Police fight cellphone recordings (via Interesting People)Simon Glik, a lawyer, was walking down Tremont Street in Boston when he saw three police officers struggling to extract a plastic bag from a teenager's mouth. Thinking their force seemed excessive for a drug arrest, Glik pulled out his cellphone and began recording.
Within minutes, Glik said, he was in handcuffs.
"One of the officers asked me whether my phone had audio recording capabilities,'' Glik, 33, said recently of the incident, which took place in October 2007. Glik acknowledged that it did, and then, he said, "my phone was seized, and I was arrested.''
The charge? Illegal electronic surveillance.
(Image: Marathon Monday, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from cherrylet's photostream)
The Los Angeles Times article asks:
Can the military coexist with social networking sites?
Gosh, I sure hope not.
The idea that Twitter, MySpace and Facebook could simply crash the modern cyber-state’s ability to wage war — which is to oppress, occupy, conscript, tax, torture, rape, murder, rob, poison, dispossess, expel, infect, regulate, control, police, imprison, degrade, dehumanize and destroy human beings — simply tickles me.
And it just may be possible.
At different times and in different combinations, military service personnel communication with the outside world is and has always been banned, blocked, censored, controlled, forced, edited in transit, misdirected, intercepted, co-opted, manipulated and so on.
The technology to do that has typically relied on the application of policy and physical means to the hired thugs themselves and their communications channels. In the dead age of empires, that mostly meant controlling the mails, access to military sites, physical documents and the like.
The modern mercenary for Leviathan has all manner of fresh, cool, exciting, low-power and long-reach wireless communications tools available which can beam messages, documents, position information, local data feeds and so forth around the globe to millions — on or off the secret military networks — in seconds. Those tools, in combination with the existing social networking services, might well make it impossible for wealthier nations to maintain typical military discipline and operational security.
This is not to mention that the tools are sometimes used by accident, and that just like the number of intentional uses, the number of accidental uses in increasing in tandem with the tools’ growing reach, range, speed, popularity, ease of use, market penetration, protocol and network compatibility, interchangeability, user loyalty and the like, plus their shrinking costs, sizes, power profiles, new-user learning curves, and detectability by Powers That Be and Pointy-Haired Bosses.
Let’s hope that’s enough to make the modern makers of mass misery not just obsolete, but impossible.
But if it’s not enough, what’s coming is distributed, peer-to-peer, organic, cypherpunk- and crypto-anarchist-created Facebook- and Twitter-like social networking and communication services that support unbreakable hard encryption, market-produced unfalsifiable digital identity management, mathematically guaranteed transactional and locational anonymity by default or at will, untraceable anonymous digital bearer certificate trading networks and, of course, assassination markets.
And when those things launch, they’re going to launch on all channels. Linux clients? You betcha! MAC OS X? Yes we can! Windows Vista? ¡Viva Bill Gates! Official Apple iStore version for iPhone? Gosh yes! But it doesn’t stop there, of course — there will be interfaces and gateways springing up on everything from your old-school two-way pager to instant messaging services like ICQ, AIM, MSN, Google Talk, Skype, Gadu-gadu and all the rest. Plugins and widgets and gizmos and HUDs for Counterstrike and World of Warcraft and Second Life and Runescape. Classified ads in the local advertising circular. Newsletters and forms by post. Scratch-off cards in cereal boxes. And nice men and women at church or in cafes who field requests and handle messages into and out of the darknet for the benefit of those who can’t manage the tech themselves.
To troops everywhere: think about getting into a new line of work.
Love it? Hate it? Share it!
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
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.
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.)
Pick one of those books from the list, and pick out a quote of one or more paragraphs, to post underneath the list.
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.
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:
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 40th 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….
AS
Lawbecomes 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
wronghouse (there is norighthouse 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, Mento stupid, negligent, incompetent thugs for terrorizing and injuring innocent people.
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.
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.
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
screeningand searching passengers. Therandomlychosen 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.
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 inpost 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.
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 themedicalmatrons, 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.
A couple of months ago, just before New Years’, [a Las Vegas Metro SWAT team rolled out to Emmanuel Dozier and Belinda Saavedra’s house in Seven Hills, at 9:30 at night (about four or fve hours after dark, around here, during the winter) in order to serve
a search warrant. The cops blasted open the gate with a shotgun. They claim they announced themselves but nobody other than the police says that they heard anything other than a lot of noise. Saavedra has a three month old baby and a 13 year old daughter who were in the front of the house when this hard-to-see gang of armed strangers opened fire late at night and started forcing their way in. Saavedra called 911 as soon as she heard the gunfire; the recording of the call is now available online. Dozier got a handgun that he keeps for self-defense and fired back at the gang of strangers, apparently wounding three cops. After a stand-off, once the 911 dispatcher convinced Dozier that the men outside were in fact cops, he dropped the phone, went outside, and surrendered himself with his hands up. Here’s how he looked when he got to the police station:
Then they searched the house. They found no cocaine anywhere. Dozier is being charged with attempted murder and possession of marijuana — even though an inventory of items seized doesn’t include the marijuana or paraphenalia the police claimed to have found with their search warrant. Apparently the search warrant was to gather evidence to bust Dozier on charges of being a low-level cocaine dealer. The cops claim an undercover had already made a few purchases from Dozier; allegedly they had a business relationship with him, but they couldn’t be bothered to meet up with him one more time in order to be able to make an arrest that didn’t involve storming his house late at night while children were present. They told the media that Dozier had no above-the-table job; actually, he had a regular job at the time as a sheet-metal worker. They have not made any claims that Belinda Saavedra committed any crimes whatsoever at any point, either related to the drugs or related to the shooting; but the did make sure to force her down and rough her up after she had surrendered (since she wouldn’t calm down
or shut her mouth
while they shot at her house, hollered at her, took away her baby and called her a dumbass
for her trouble).
