mark Crowe, et al. Bryan County, Georgia. Back in April, Tommy Lee Williams was working out in his grandmother’s yard when a white narc named Mark Crowe (then a deputy for the county government’s sheriff) rolled up and started hassling him, repeatedly calling him Leroy. (Crowe claims that he thought Mr. Williams was someone else, an old classmate of his. Crowe was in the neighborhood on other business, and apparently not in uniform at the time, so as far as Mr. Williams knew Crowe was just some random stranger yelling Hey Leroy at him while he was trying to get some yard work done.) Mr. Williams asked Crowe why he was messing with him, and then told him to go away. According to Mr. Williams and other witnesses, Crowe responded by going off on a tirade against Williams, calling him boy and nigger along the way.

  According to Crowe himself, Mr. Williams responded to the exchange of words by cussing Crowe out from the private property of his grandmother’s front yard, and then approached his car, at which point Crowe decided to arrest Mr. Williams for the non-crime of cussing at a police officer who hassles you. Then Crowe tied to grab Williams, and when Williams struggled, eventually called in two of his gang buddies to pull Williams down into a ditch, hold him down, handcuffed him, pepper-sprayed him, beat him in the head with fists and batons, and tasered him. When Williams’ family and neighbors tried to get the cops to stop this gang beat-down, five of them, including his 81-year-old grandmother, were arrested on charges from obstruction of police to terroristic threats. The cops also seized the cell phones they were using to take photos of what was happening. This rampaging police riot against an 81 year old woman and an unarmed man who was being held down by three heavily-armed cops is of course dignified as a melee by the local papers.

  The six victims of this racist police rampage filed suit in the county Superior Court, then withdrew and re-filed the suit in federal court after the local court refused to order the police accused of participating in the beating from patrolling the neighborhood where their victims live. In any case, all this is in the news again because, in the meantime, the city government of Pembroke decided to appoint Sergeant Mark Crowe as chief of their police force.

• Tallman Street, New Bedford, Massachusetts. Speaking of racial slurs and melees, in New Bedford, Mass., a gang of over a dozen cops stormed a poor, mostly-Latino neighborhood on Tallman Street in pursuit of a single young man, Jonathan Natal, for allegedly riding a minibike with no helmet and without a license. When he didn’t stop on command, they chased him; when he ran off on foot and hopped into nearby backyards, they called in 12 more cops and shoving people to the ground, knocking down doors, storming houses, calling the residents spics and yelling at them to shut the fuck up along the way. When they found Jonathan Natal in a stairwell, they arrested him and beat him black and blue while he tried to surrender. (The cops say he raised his arms, which apparently they took as a sign that he wanted a fight. Of course, if you don’t raise your arms when the cops come at you, they’re liable to shoot you.) Evelyn Natal, Jonathan’s 38 year old mother, was arrested while she was standing on her porch trying to find out what was happening to her son. When people gathered on public streets to observe what the cops were doing, and had the temerity to verbally berate police on public property, the cops ordered them to disperse. When people in the neighborhood started filming the police rampage on cell phone cameras, the cops slammed them to the ground and snatched the cell phones. When Jolanda Rivera, an 18 year old young woman, walked towards the cops, they slammed her to the ground and arrested her for disturbing the peace. When Louis Natal, a 22 year old young man, ran away from the cops, a gang of the cops chased him down, slammed him to the ground, and started punching him over and over again. (I guess he’s lucky they didn’t kill him for running away.) When his father, Luis Natal, 49, tried to find out what was happening to his son, they arrested him, beat him up, and pepper-sprayed him. When John Hernandez refused to let cops into his house without a warrant, they forced their way in, beat him up, and arrested him for disorderly conduct and interfering with a police officer. In the end, the cops arrested 14 people in the course of this police rampage. Once again, this one-sided assault, in which a large group of people observed and verbally berated police officers who were storming through public and private property, and the police responded by yelling racial slurs, breaking down doors, breaking down doors, invading houses, handcuffing people, holding them down and beating the hell out of them, torturing them with pepper spray, forcibly arresting them whether they moved towards officers, away from officers, or just stayed put in their own homes, etc., etc., etc., is described as a melee and a near-riot (referring to the berating of the bystanders, not the massive violence of the heavily-armed police) by the local papers. City Councilor Steven Martins, alleged representative of the people living on Tallman Street on the arbitrary Council over the city of New Bedford, explains it all by saying They were back there, chasing that individual [sic], because he went to that neighborhood. And other people got involved when they shouldn’t. A police sergeant assigned to the North End station told the papers that folks in the neighborhood get upset when the police try to crack the whip a little or enforce the laws.

  Here’s a little history quiz for the day. Historically, in the U.S., what kind of social relationship is associated with cracking the whip in order to get people to fall in line with what you want them to be doing?