Meanwhile, the D.A. has taken steps to take away her children and charged her with abuse and neglect — even though, remember, she is not accused of any independent crimes whatsoever. The explanation is that she is being charged with abuse and neglect because she doesn’t have a job outside the house. There’s no sign that being a stay-at-home mother (while her boyfriend holds down a job as a sheet metal worker and her mother works two jobs in order to help support her grandchildren) has caused either kid any hurt or want. But the prosecutor does inform us, in the complaint, that the 13 year old was traumatized when cops started a gunfight at her house. I wouldn’t be surprised, but whose fault is that?
The cops refuse to answer any questions about the reasons for staging a late-night SWAT raid in this case or about the discrepancies between their public statements about the suspects and the documented facts that emerged later. Dana Gentry reports that Police refuse to answer but a Metro spokesman did tell me extreme measures are necessary to guard against
Metro are liars and child abusers who routinely use maximal force in situations where they could easily have gotten anything they needed to get by other means. They also spend tremendous amounts of time, and tremendous amounts of money that taxpayers are forced to turn over to them against our will, prosecuting people who — even if everything alleged against them is true — are doing nothing more than selling a valued product to a willing customer, and who never should have been threatened or hassled by the police in the first place.some liberal judge
throwing out the case.
Las Vegas Metro made a road stop at about 4 in the morning on February 6. They suspected that the driver was drunk. He got out of the car and ran away on foot. Cops sent a helicopter to look for him and concluded (based on heat in the yard) that he was hiding out in a backyard in a nearby neighborhood. He wasn’t — turns out he was hiding in a different part of the neighborhood — but the family’s dog, a pit-bull named Coco, was. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except that the cops decided that catching a DUI suspect was so incredibly urgent, and respecting other people’s private property being, after all, no concern at all to Las Vegas Metro’s important work, they would send a gang of seven cops, first to barge into the next-door neighbor’s yard without asking, and then, again without asking anyone’s permission, to jump the wall into the backyard where they thought the suspect would be. The family dog came out and confronted this gang of strangers barging into her territory; she didn’t actually attack anybody, but, after all, she was only surrounded by seven fully-grown, professionally-trained, and heavily-armed police officers; her continued existence clearly posed a threat, so they shot the dog dead. The cops took responsibility by issuing an Oops, our bad
to the bereaved family — along with a self-serving claim that the cops just had to shoot the dog in self-defense
. (No, they didn’t. Self-defense
is no longer an excuse when you put yourself in danger by invading somebody else’s private property.) Then, public servants that they are, they left Jose Fernandez and Yurisel de la Torre by themselves to cover the $200+ bill for cremating their dead dog.
Metro are home invaders and dog killers who routinely exercise contempt for private property, instigate violent confrontations in order to deal with trivial crimes, shoot first and ask questions later, and then excuse their use of maximal force as the necessary means to completely unnecessary ends.
While we’re here, I should also mention that the Nevada Crime Technology Advisory Board,
representing Las Vegas Metro, the FBI, and several other law enforcement outfits from around Nevada, wants a new law passed that will allow police in Nevada to unilaterally seize the balances on prepaid debit cards without any kind of warrant — because, while they don’t have any evidence to present in any particular case, they reckon that somebody, somewhere using one of these things might turn out to be a bad guy
selling drugs to willing customers — which is apparently enough of a reason to give these lying, child-abusing, dog-killing, home-invading, itchy-trigger-fingered irresponsible thugs a unilateral right to seize private citizens’ money, by arbitrary fiat, with no need for any kind of prior judicial review.
There’s a cliché around here, about how longtime locals compare the way things are now — for better or worse — with the way things used to be, back when the mob ran Vegas.
The problem with this is that the mob never stopped running Vegas. The only thing that’s changed is the name of the families, and the color of the tailored suits.