• NOPD Tactical Unit. New Orleans, Louisiana. In New Orleans, cops working for a tactical unit of the city government’s police force kicked in the door of a house after midnight in order to serve a warrant on Leonard Dillon, who the police suspect of conspiring to murder a witness in an upcoming trial. After breaking down the door and shouting commands to come out, they grabbed Dillon’s 15 year old nephew, forced him down, and handcuffed him. When they got their hands on Leonard Dillon, they handcuffed him, knocked him down, and then, while he was handcuffed, began kicking him in the crotch while he was restrained. When his nephew tried to look over at what was happening, the cops kicked him in the jaw so hard that he had to be sent to the children’s hospital later with facial lacerations. After Dillon was arrested the cops he had to be hospitalized for broken bones in his face, a lacerated liver, and damage to his testicles so severe that he had to undergo surgery. The cops claim that they took him down while he was resisting and trying to get a gun to use against them; Dillon denies it; but in either case, whatever he was trying to do, how is this kind of savage beat-down once he has already been restrained, justified by anything resembling self-defense? The NOPD say that an internal investigation is underway; meanwhile, last week, the NOPD also took the time to hold a public press conference to praise the work of the warrant squad.

• Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Department, Salt Lake County, Utah. Two years ago, a Salt Lake County couple had some coworkers over to their house for a work party to get a video presentation done. It ran late; they got to drinking while they worked; they got a bit loud; they started singing karaoke. The couple’s 16 year old kid complained over the phone to a friend that he couldn’t sleep. The friend then decided that the best thing to do would be to call the police. The county sheriff then sent out six deputies, to do some servin’ and protectin’ by investigating a noise complaint (about noise that only people inside the house were complaining about?). When Stephen M. Perry refused to let police inside his house without a warrant, the Gangsters in Blue forced their way in through the door, pepper-sprayed Perry and two of his guests, and repeatedly tortured the same two guests with a taser. Then these out-of-control hyperviolent thugs, who stormed a house without a warrant over a noise complaint, used repeated pain compliance to torture innocent people for asserting their right to be secure in their home from busybody police, and then proceeded to arrest their three victims on charges of disorderly conduct (in their own home?), resisting arrest (arrest for what?), and assault on police.

  A jury threw out all of the charges against Perry and his guests. They then filed suit against the six deputies for excessive force and violation of their civil rights in the warrantless search. The story is in the news because the Salt Lake County government has decided to cover the cost of a $60,000 settlement for these deputies’ out-of-control violence. Public servants that they are, they will, of course, send the bill to county taxpayers who had nothing to do with this rampage. Meanwhile, Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Lt. Don Hutson said an internal affairs investigation found no violation of policies by the officers.

  What do you think that says about the policies?

• Internal investigations. New Jersey. The ACLU has filed a report documenting that the numerical majority of New Jersey’s local police departments violate New Jersey’s legal requirements for handling so-called civilian complaints. 63% of local police agencies demand, in violation of state law, that complaints be submitted in person (so that victims of police violence have to go down to the police station in order to lodge a complaint); 49% do not allow anonymous complaints. 79% of agencies refuse to accept complaints filed by a minor without back-up from an adult; in 50 cases over the past 10 years, the investigators never even bothered to interview the person who made the complaint. Morris County Prosecutor Robert Bianchi says that the guidelines exist because a complaint process can do either of two things: Is it a shield for police misconduct? … Or is it … doing what it’s supposed to be doing? I dunno; I’m inclined to say that, in most cases, the answer is that it’s both; the only reason you’d think there’s a distinction here is if you had some odd ideas about what, in the eyes of the State, this kind of process is supposed to be doing.

• Yet Another Isolated Incident. Officer Joseph J. Rios III. Passaic, New Jersey. In Passaic, New Jersey, a 49 year old black man named Ronnie Holloway was walking down the street minding his own business. It was a warm night and he had his sweatshirt open, showing part of his chest and belly. A cop car rolled up to the street corner and the cops yelled at him from out the car, ordering him to zip it up his jacket.

  When he didn’t promptly respond to this arbitrary bellowed command, Officer Joseph J. Rios III got out of the car, grabbed ahold of Holloway, repeatedly slammed him into the ground and against the hood of the car, and punched him in the head over and over again, and then got out his baton and started beating his victim in the ribs with it, all while Holloway made no move of any kind to fight back or resist in any way at any point. A nearby restaurant’s surveillance camera recorded the beating; it also recorded his gang-sister, Officer Erica Rivera, standing around, doing nothing, then turning her back on the beating and walking away to call in some backup (!), rather than lifting one finger to stop this sustained assault on a defenseless man who had committed no crime. [Possible trigger warning. Raw footage shows extreme violence against an unarmed, non-resisting man.]

  Then, when the gang of other cops rolled up, they arrested the victim of this relentless beating for resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and wandering for the purpose of obtaining controlled dangerous substances. In an opinion piece on the beating by Jerry DeMarco wonders how they got resisting arrest from a man who can be seen never to have lifted one finger to physically resist anything; a fellow Passaic County officer writes in to clarify that, quote-unquote:

  For the record, ‘Resisting Arrest’ is not just when a subject is fighting an Officer. Refusing to obey verbal commands, stiffening your body, putting your hands in your pocket, lowering your center of gravity, assuming a fighting stance, possessing a menacing demeanor on your face, refusing to get/stay on the ground (Instead, he got back up), while saying [something threatening], in a totality of the circumstances, regardless if he was fighting the male Officer or not, more than constitutes Resisting Arrest!

  In other words, according to at least one active member of the Passaic County police force, you can be arrested for resisting arrest simply for refusing to obey an arbitrary order from any police officer, or indeed if the cop just doesn’t like your posture or your demeanor.