So there are a lot of cops who are involved, somehow or another, in the drug trade. Sometimes they sling the drugs themselves; often, they just protect drug dealers from arrest. Like any form of Prohibition, government Drug Prohibition creates a condition in which there are lots of black market operators who are willing to pay bribes, and lots of cops who are willing to take them, in order to keep the drug trade running without police interference. The cost of the bribe is a drain, but the profits from a well-run drug dealing outfit make up for it, and the cost of the bribe is less than the cost of getting locked up in prison for several years. In fact, the Drug War Chronicle runs a regular feature called This Week’s Corrupt Cop Stories,
which I guess is intended to show how the conditions fostered by Drug Prohibition inevitably produce police corruption. A point which is pretty well conveyed just by the fact that they have plenty of stories to run every single week, as much as by any of the individual stories that they run.
But there’s a problem with the word corrupt.
To become corrupt is to become impure, damaged, or worse. To be corrupt is to be doing something wrong — and when we apply it to people, it usually means that someone is bribed into doing something depraved in exchange for some form of material reward — most commonly violating personal or professional ethics in exchange for money. But protecting a drug dealer from arrest is only unethical if you have an ethical obligation to arrest drug dealers. If, on the other hand, Drug Prohibition is unjust — if enforcing drug laws means violating the rights and the freedoms of innocent people, often by locking nonviolent offenders
in a cage for years at a time even though they violated nobody else’s rights — then cops have no ethical obligation to arrest drug dealers, because nobody has an ethical obligation to do an injustice to innocent people. Then a lot of what commonly gets called police corruption
is really nothing of the sort; so-called corrupt cops
may be turncoats in the Drug War, but they are turning from the wrong side to the right side. Those who protect drug dealers from arrest are no more dirty
than cops in antebellum America who refused to turn fugitive
slaves over to the slave-catchers, or cops in Nazi Germany who refused to turn hiding Jews over to the Gestapo.
Of course, someone who has to be bribed into doing the right thing may not deserve blame for what she does; but she probably doesn’t deserve praise either. And so-called corrupt cops
may in fact do other things that do deserve blame. (Many, if not most, of the narcs or patrol cops who get involved in the drug trade do end up acting much like Terrence Richardson in Houston — that is, as thieves, thugs, or shake-down artists, using their police power or threats of violence in order to intimidate and coerce competing drug dealers who don’t have the same connections to the Gangsters in Blue. But here the problem isn’t that the cop is slinging drugs. The problem is that the cop is cracking skulls of other people who sling drugs, and getting the drugs he slings by stealing them from other drug dealers.) Hence the two cheers, rather than three. But then consider a case like that of Keenan Colson, a cop in Lake Wales, Florida:
Lake Wales police officer Keenan Colson, 50, was arrested Wednesday by the Polk County Sheriff’s Department on multiple charges stemming from information he leaked to 25-year-old Clayton Hoerler, a known criminal offender, including blowing the cover of an undercover cop, said LWPD Chief Herbert Gillis.
[…] Colson faces one count of conspiracy to engage in a pattern of racketeering action, five counts unlawful use of two-way communications device, and four counts unlawful use of computer access after he was tied to an investigation that ultimately netted 18 people arrested in conjunction with what was described by county law enforcers as a
violentmarijuana distribution ring.Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd agreed with Gillis, noting in a phone interview Thursday that the blame rests solely on Colson and his actions.
It’s important to point out we don’t in any way suspect anyone other than Keenan Colson. We don’t want to leave any impression of that being anything other than an ethical police department. They run a great shop there. The men and women there are very dedicated. This is just one crooked cop,he said.But it was one cop nobody seems to have expected to compromise the integrity and safety of his fellow police officers.
Colson’s actions sent shock waves throughout the LWPD.
Captain Patrick Quinn said he was
hurt and shockedbecause he regarded Colson asthe rock,a man whowas always there, went to his calls, took his reports, was dependable.Quinn, who was not involved in the investigation, was briefed about the situation on Tuesday.
Several people fall from grace,he said.That stinks, that hurts. We hire people, unfortunately people are going to do stupid things sometimes.Quinn said Colson made a bad choice and was going to have to answer for his bad choice, but added that everyone in the department was upset.
We have lost a member of our family for his bad choice,he said.What frustrated the chief so much is the concept that the lives of other officers were put in danger. Undercover work presents challenges of it own, he noted, calling it
one of the most dangerous jobs in law enforcementbecause of its vulnerability.
And for Keenan Colson to identify to criminal offenders, this undercover officer, this undercover deputy, could have caused him to be killed, and could have caused the deputies that were working with him, the undercover officers to be injured,he said.That is something that will never be forgiven.Gillis said Colson’s arrest was about justice for the police officers that are doing a good job every day. And it is those who trusted Colson that wonder what went awry with him.
Having had no prior indications to believe that Colson was capable of betraying his fellow officers, the chief described Colson as a
very likable guy, very respectful, very quiet, very courteous.How he got hooked up with a known criminal offender still stumps investigators, Gillis said.
Judd said he isn’t sure of the connection either, but said investigators did believe there was a prior relationship. In the late 1990s, Colson was an officer in Lake Hamilton, and Clayton Hoerler, identified as being one of the alleged ring leaders, apparently lived in Lake Hamilton at that time as well. Hoerler, 25, was identified this week by the county sheriff’s office as being a Lake Alfred resident.