  Meanwhile, DeMarco himself, although disturbed by the beating, insists that Passaic police beating is an isolated incident, period [sic] and that A speeded-up video of a cop beating a seemingly defenseless man doesn’t prove law enforcement nationwide is unleashed and barbaric.

  True enough, but all the other fucking cases nation-wide, do.

When every fucking week brings another story of a Few More Bad Apples causing Yet Another Isolated Incident, and the police themselves invariably do everything in their power to justify, ignore, cover up, excuse, or minimize the violence, even in defiance of the evidence of the senses and no matter how obviously harmless or helpless the victim may be — when cops routinely act on the understanding that they have an unchecked plenary right to issue arbitrary commands to civilians and to arrest, beat, and torture people for disobedience or just for shouting some unkind words at a cop — when the only possible recourse is to lodge a complaint with the cops own colleagues, who, every week, shrug off these relentless assaults and rapes committed by their officers using their government-issued arsenal of small weapons and the color of their legal authority to an internal investigation, — and when, even under the best possible circumstances, the main outcome of such an investigation is that the cop responsible will be given a vacation or possibly lose their job, while the city government steps in to shield them from any personal civil liability for their crimes by offering some money taken right out of the pockets of working folks who had nothing to do with the crime — it beggars belief to keep on claiming that there’s no systemic problem here, that cops ought to be given every benefit of the doubt, or blanket condemnations of policing in major American cities are somehow a sign of hastiness or unfair prejudice against good cops. The plain fact is that what we have here is one of two things: either a professionalized system of violent control which tacitly permits and encourages cops to exercise this kind of rampant, repeated, intense, unrepentant, and unaccountable abuse against powerless people—or else a system which has clearly demonstrated that it can do nothing effectual to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.

See also:

• GT 2009-06-02: The Police Beat
• GT 2009-02-23: The Metro Police Beat

• … but the streets belong to the people! Jesse Walker, Hit & Run (2009-06-10): The People’s Stop Sign. In which people in an Ottawa neighborhood take nonviolent direct action to slow down the traffic flying down their neighborhood streets — by putting up their own stop signs at a key intersection. The city government, of course, is now busy with a Criminal Investigation of the public’s heinous contribution to public safety.

• Abolitionism is the radical notion that other people are not your property. Darian Worden (2009-06-09): The New Abolitionists The point is that the principles of abolitionism, which held that regardless of popular justifications no human is worthy to be master and no human can be owned by another, when carried to their logical conclusion require this: that no human is worthy of authority over another, and that no person is owed allegiance simply because of political status. When reason disassembles the popular justifications of statism, as advances in political philosophy since the 1850’s have assisted in doing, the consistent abolitionist cannot oppose the voluntaryist principles of the Keene radicals.

• Mr. Obama, Speak For Yourself. Thomas L. Knapp, Center for a Stateless Society (2009-09-09): Speaking of the State

• A campaign of isolated incidents. Ellen Goodman, Houston Chronicle (2009-06-08): Sorry, but the doctor’s killer did not act alone

• Let’s screw all the little guys. Just to be fair. (Or, pay me to advertise my product on your station.) Jesse Walker, Reason (2009-06-09): The Man Can’t Tax Our Music: The music industry wants to impose an onerous new fee on broadcasters.

• Some dare call it torture. Just not the cops. Or the judges. Wendy McElroy, WendyMcElroy.com (2009-06-08): N.Y. Judge Rules that Police Can Taser Torture in order to coerce compliance with any arbitrary court order. I think that Wendy is right to call pain compliance for what it is — torture (as I have called it here before) — and that it is important to insist on this point as much as possible whenever the topic comes up.

• On criminalizing compassion. Macon D., stuff white people do (2009-06-05), on the conviction of Walt Staton for knowingly littering water jugs in a wildlife refuge, in order to keep undocumented immigrants from dying in the desert.

• Freed markets vs. deforesters. Keith Goetzman, Utne Reader Environment (2009-06-04): Do You Know Where Your Shoes Have Been?, on the leather industry and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Utne does a good job of pointing out (by quoting Grist’s Tom Philpott) that the problem is deeply rooted in multi-statist neoliberalism: because of the way in which the Brazilian government and the World Bank act together to subsidize the cattle barons and ‘roid up Brazilian cattle ranching, the report is really about the perils of using state policy to prop up global, corporate-dominated trade.

• Well, Thank God. (Cont’d.) Thanks to the Lord Justice, we now know that Pringles are, in fact, officially potato chips, not mere savory snacks, in spite of the fact that only about 40% of a Pringles crisp is actually potato flour. Language Log takes this case to demonstrate the quasi-Wittgensteinian point that, fundamentalist legal philosophy to one side, there’s actually no such thing as a self-applying law. (Quoting Adam Cohen’s New York Times Op-Ed, Conservatives like to insist that their judges are strict constructionists, giving the Constitution and statutes their precise meaning and no more [linguists groan here], while judges like [Sonia] Sotermayor are activists. But there is no magic way to interpret terms like free speech or due process — or potato chip.) I think the main moral of the story has to do with the absurdity of a political system in which whether or not you can keep $160,000,000 of your own damn money rides on whether or not you can prove to a judge that your savory snack hasn’t got the requisite potatoness to count as a potato crisp for the purposes of law and justice.