We know from the investigation that they were good friends,Judd said.We know they discussed criminal activity freely, and that Colson give him intricate instructions in how to avoid arrest and how to protect himself from covert investigation. He was certainly the consultant for Hoerler.
If that’s what Keenan Colson did, then good for Keenan Colson.
The Drug War is an aggressive war by the government against innocent people. Neither using marijuana, nor selling marijuana violates anybody else’s rights. Like all so-called victimless crimes,
it is in fact not a crime at all in any moral sense; crimes have identifiable victims, and consensual exchanges between willing parties have none. Cops who use force to shut down drug dealing outfits — and that is the only way that cops shut anything down, by beating people, tasering them, pepper-spraying them, pulling guns on them, restraining them, handcuffing them, confining them in police cars and holding cells, and ultimately by having them locked up in cages for years at a time, all of it backed up by the threat of inflicting pain, injuring you, or killing you if you should resist their orders — those cops, I say, are using violence against peaceful people; they are hurting, restraining, and imprisoning people who have never violated the rights of any identifiable victim. If they come after your friends on the basis of these unjust drug laws, then, morally speaking, they are the criminals, and using your connections and your knowledge of the system in order to defend your friend and his livelihood from their aggression — by telling him how to avoid detection, by telling him how to keep from getting unjustly arrested, and by exposing the undercover police spies who have been sent to infiltrate his circle and facilitate the narcs’ efforts to seize innocent people and locking them in cages for the next several years, is not corrupt.
It’s certainly not an unforgivable sin.
That’s protecting the innocent, and doing so while putting yourself at considerable personal risk from the same uniformed gang that you are trying to protect your friend from. It is, in fact heroic, and Keenan Colson deserves the title of hero
far more than the vast majority of the arrogant, preening, entitled cops who never stop hollering about their own heroics
and the protection
they inflict on unwilling recipients every day.
Meanwhile, the police chief in Lake Wales has decided to engage in a low form of farce:
If your officers do commit criminal acts, they need to be arrested just like anyone else,the chief said.A lot of times things may be handled where people may be just terminated or let go. That’s not the way you are supposed to do things, that’s why I told the officers around here hold your heads up. We’ve been through a lot, we’ve been in the paper a lot with our officers who have done stuff wrong.
We are going to hold offenders accountable, because we hold our people accountable. To me that is a good thing because we hold ourselves accountable first, we hold offenders accountable second. And that’s a position you want to be in law enforcement, that’s accountability, that’s integrity,he added.
That’s bullshit, is what that is.
When cops harass, unjustly imprison, beat, hurt, torture, rape, or kill the people that they contemptuously dismiss as civilians,
there isn’t a damn bit of accountability. They may be transferred to another precinct; they may be given a paid vacation for a few months before fellow cops exonerate them in administrative hearing for a few months; in really extraordinary circumstances, where evidence of guilt is undeniable and has also, by the way, been reeased to the public, someone might actually lose their job over it. But they will almost certainly never face jail time, or any criminal responsibility whatsoever, for what they do. As the victim, you might, if you are very lucky, get an Oops, our bad
; realistically, what you’re more likely to get is Fuck you, civilian.
The reason that Keenan Colson has been arrested and is now threatened with jail has exactly nothing to do with any general commitment by the police force to accountability
or integrity.
The unforgivable sin
for which he is being arrested and prosecuted is the fact that he gave out information that messed with the game of the other cops who were coming after his friend. Cops protect their power, and they’ll do just about anything to anybody who endangers that by valuing the safety of a friend over the ability of his gang brothers to go on with their activities unimpeded. Keenan Colson is only the latest to get the long knife treatment for the unforgivable sin
of acting like a responsible human being at the expense of gang loyalty. He won’t be the last.
(Via Drug War Chronicle 2008-08-29 and Drug War Chronicle 2008-08-22.)
In its 2000 decision in Indianapolis v. Edmond, the US Supreme Court held that the city’s effort to attack the drug trade by holding a checkpoint to look for drugs was an unconstitutional violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protection of the right to be free from unwarranted searches and seizures. But in the years since then, a handful of departments across the county, usually in the South, have brazenly trumpeted their resort to drug checkpoints.
The latest department to step into the breach was Louisiana’s Beauregard Parish Sheriff’s Office, which held such a checkpoint last Thursday night near the town of Starks. Following the lead of sheriff’s deputies, the local newspaper was all over the story.
Narcotics checkpoint a success,blared the headline in Monday’s Derrider Daily News story on the police action. The article went on to explain how, following complaints of drug dealing in the neighborhood, police decided to take action:
The Beauregard Parish Sheriff’s Office set up a Narcotics Checkpoint Thursday night near Starks, Louisiana,the local paper reported.Due to several complaints coming from the Fields area, the BPSO put together a joint operation with the help of Sheriff Ricky Moses and the DeRidder city police department. The operations utilized several BPSO deputies as well as the new Drug Interdiction team led by Detectives Dale Sharp and Greg Hill. Seven police units total were used for the operation in addition to four other units performing regular patrols.The checkpoint resulted in three arrests for marijuana and hydrocodone possession, a quarter pound of marijuana being tossed from an unknown vehicle’s window, and a number of traffic citations.