• Small riots will get small attention, no riots get no attention, make a big riot, and it will be handled immediately. Loretta Chao, Wall Street Journal (2009-05-30): In China, a New Breed of Dissidents. The story makes it seem as though the most remarkable thing about the emerging dissident movement is that they are safe enough for the State to tolerate them, rather than launching all out assaults as they did against the Tienanmen dissidents in 1989. Actually, I think that that misses the point entirely; and that the most interesting thing is that they have adopted such flexible and adaptive networking, both tactically and strategically, and that they now so often rise up from the very social classes that the Chinese Communist Party claims to speak for (not just easily-demonized students and intelligentsia, but ordinary farmers, factory workers, and retirees) — that the regime isn’t tolerating them; it just no longer knows what to do with them.

• Counter-Cooking and Mutual Meals. Julia Levitt, Worldchanging: Bright Green (2009-06-03): Community Kitchens (Via Kevin Carson’s Shared Items.) If I may recommend, if you’re going to work on any kind of community cooking like this, particularly if you’re interested in it partly for reasons of resiliency and building community alternatives, you should do what you can to make sure that it is strongly connected with the local grey-market solidarity economy, through close cooperation with your local Food Not Bombs (as both a source and a destination for food) and other local alternatives to the state-subsidized corporate-consumer model for food distribution.

• Looking Forward. Shawn Wilbur, In the Libertarian Labyrinth (009-06-06): Clement M. Hammond on Police Insurance. An excerpt on policing in a freed society, from individualist anarchist Clement M. Hammond’s futurist utopian novel, Then and Now which originally appeared in serialized form in Tucker’s Liberty in 1884 and 1885. (Thus predating Bellamy’s dreary Nationalist potboiler by 4 years.) Hammond’s novel is now available in print through Shawn’s Corvus Distribution. The good news is that, while Bellamy’s date of 2000 has already mercifully passed us by without any such society emerging, we still have almost 80 years to get it together in time for Hammond’s future.

• Here at Reason we never pass up a chance to have some fun at the expense of Pete Seeger. Jesse Walker, Hit & Run (2009-06-09): They Wanna Hear Some American Music. On brilliant fakery, the invention of Country and Western music, the cult of authenticity, and the manufacture of Americana. For the long, full treatment see Barry Mazor, No Depression (2009-02-23): Americana, by any other name…

• Anarchy on the Big Screen. Colin Firth and Kevin Spacey have signed on for a big-screen film adaptation of Homage to Catalonia. The film is supposed to enter production during the first half of 2010.

Technological civilization is awesome. (Cont’d.)

• Freezers are awesome. J.D., Get Rich Slowly (2009-06-06): 3 Easy and Delicious Ways to Preserve Your Berry Harvest. My plan is to make some freezer jam.

• Toward usable e-mail. Leah Chaney, OtherInbox (2009-06-05): Organizer By OtherInbox now available with Yahoo! Mail apps!. Even where technological civilization is not yet awesome enough, it soon will be.

Communications

• IMPACT! Strategies for Social Change Forum, Thursday, June 18, Sonoma County, California. Infoshop News (2009-06-08): Strategies for Social Change Forum on June 18th in Sonoma County IMPACT!, an independent and radical youth organization in Petaluma is turning one year old this month. Part 1 of the celebration is a forum, entitled Strategies for Social Change, where organizers from labor, immigrants’ rights, and anti-police brutality groups will be discussing their projects and strategies for achieving radical social change locally. This event will be bilingual and free. … As one part of the celebration of IMPACT!’s one-year anniversary, we are excited to announce a forum on Thursday, June 18th at 7pm at the Peace and Justice Center in Santa Rosa (467 Sebastopol Ave) … After hearing from all the different organizations, we hope to have an open dialogue about how we can build real people power in our communities and what methods, strategies, tactics, we can implement to achieve long-lasting and radical social change.

• Tasered While Black Internet Radio Show. Tasered While Black @ Blog Talk Radio. (Via Electrocuted While Black 2009-06-09.)

• Anarchist Movement 09, East London, England. Anarchist Movement Conference 09 was held last Saturday at Queen Mary, University of London. About 300 attended. Some reportbacks from Anonymous @ Infoshop News (2009-06-09), Nestor Makhno @ indymedia london (2009-06-07), Paul Stott (2009-06-08), and No Pretence (2009-06-07). One of the major events at the conference was anarcha-feminist group No Pretence’s appearance at the closing plenary to deliver a statement and project a video presentation calling out sexism in the U.K. movement:

• SPEAK! Listening Party. Sunday, June 14th, 2-5pm. Long Beach, California. Julie, feministe (2009-06-05): SPEAK! Listening Party in Long Beach, CA! Remember that awesome CD that’s out right now? The spoken word collection that features the work of BFP, Black Amazon, Little Light, and so many others? The one that combines personal history and movement making in truly inspiring ways? If you live in or around Long Beach, CA and haven’t heard it yet, now’s your chance! (Via bfp, flip flopping joy 2009-06-05.)

• New subscriptions. Served & Protected, @InjusticeNews, No Pretence

I recently mentioned a story that POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine ran a couple weeks ago, in which Dean Scoville was outraged by the outrage over an El Monte police kicking a prone Suspect Individual in the head after he’d already surrendered to police. (Scoville also openly praises extrajudicial punitive police beat-downs as an institutional practice, longing for a time when post pursuit ass-kickings were obligatory.)