If this really was a drug checkpoint, it is clearly unconstitutional,said Steve Silverman, executive director of the constitutional rights defense group Flex Your Rights.
Well, O.K., whatever. If you are ever hauled into court as the result of one of these checkpoints, that’s important information to have. But the problem is that cops are, as a rule, better at manipulating the court than you are; they are trained in how to exploit loopholes, how to manipulate people, and how to get cheap sympathy from judges and juries. As Silverman himself says:
If people went to court and fought it, the evidence would be dismissed — unless they consented to a search. The sheriff down there must know checkpoints like this are constitutionally questionable, but they can still ask people to consent, and they know how to phrase that request in such a way that people are likely to consent,he said.
The problem with these roadblocks and checkpoints
by uniformed highwaymen, which impose blanket screening of ordinary people by police and which intimidate or force everyone to submit to interrogation and searches, treating anyone who happens to be on a particular road as a presumptive criminal, who needs to prove her innocence to the police in order to be left alone to go about her own business, based on no probable cause whatever — and all in order to find and imprison a handful of nonviolent drug traffickers, who are violating absolutely nobody’s rights, who are doing a peaceful and productive service for willing customers, whose only crime
was to defy a senseless government prohibition on the kinds of chemicals that people may willingly put into their own bodies — the problem with that, I say, has nothing to do with whether these internal checkpoints and constrictions on peaceful people’s freedom of movement and security in their persons and effects, happen to be consistent or inconsistent with a fundamentalist reading of the words scribbled onto a 200-year-old piece of paper. The real problem is not that this kind of Ihre Papiere, bitte
treatment is unconstitutional; it’s that it’s tyrannical. Tyranny is bad enough whether or not the Nine can be convinced that it can be excused on a legal technicality, and the reasons why are moral, not constitutional. Even when cops can invent absurd technicalities in order to convince a judge (who is always willing to be convinced that another State employee was acting within bounds) that their extraction of searches through intimidation, coercion, and the inevitable recourse to the threat of arbitrary arrest on any of the countless vague laws that nobody can possibly avoid violating in daily life, all somehow amounts to consent.
And those of us who oppose the drug war, and the police state that has emerged in order to prosecute it, ought to be more clear and less timid about saying so. We don’t need The Law on our side to be right. If the Constitution allows that kind of brigandry and tyranny, then the Constitution itself is tyrannical. If the Constitution does not allow it, then it has been demonstrated as thoroughly as you please that the Constitution can do nothing effective to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist, and certainly undeserving of our deferential appeals.
In related news, holiday bloggers should keep in mind that there are only 7 more ranting days left before International Ignore the Constitution Day.
Show me what a police state looks like…
This is what a police state looks like!
August 30
Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff’s department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than “fire code violations,” and early this morning, the Sheriff’s department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying.
[…] In the house that had just been raided, those inside described how a team of roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear, holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political materials kept in the house. One of the individuals renting the house, an 18-year-old woman, was extremely shaken as she and others described how the officers were deliberately making intimidating statements such as “Do you have Terminator ready?” as they lay on the floor in handcuffs.
[…] There is clearly an intent on the part of law enforcement authorities here to engage in extreme and highly intimidating raids against those who are planning to protest the Convention.
—Glenn Greenwald, Salon (2008-08-30): Massive police raids on suspected protesters in Minneapolis
August 30
This is Eileen Clancy, one of the founders of I-Witness Video, a NYC-based video collective that’s in St. Paul to document the policing of the protests around this week’s Republican National Convention.
The house where I-Witness Video is staying in St. Paul has been surrounded by police. We have locked all the doors. We have been told that if we leave we will be detained. One of our people who was caught outside is being detained in handcuffs in front of the house. The police say that they are waiting to get a search warrant. More than a dozen police are wielding firearms, including one St. Paul officer with a long gun, which someone told me is an M-16.
We are suffering a preemptive video arrest. For those that don’t know, I-Witness Video was remarkably successful in exposing police misconduct and outright perjury by police during the 2004 RNC. Out of 1800 arrests, at least 400 were overturned based solely on video evidence which contradicted sworn statements which were fabricated by police officers. It seems that the house arrest we are now under and the possible threat of the seizure of our computers and video cameras is a result of the 2004 success.
August 30
The work of the I-Witness Video collective was interrupted this past Saturday, August 30, 2008, when St. Paul police detained 7 members of the group (along with an assortment of other individuals) for several hours. The NYC-based video collective is in St. Paul to document the policing of the protests at the Republican National Convention.
The incident began in the late morning when an FBI agent and a Wisconsin Deputy Sheriff showed up on the doorstep of the house in which members were staying (on Igelhart St.), interrupting a collective planning meeting. The officers left after a short conversation with members through a locked front door. Two hours later, around 30 police surrounded the house. Two people who left the house were detained in handcuffs; several others, who were inside, were told that if they left, they would be also be detained. Around the same time, three other I-Witness Video members who had left the house on bikes and two others who were riding in a car across town were also detained by police.
Two hours later, after the search warrant arrived, police at the Igelhart Street house stormed in, pointing an automatic handgun at the people inside. They handcuffed all the individuals inside, collected their personal information, and corralled them in the back garden. While police held the media activists and their friends there, members of the media, who had gathered in an adjoining backyard, interviewed I-Witness Video member Eileen Clancy from behind a fence. After completing their search, the police finally uncuffed everyone and departed. Within about two hours, the other I-Witness Video groups—who had been detained on bikes and in a car, all of whom also had their identifications verified and had undergone searches of various kinds—were also released.
During the raids, members of I-Witness Video managed to send out several email and text messages to supporters, legal support, and press. In response, hundreds of people called the office of the St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman.
Among those individuals detained was Democracy Now! producer Elizabeth Press, who had her camera with her throughout the incident. This morning, Democracy Now! ran a news segment on the many preemptive raids that police have launched against activists in St. Paul this month, including the raid that I-Witness Video suffered on Saturday.
This was a clear effort to intimidate and undermine the work of I-Witness Video—a group that was remarkably successful in exposing police misconduct and outright perjury by police during the 2004 RNC. Out of 1800 arrests made that week, at least 400 were overturned based solely on video evidence which contradicted sworn statements by police officers.
September 3
At about 2:45 this past afternoon (Sept. 3), police wielding batons and a battering ram entered the professional office building on Selby Avenue in St. Paul where I-Witness Video is renting work space.
Geneva Finn, an attorney with the National Lawyer’s Guild went to head off the police. After the police left, she made this statement at an impromptu press conference on the street:
A few minutes ago, one of our legal observers called me to the door. I saw the St. Paul police unloading a bunch of equipment from their cars and they saw me at the door. They saw me at the door, they motioned me forward. I came forward to their cars. They told me that they had reports that somebody was holding somebody hostage in the building, that there had been a kidnapping. They told me that somebody, an undercover had told them, that the anarchists were holding people hostage in our building.
I work for the NLG [National Lawyers Guild] here, we have, we’re working at one of our lawyer’s offices, I said, “Is it in our law office?” They said “No, it’s upstairs.” They then came into the building with me, I showed them what was going on upstairs. They did a pull-up on the frame of I-Witness’ door, looked in, saw that there was people in there, nobody was being held hostage. I then asked the police to leave, since no one was obviously being held hostage here, and they refused. Eventually their head sergeant came here, and decided that they could leave the building.
Anarchists taking hostages? Kidnapping?
This is extraordinary, folks. The St. Paul police came after us with unfounded allegations that we were engaged in criminal behavior. This harassment has interfered with our ability to do the work of documenting the policing of protests that we have come to St. Paul to do. They were able to put pressure on the landlord to do something that they could not force under the law. We were informed that, as a result of all of the commotion, our landlord wanted us to leave the premises immediately.
We packed up our belongings as quickly as possible and were welcomed at the offices of Free Speech TV in St. Paul, for which we are deeply grateful.
YouTube (2008-09-01): Protesters Run From Police at the RNC
YouTube (2008-09-01): Protesters surrounded by police at the RNC
While reporting from a protest at the Republican National Convention, Utne Reader intern Chelsey Perkins captured footage of police launching gas canisters at protesters and chasing them down the banks of the Mississippi river in St. Paul. […]
Having seen protesters and police clash in the distance, Perkins asked an officer how to get away from the conflict zone. She was directed toward a river walk with a large group of people including both protesters and bystanders. The police followed closely behind, until multiple groups of officers on bikes, horses, and on foot surrounded and detained everyone in the area.
Once surrounded, Perkins was told to get on the ground with her hands on her head. Some of the people were placed in plastic cuffs, and a large bullhorn announced that everyone in the area was under arrest. Members of the media were eventually told to leave, because the area was deemed a “crime scene.” Perkins tried to explain that she was a member of the media, but without credentials, she was unable to leave.
After some 45 minutes of being detained, Perkins was told that she was no longer under suspicion and could leave if she wanted. When she agreed, she was surrounded by a group of police who escorted her away from the area.
—Bennett Gordon, Utne Blogs (2008-09-01): RNC: Police Tear Gas and Arrest Protesters
Before the protests, police from several different government agencies repeatedly used hyperviolent paramilitary SWAT assaults in order to harass, intimidate and disrupt protest groups even though there was absolutely no evidence, other than wild speculation, that anyone posed a threat of violence against the cops sent to serve the warrants, and even though no crime had yet been committed. The cops attacked not only protest groups but also journalists. Then, once the demonstrations had begun, heavily-armed riot cops repeatedly surrounded nonviolent protests, attacked them with batons, ordered them to disperse and then blocked off all possible routes of exit, and fired tear-gas cannisters into crowds of retreating protesters and bystanders.