Anyway, the week after they ran Scoville’s ill-tempered tirade in praise of police brutality, the POLICE magazine website decided to run this funny little web poll:

WEB POLL: Have you ever wanted to kick a suspect who was surrendering for endangering the public and being a total dirtbag?

a. Yes

b. No

c. To hell with kick, I wanted to shoot him

Here are the final results as of Monday:

You can see the results for yourself here. 45.4% of POLICE readers responding to the poll said that they have at some point wanted to kick suspect people after they’ve already surrendered to police. The cop editors of POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine thought they’d add a funny little joke option for their cop readers, To hell with kick, I wanted to shoot him. 31.9% of POLICE readers responding to the poll went with that one.

Ho, ho, ho.

Speaking of which, in Oakland, Officer Johannes Mehserle is now on trial for murder in the execution-style shooting of Oscar Grant. Here’s some recent testimony from the trial:

(05-27) 17:00 PDT OAKLAND — A colleague of the former BART police officer who shot and killed an unarmed man early New Year’s Day testified Wednesday that the victim would still be alive if he and his friends had cooperated with police.

If they would have followed orders, this wouldn’t have happened, said Officer Marysol Domenici at a preliminary hearing in Oakland for former Officer Johannes Mehserle, who is charged with murder.

—Demian Bulwa, San Francisco Chronicle (2009-05-28): Cop: Had Grant cooperated, he would be alive

According to Officer Marysol Domenici, ordinary civilians like you and me are always under the command of the police, so that when a cop gives an order you’d damn well better follow, and if you don’t, well then, you’re resisting, and you have nobody to blame but yourself when they slam you into the wall, throw you to the ground and shoot you in the back while you’re prone and physically restrained.

Also:

Domenici said she did not see Mehserle shoot Grant because she had been facing the other direction. Immediately after the shot was fired, she said, some train riders were so angry that she started thinking about using her gun.

**I said to myself, Oh, Jesus Christ, if I have to, I’m going to have to kill somebody, Domenici said.

—Demian Bulwa, San Francisco Chronicle (2009-05-28): Cop: Had Grant cooperated, he would be alive

Note that when her buddy-cop shot a man who was prone on the ground and physically restrained by the police, her first thought was not that she might have to defend the public from this killer cop; it was that she might have to open fire on the crowd of bystanders.

In Metro Detroit, the Warren city government’s police chased down Robert Mitchell — an unarmed, 16 year old black boy, weighing in at about 110 pounds — and killed him with non-lethal force in an abandoned house of Eight Mile. This extrajudicial electrocution of an unarmed young man was carried out in the attempt to arrest him; the reason the cops were chasing him down and trying to force him to surrender himself to them is that he jumped out of the passenger side of his cousin’s car during a traffic stop for an expired license plate. For, that is, trying to leave the scene in a situation where he himself was not suspected of any crime. Boss cop William Dwyer believes that his forces had no alternative to blasting an unarmed 16 year old with a 50,000-volt electric shock in order to force him to surrender to arrest. Of course they did have an alternative; they could have let him leave, since they had no probable cause to suspect him of any particular crime. But government cops in America aren’t actually interested in dealing with crimes; they are interested in targeting suspects, and are willing to summarily declare you a suspect sort of guy based solely on your failure to follow their arbitrary bellowed commands, or your decision to try to leave the scene when they are present. They are quite willing to say that running away from cops, just as such, without any evidence of any specific crime, is considered good enough grounds for chasing you down, beating, shooting, or electrocuting you first and asking questions later, and arresting you on suspicion of resisting arrest. Presumably because the sheep are supposed to stay where they’ve been herded.

The commissioner called Mitchell’s death a tragedy, but said police who watch someone run from them can only assume he committed a crime or is wanted for a crime.

—Abbie Boudreau and Scott Bronstein, CNN.com (2009-05-28): ‘No excuse’ for teen’s Taser death, mother says

Boss cop William Dwyer adds that, since the cops have been trained by a bunch of other cops to use 50,000-volt electric shocks to torture anyone resisting arrest until they surrender, regardless of the risks involved and even if their chosen target is unarmed and poses no physical threat to anyone present, as a form of pain compliance, well, that makes it O.K. for them to do so. Just following orders, you know:

The officers had been trained to use Tasers on people resisting arrest, so there was nothing wrong with using that Taser, Dwyer said.

—Abbie Boudreau and Scott Bronstein, CNN.com (2009-05-28): ‘No excuse’ for teen’s Taser death, mother says

Renea Mitchell, the mother of the victim, says They are here to protect us. There’s no reason for what they’ve done…. There’s no reason, no excuse. She also calls what happened to her son a murder at the hands of police. And that’s about the size of it. Her son was not suspected of any crime; he was not even on the scene for anything more serious than an expired license plate. He tried to leave because he doesn’t feel safe around cops — and, given that cops are the ones who eventually killed him, why should he have? — and the cops took this as good enough reason to treat him as presumptively criminal, and therefore to use any level of violence necessary to stop him from leaving — whether or not they have any knowledge of his having been involved in any specific crime, or even whether or not any specific crime has been committed, and regardless of the fact that he was completely unarmed and posed no threat to absolutely anyone’s person or property. They had no reason to use force at all, let alone the potentially lethal force of a taser.

Meanwhile, back over at POLICE magazine, editor David Griffith believes that political correctness is killing a lot of Americans because cops in some major cities can’t use suspicion of immigration violation as [Probable Cause] to roust any gang member. Apparently suspicion of immigration violation means looking Latino. Griffith asks and answers a few clarifying questions: Would that be profiling? Absolutely. Would some American citizens get hassled? Surely. Would there be a lot less violent crime in our cities if we deported many gang members who are probably illegal aliens [sic]? You tell me.

In other words, in the name of controlling crime by controlling entire populations, Griffith wants for cops to have unilateral authority to roust absolutely anyone based solely on their ethnic status, without any evidence of having committed any crime whatsoever, and so to bring them under the control of the police unless and until they can prove, to the police’s own satisfaction, that they have a permission slip from the government for existing in this country. Griffith asks, rhetorically, What is our priority? Do we want to make Americans safer? But which Americans does he have in mind, and what does he hope to make them safer from? Apparently not the Americans he explicitly expects to be hassled, that is, terrorized, manhandled or, if necessary, killed in order to put them under, and to keep them under, the physical control of those cops who Griffith would like to grant unlimited discretionary authority to detain anybody that they want, for absolutely any reason or for no reason at all, based solely on their ethnic status, and without any connection to any known crime.

In the same article, Griffith mentions an Atlanta cop, Scott Kreher of the local Fraternal Order of Pigs, who is pissed off about inadequate bennies for Atlanta city cops; so he told the city council that the situation made him want to beat Mayor Shirley Franklin in the head with a baseball bat. (Griffith doesn’t have anything worse to say about this than a weak joke about how he hopes that Kreher does not command the APD’s crisis negotiation team.)

Does a police state, staffed by men who deal with stress like Sergeant Scott Kreher does, with the powers that David Griffith wants to give them, make you feel safer? Probably depends on what side of the taser, or the baseball bat, you expect to end up on.

See also:

• How cops see themselves (#2). National Police Memorial Week and El Monte, California.
• GT 2009-01-12: Cops are here to protect you. (#8)
• GT 2008-12-05: Don’t turn your back on the Wolfpack

• Checking out the competition.

  

  Via Wendy McElroy (2009-04-29): The Farce is strong with this one. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it: write your own caption in the comments.

• Mutual Aid. bfp, flip flopping joy (2009-05-26): Help bring single mamis to the Allied Media Conference. So dig deep into your pockets and spread the word. We need these mamis here, and as such, we need your help. SPREAD THE WORD. Demand people buy the CD’s. Refuse to free people’s pet rocks until they have donated.

• Established churches only, please. Drew Zahn, WorldNetDaily (2009-05-22): Home: No place for Bible study. In which a San Diego home Bible study group is confronted by the county government’s war on the informal sector.

• The War on the Informal Sector, cont’d. Brad, WendyMcElroy.com (2009-04-26): Book Rental Is Illegal?

• Against the Intellectual Enclosure Movement. Kevin Carson, Center for a Stateless Society (2009-05-15): Copyright Communism?

• Gagsters in Blue. Kevin Carson, Center for a Stateless Society (2009-05-22): Gangsters in Blue and William Grigg, LewRockwell.com Blog (2009-05-13): Gang-Bangers in Blue. The Gangsters are still on their game. If we hope to resist it, the first thing to do is to understand it, and in that interest, I encourage all anti-statists to make as much use of this phrase as possible. And not just because I run GangstersInBlue.org (Rather, I run the website because I think it’s important to get the phrase out there.)

• We’re like a tick. Hey man, you said it, not me. Birmingham, Alabama is getting its own storm-trooper elite saturation squad to swarm targeted neighborhoods, apparently with a special focus on socioeconomic cleansing (street corner issues like narcotics and prostitution). (Cf. GT 2008-12-05: Don’t turn your back on the Wolfpack on saturation tactics.)

• On principles. Julian Sanchez (2009-05-04): Morality Isn’t Free

• Pull the other one. Sheldon Richman, Free Association (2009-05-19): The CIA Wouldn’t Lie! Reality dials Washington, D.C. and gets sent straight to voicemail.

• Today in news of the obvious. Las Vegas Sun (2009-05-23): [A government] Safety program goes awry and Las Vegas Sun (2009-05-19): Bank bailout does little for those who need help most . Don’t look so surprised.

• State socialism means never having to say you’re sorry. @ndy, Andy the Slack Bastard (2009-05-25): Dear President Chávez. In which Hugo Chávez, revolutionary President-for-Life, continues his far-sighted socialist leadership by having 14 union steelworkers sent to prison for 5 to 10 years as punishment for going on strike. He was able to do this because their boss is the Venezuelan government, due to a nationalization which state socialists hailed as a triumph for the working class. Meanwhile, Australian Anarchists reply by sending an open invitation for Citizen Chávez to come to Australia for a special fraternal greeting from the Biotic Baking Brigade.

• The Two Socialisms and the Revenge of Proudhon. Coming to a theater near you this summer. Shawn Wilbur, In the Libertarian Labyrinth (2009-05-07): French mutualism beyond Proudhon

• You say pissed-off, man-hating, dykes with an excess of body hair like it’s supposed to be a bad thing…, cont’d. Roderick Long, Austro-Athenian Empire (2009-05-25): How to convert a big tent into a small one.