Remember that so-called electoral democracy — in fact, nothing more than an imperial elective oligarchy — never means that we (meaning you and I and our neighbors) are respected as sovereign individuals or left alone to manage our own affairs. What it means is that a highly organized, heavily armed elite insists on the privilege of “representing” us, ruling over us, and ordering us around, on the excuse that, once every several years, we are given some minimal opportunity to select which of two tightly regimented political parties will take control of the ruling apparatus. It is, in other words, not freedom, but rather a Party State, in which we are given only the choice of which of two bureaucratic political parties might control our lives and livelihoods, with their authority supposedly justified by the ritual of elections and the mandate of popular sovereignty. And if the people (again, meaning you and I and our neighbors) should dare to think that we might challenge the authority of the regime supposedly “representing” us, you’ll find that it’s the people that go out the window, not the rigged electoral system or the parties’ grasp on the authority supposedly derived from those people.
More to come.
… But it must just be the summer heat, right?
In Maryland, a state police Red Squad spent a year and change infiltrating anti-death penalty and anti-war groups, and put the names of nonviolent activists onto terrorist and drug-trafficking watch lists:
The ACLU released 43 pages of [Maryland] state police summaries and computer logs Thursday - some with agents’ names and paragraphs blacked out — that it obtained from the state attorney general’s office through a lawsuit based on Maryland’s Public Information Act.
The files depict a pattern of spying and surveillance over a 14-month period in 2005 and 2006. During that time, agents infiltrated the Baltimore Pledge of Resistance, a peace group; the Baltimore Coalition Against the Death Penalty; and the Committee to Save Vernon Evans, a death row inmate.
Police entered the names of activists in a law enforcement database of people suspected of being terrorists or drug traffickers, the documents show. Police officials said they did not infringe on the protesters’ freedom; the ACLU said that nothing in the documents indicated criminal activity or intent.
Many of the spies’ reports seem innocuous. In one, an agent who attended a gathering of the Evans group noted that activists discussed the stance that a candidate for Baltimore County state’s attorney might take on the death penalty.
Yesterday, [former Maryland Governor Bob] Ehrlich said on WJZ-TV that he was
sympatheticto the principle that police should not spy on groups when there is no evidence of wrongdoing.But he added,
We pay state police to make decisions, and obviously they bring discretion with them to their jobs every day, so their job on a daily basis obviously is to weigh the relative value of intelligence they’ve received and to make decisions accordingly.—Jonathan Bor and Gus G. Sentementes, Baltimore Sun (2008-07-19): State police spying decried
For example, one of the decisions that cops accordingly make is to harass, assault, restrain, and imprison innocent people who try to photograph them and document how the cops are treating the people they interact with. (Apparently this intelligence
thing isn’t a two-way street.) They are, of course, happy to invent completely fictional crimes
based on nonexistent laws
in order to do so. Thus, in Johnson County, Tennessee:
Nearly everyone carries a cell phone and it’s hard to find one without that camera feature. It’s convenient when you want to take that impromptu photo, but a Tri-Cities area man ended up behind bars after snapping a shot of a Johnson County sheriff’s deputy during a traffic stop.
The cell phone photographer says the arrest was intimidation, but the deputy says he feared for his life.
… A Johnson County sheriff’s deputy arrested Scott Conover for unlawful photography.
He says you took a picture of me. It’s illegal to take a picture of a law enforcement officer,said Conover.… The deputy also asked Conover to delete the picture three times.
He said if you don’t give it to me, you’re going to jail,said Conover.Under the advice of the Johnson County attorney, the sheriff would not comment and the arresting deputy said he didn’t want to incriminate himself by talking to us.
—Darius Radzius, WJHL (2008-07-11): Man Arrested For Unlawful Photography
Carlos Miller elaborates on the same case:
Gangsters in Blue Ben May and Starling McCloud
Update: I talked to Scott Conover Wednesday morning and he said they delayed his court appearance to Sept. 3rd, which sounds familiar because they kept doing the same thing in my case. (I was arrested last year for photographing cops against their wishes). In my case, I took it as a sign that they were hoping the delay would cause the media interest to die down.
After arresting Scott Conover for
unlawful photographyin Mountain City, Tennessee last June, Johnson County Sheriff’s Deputy Starling McCloud threatened to arrest Conover’s 12-year-old daughter with the same charge after she snapped two photos of her father getting handcuffed.As it turns out, she is a better photographer than her father because she actually managed to photograph the camera shy deputy.
… It won’t be the first time [Scott Conover has] faced off against the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in court.
A couple of years ago, we had problems with the sheriff, so we sued them and settled out of court for an undisclosed sum,he said.But the problems started even before that, after he witnessed deputies beating a man in front of the restaurant/bar he owns.
They beat the shit out of him,he said.The guy’s lawyer came back and took witness statements. When the statements made it back to the sheriff’s department, they came by and asked me why I was getting involved.Not long after that, deputies started staking out his business, Jammers Rocking Road House, which he said is modeled after the Tiki Bar in Key Largo.
They were wolf-packing my customers,he said.They would lie and wait for them to leave and then pull them over to see if they had been drinking.Conover struck back by suing them.