• Unbreaking the business model. Roderick Long, Austro-Athenian Empire (2009-05-25): Contingency markets and IP Want to reward innovation? Don’t fall back Intellectual Protectionism to force others to support your broken business model; instead, use the web to discover demand and pay for supply.

• On the web as distributed computing platform. Tim Bray, ongoing (2009-05-25): HTTP and the Fallacies of Distributed Computing

• On living with summer stars and dystopia. soul searching with christ and gacy (2009-05-25): the dead flag blues

Communications:

• Modesto Anarcho #11. Issue #11 of the valley’s insurrectionary journal of class struggle is out and now available for reading online.

• 2nd annual Hamilton Anarchist Bookfair (June 6). Pat Murtagh, Molly’sBlog (2009-05-24): CANADIAN ANARCHIST MOVEMENT-HAMILTON: POLICE KEEPING A BEADY EYE ON THE HAMILTON ANARCHIST BOOKFAIR. Check it out both for the announcement of the bookfair (which is coming up on June 6 in Hamilton, Ontario), and also for a report on and reply to Ontario hate-cops who have lots of government funding and nothing better to do with their time than nose around for hate crimes at anarcho book bazaars.

• San Jose Anarchist Cafe (June 7). The Anarchist Cafe is not a place, it’s an event: an informal meet-up for folks interested in hometown anarchy. There’s a new A-Cafe getting started in San Jose, California; the first-ever meeting is happening on Sunday, June 7, 2009. See http://sanjose.anarchistcafe.org/ for details and contact information.

Here’s the new rules:

1. At the top of the post, make a list of the books you’ve read all or part of, in print, over the course of the past week, at least as far as you can remember them. (These should be books that you’ve actually read as a part of your normal life, and not just something that you picked up to read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Pick one of those books from the list, and pick out a quote of one or more paragraphs, to post underneath the list.

3. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, which should be more a matter of context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than they are a matter of discussing the material.

4. Quoting a passage absolutely does not entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the books:

• Sonia Johnson (1989). Wildfire: Igniting the She/Volution. (Albuquerque: Wildfire Books. I picked it up some time ago through BookMooch.)
• Richard Gombin (1975), The Origins of Modern Leftism. Translated from the French by Michael K. Perl. (Baltimore: Penguin. Picked up this very week for 49¢ from the Shaman Drum used books sale rack!)
• Fred Woodworth, The Match! Issue No. 107 (Summer, 2009). (Tucson: Fred Woodworth. PO Box 3012, Tucson, Arizona 85702. I picked my copy up last week from May Day Books in Minneapolis.)

And here’s the quote. This is taken from Fred Woodworth’s Evil Empire Notes, Issue No. 107 of The Match! (Summer 2009; also, incidentally, the 40^th anniversary issue of The Match!). This was airplane reading, taken in somewhere in the sky between Minneapolis and Las Vegas.

GIVEN all the millions of horrifying stories in the naked country, now and then it’s good to pluck out one to hear an authentic voice rather than a statistic. Amnesty International printed up this one, by Donald Boyd of Chicago:

I have been a victim of racial profiling since I was 17 years old. Once when I was walking to the cleaners, I stopped to talk with some young men…. When I walked away, the police just automatically accused me of purchasing drugs. Two officers jumped out of a car and kept asking What did they sell you? I repeatedly replied no one sold me anything. … They cuffed me and drove me to a police substation.

… The next morning they loaded 45 people into a van made for 32. The men were almost all black and Latino. When we arrived at the jail, sheriff’s deputies, dressed in riot gear, met us. They shouted obscenities and threats. The deputies assaulted several people, including me, for supposedly not complying with their every word.

At each step in the process—arrest, detention and bond hearing—we were lined up, and numbers were scribbled on our arms with black marking pens…. In court, you appear before a judge, but via a television screen. You don’t get to speak, and the judge never even looks you in the face…. They treat our communities with disdain and contempt. I had to hire a lawyer and spend thousands of dollars to get the charges dismissed….

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AS Law becomes increasingly complex, with hundreds of thousands and even millions of laws stacked on top of each other, almost no one can confront officialdom in any way without a lawyer. But what happens when your lawyer takes your money and does no work, don’t file basic motions or writs, and essentially shafts you? Not much. Bar associations have a cap of compensatory payments they sometimes make to incompetent or dishonest lawyers’ clients, but the amouts are often based on century-old, or even older, stated maximums. And it’s next to impossible to go after such a lawyer legally, because to do so you need… another lawyer.

---

[…]

EIGHT COPS raided a home in Minneapolis in ‘08. They shot up the place, accidentally not killing anyone. Well, it was the wrong house (there is no right house for something like this). This is completely comparable to a surgeon amputating the wrong leg, but if the doctor who did this to you then got a commendation from the medical association, wouldn’t you feel absolutely floored? So did the family whose home was raided and shot up. All eight cops received medals.

Undoubtedly this sounds like hyperbole or mere rhetoric, but the simple fact is that there is no conceivable way anyone can interpret this but as an official statement of Good Work, Men to stupid, negligent, incompetent thugs for terrorizing and injuring innocent people.

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NOT SURPRISINGLY, when humanitarian spirit is dead in officialdom it’s not partly alive; it really is extinct and defunct. Also in Minnesota, a poor wild bear somehow got a plstic jar or bucket stuck on its head. Official solution: shoot the bear. No sympathy for an unfortunate creature; no imaginative or bold remedy. Just kill.