… On the night of his arrest, Conover and his family had left the Last Chance Saloon after picking up the nightly earnings and were on their way back to Jammers. His wife was sitting in the passenger’s seat. His son and daughter were in the back seat.
Up ahead were a group of customers who had just left the bar. A Johnson County Sheriff’s deputy, who was parked along side of the road, pulled over the car with the customers.
The lady who was driving doesn’t drink,he said.Her husband, who does drink, was sitting in the passenger’s seat.Conover pulled up to the scene and stopped his Hummer in front of the traffic stop. He asked his son for his IPhone, then rolled the window down and said:
Hey fellas, I’m just getting your picture.Then he snapped the photo. Deputy McCloud — who has been on the force only 18 months — told him that photographing him was illegal.
I asked,Conover said.what planet are you from?,McCloud started threatening to arrest him if he did not delete the photo, which as it turned out, did not even capture the deputy.
Conover’s wife even asked her husband to just hand the deputy the IPhone, but he refused. The deputy kept threatening him with arrest if he didn’t delete the photo.
The deputy then ordered Conover out of his car.
I threw the phone back to my daughter and told her to keep taking photos.By then, two Mountain City police officers had pulled up to the scene, including Kenneth Lane and Ben May, who is in the dark uniform in the above photos. McCloud placed two sets of handcuffs on Conover, who is six-feet tall and weighs 270 pounds, and apparently looked as if he could break out of a single pair of handcuffs.
Conover’s daughter snapped two photos before McCloud threatened her with arrest.
He started trying to get in my Hummer and get to the back seat where my kids were. I told him,he said.You better not go back there or else we’re going to have some real problems,McCloud decided against arresting the daughter.
At the jail, Conover asked McCloud if had ever heard of the First Amendment.
He then turned to me and said,I’m charging you with disorderly conduct.Thirty minutes later, after McCloud had left the jail — and had time to think of what other charges he could come up with — he called the jailer and added another charge against Conover; pointing a laser at an officer.
Meanwhile, in Ohio, posturing macho paramilitary cops gunned down an unarmed woman holding nothing other than her baby boy. They fired high-powered rifles, blindly into a room they couldn’t see, because they saw a shadow on the wall during their cock-swinging commando SWAT raid. Please remember that cops are hired and trained to keep you and me safe, so obviously no matter how many unarmed women these heavily armed, trained professionals mow down in a wild attempt to save their own skins, the warrior mindset
means never having to say you’re sorry.
A Lima, Ohio jury has acquitted police officer Joseph Chavalia of involuntary manslaughter in the death of 26-year-old Tarika Wilson. Chavalia shot and killed Wilson and wounded her infant son during a drug raid last January. Wilson was unarmed.
During the raid, one of Chavalia’s fellow officers shot and killed the two dogs owned by Wilson’s boyfriend and the target of the raid, Anthony Terry. Chavalia testified that he mistook his fellow officer’s shots at the dogs for hostile gunfire coming from the bedroom where Wilson was standing with her child. Chavalia then fired blindly into the bedroom.
The jury concluded that Chavalia reasonably feared for his life when he heard the gunshots. I guess they were then willing to overlook Chavalia’s mistaking an unarmed woman holding a baby for an armed drug dealer, and the fact that he fired blindly into a room without first identifying what he was shooting at. It’s too bad that that same sort of deference isn’t given to the people on the receiving end of these raids when they too understandably confuse the police officers who wake them from sleep and invade their homes for criminal intruders.
Over in Chicago, the arbitrary governor over the state of Illinois has declared that what Chicago needs is yet another elite tactical team
to patrol inner city neighborhoods, complete with state troopers and military helicopters.
Calling violence in Chicago
out of control,Gov. Blagojevich on Wednesday offered to lend state troopers and National Guard helicopters to the city to augment the Chicago Police.The governor is considering forming an
elite tactical teamto help the Chicago Police fight gang problems, a source said, adding that the unit could later be sent across the state to deal with gang problems at any city’s request.—Chicago Sun-Times (2008-07-17): Gov. says Chicago
out of control
Meanwhile, the Fighting Uruk-Hai of Arizona proposes that we ought to combat inner city crime using the strategic hamlet surge tactics that have made for such a brilliant success in the occupation of Iraq.
We might look at what Rudy Giuliani did in New York City, when he became mayor of that city. … And some of those tactics, very frankly — you mention the war in Iraq — are like that we use in the military. You go into neighborhoods, you clamp down, you provide a secure environment for the people that live there, and you make sure that the known criminals are kept under control. And you provide them with a stable environment and then they cooperate with law enforcement, etc, etc.
Do you feel safer now?
(Stories via Darian Worden (2008-07-18): Martial Law 2008, Manuel Lora @ LewRockwell.com Blog (2008-08-02): The Fascist McCain On Solving Neighborhood Crimes, Ali @ ThinkProgress (2008-08-01): McCain suggests military-style invasion modeled on the surge to control inner city crime, etc.)