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AS REPORTED by the Washington Post, prison guards at Prince George’s County Jail in Maryland are apt to be the kind of guys the average person expects to hear of as BEHIND bars. An investigation by the paper found guards who’ve been charged with assault, theft, beating and threatening their wives with death, having sex with prisoners, robbery at gunpoint, and other crimes.

Among the nine officers was Mark R. Bradley, whose then-wife asked for a protective order in 1998, claiming he had threatened, taunted, punched and slapped her… When she reached for the phone, Bradley who had been on the force for almost four years, yanked it away… His wife recalled him saying: Call the police… Make me lose my job. I’ll kill you. Almost a decade later, he was still on the payroll at the jail, despite three protective orders issued against him in the late 1990s. In 2004, he pleaded guilty to assaulting another woman, whose rib was broken. The woman, who had been pregnant with his child, told police that after a beating days earlier, she had a miscarriage. A judge put Bradley on probation and ordered him to take an anger management class.

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AIRPORT FASCISM is being extended to railroads. Amtrak, the railroad passenger company, has brought in a SWAT-style phalanx of agents in full combat gear to sweep through train stations, randomly screening and searching passengers. The randomly chosen passengers will have to place their bags on a platform and be swabbed with chemicals that are claimed to react to traces of explosives. You can also be ratted out by dogs.

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ONE OF THE factors that propelled the United States as far along into the police state that it now is, was the Vietnam War. There’s plenty of evidence that soldiers in ALL wars become brutalized, but something extraordinary seems to have taken place in Vietnam. Whatever it was, American men who went there (and survived) tended to come back in a vicious state of mind. Ordinary people were their enemy. They made up stories (essentially none has ever been verified) of people spitting on them when they arrived at stateside airports; and they formed cliques of us-versus-them. Looking for work, a high proportion of them went into law enforcement, and there they reinforced and amplified the already-existing us versus them mentality, ratcheting the propensity toward police brutality to amazing heights.

Now the same thing is happening with Iraq. Our guess is that the psychological corruption happens when soldiers fight amid a culture and a language that has few points of contact with the west and with Indo-European languages. It is one thing to fight, say, Germans or Italians, whose general culture is largely familiar (same religions, for instance) and whose languages have a large percentage of words that are the same or nearly enough so to be comprehensible even to the monolingual standard American youth. But in Vietnam—and now in Iraq—these military people are surrounded by words and behaviors utterly alien to them. Our own idle theory, therefore, is that this operate on their minds in such a way that the enemy becomes completely dehumanized. This creates the us-versus-them, and when they return to the USA, they still have it.

Then they go into law enforcement.

Already we are beginning to read about cases in which police—now Iraq war veterans—are opening fire on people merely running away from them. And already, too, the convoluted excuses are starting to evolve: Re-experiencing a war zone is one of several classic signs of combat stress reaction, says the Department of Veterans Affairs. If persistent and untreated, the Department goes on, this can result in post traumatic stress disorder.

Whatever verbal gimmickery you haul out to gloss over the facts, the truth is that these men (generally they are men) have been ruined, corrupted fatally and irretrievably, by being sent out to murder masses of people for no good reason in a country where they ought never to have gone. Mostly it’s their own fault, too, since ultimately it was their own volition that was compliant in their going there.

The bottom line is that Bush’s freudian effort to surpass his father’s Panama coup by similarly taking Saddam Hussein, unresisted by the press and the American people at the outset, is now going to result in thirty or forty more years of ever-worsening police violence against the public here. With this on top of everything else—the overpopulation, insanely burgeoning law-pollution, disastrous shift to digital culture, etc.—America is rapidly turning into an unliveable hell. Then add global warming.

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IMMIGRATION PRISONS, where you’re sent for not having adequate proof of being a so-called citizen, are the new concentration camps of the Evil Empire. There are now a whole class of persons of various ethnicities who are afraid to travel outside of the towns or cities where they live, because of the possibility of being stopped by some profiling trick excused as a broken taillight, and then being sent sprawling into a cell at an immigration prison.

A recent well-publicized case in some of the larger newspapers (and excluded from the local dailies) concerned one Hiu Lui Ng, who’d come to the US from Hong Kong. Making the mistake of going to immigraiton headquarters in New York City to get a green card (legal authorization to live and work in this country), he was grabbed and put behind bars. There he developed cancer, was in severe pain, laughed at by the medical matrons, and eventually died from the rampaging and untreated disease.

[…] They denied him a wheelchair and refused pleas for an independent medical evaluation. Instead, … guards at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, Rhode Island, dragged him from his bed on July 30, craried him in shackles to a car, bruising his arms and legs, and drove him two hours to a federal lock-up in Hartford, where an immigration officer pressured him to withdraw all pending appeals of his case. (New York Times.)

One out of hundreds of thousands.

—Fred Woodworth, Evil Empire Notes, in The Match! Issue No. 107 (Summer, 2009). 19–21.

See also:

• GT 2009-05-07: Occupying forces
• GT 2009-03-28: It doesn’t take much imagination.
• GT 2009-04-17: Death by Homeland Security (#3): The Disappeared.
• GT 2008-03-18: Death by Homeland Security (#2): Francisco Casteneda, of San Diego, California.