Ponce
7th May 2015, 06:58 PM
My take on this? (for what is worth).......the people say, we are tired with cops killing us and getting away with it, lets see how it feels going the other way.
In the old days this was not going on, and that's why is happening now..............POWER TO THE PEOPLE.
========================================
WHY THE ATTACK ON LOCAL POLICE?
http://www.boblonsberry.com/writings.cfm?go=4
WHY THE ATTACK ON LOCAL POLICE?
Written May 7, 2015 Bob Lonsberry
When you recognize what, you need to ask why.
It’s called situational assessment.
What’s going on, and why is it going on?
Like right now, in America, with the police.
What’s going on, and why is it going on?
What’s going on is that there is a concerted effort to defame and denounce local police. The president said this week that, across the country, men of color are treated differently, more harshly, by the police.
He offered no data, no balance, no facts.
Just the broadside indictment that all American cops are racists.
Protest after protest, often with veteran progressive activists in command, have denounced and condemned the police. It is asserted as an unassailable fact that the police are racist, over-armed and disrespectful of people and their rights.
None of it is backed up with facts, or anything other than a string of undocumented anecdotal accounts that sound like folklore.
Fingers point at Ferguson, where three investigations showed that the officer did nothing but defend himself against a violent attack. Fingers point at Baltimore where everything boils down to a prisoner not having his seatbelt on.
And speaking of Baltimore, it is a city with a 2-to-1 black majority, a black mayor and city council, a black police chief and a black prosecuting attorney, and a 43-percent black police force, and yesterday they announced that they were partnering with the Justice Department to root out anti-black practices.
All stemming from an incident in which three of the six officers charged are black.
The claim of racism has become so powerful that it is made and accepted as fact in the absence of evidence or logic.
That’s the what.
There is a concerted effort to damage public perception of local police, and to paint the profession of American law enforcement as a tool of anti-black racism.
So what’s the why?
Here’s my theory.
In an administration that is intensely focused on the accumulation of federal power, and under a president who promised a federal domestic security force to rival the Defense Department in both personnel and budget, I think the goal is to lay the foundation for turning traditional law enforcement over to federal police.
In each of the flare ups of late, the federal government has presented itself as the solution – even though it is clear the speeches and statements of senior federal officials fanned if not sparked the flames of conflict.
The federal government has presented itself as the only protection blacks and Latinos have against racist cops.
The federal government is doing everything it can to create the perception of a problem, and to simultaneously present itself as the solution to the problem.
To me, that smells like a power grab.
And the government can’t take to itself more power without taking from you more rights.
More specifically, increased policing powers in the hands of the federal government makes those police agencies less accountable to the people. It also increases the potential, in the worst of circumstances, of despotic or oppressive actions.
Local police departments, controlled by local chiefs and sheriffs – and the voters to whom they or their bosses have to answer – are not threats to civil rights, they are protectors of civil rights.
The federal government has never really explained its need for something approaching a half a billion handgun bullets that could only be used for domestic policing. Why is it that agencies like the Department of Interior and the Bureau of Land Management, as well as the Department of Agriculture, have heavily armed military-style SWAT teams?
And why is it that the president of the United States would work so hard to destroy public confidence in American law enforcement? Specifically, why would he do so much to assure the alienation of black Americans from the police?
The what is fact – Defaming the police and defining their entire profession as bigotry.
The why is theory – To turn enough Americans against the police to justify a power grab by the federal government.
And that’s no good.
And it’s all based on a lie.
Because as the president and the TV anchors talk about police and community relations, I don’t know what they’re talking about.
My community has great relations with the police. We respect them and they respect us.
And polls show that Americans trust the police more than they trust politicians. Personally, I trust my local cops more than I trust my national president.
What is being whipped up against the police is not logic or fact, it is prejudice and bigotry. And it is being whipped up for a reason.
And that’s what I think we ought to be worried about.
Ponce
8th May 2015, 09:25 AM
The bankers and politicians literally want to put all the heat and blame on the police.
Shami, this is from another member that posted it here........ don't blame bankers and politicians (only).....blame the blue ones.
Police officers are more likely to be struck by lightning than be held financially accountable for their actions.—Law professor Joanna C. Schwartz (paraphrased)
“In a democratic society,” observed Oakland police chief Sean Whent, “people have a say in how they are policed.”
Unfortunately, if you can be kicked, punched, tasered, shot, intimidated, harassed, stripped, searched, brutalized, terrorized, wrongfully arrested, and even killed by a police officer, and that officer is never held accountable for violating your rights and his oath of office to serve and protect, never forced to make amends, never told that what he did was wrong, and never made to change his modus operandi, then you don’t live in a constitutional republic.
You live in a police state.
It doesn’t even matter that “crime is at historic lows and most cities are safer than they have been in generations, for residents and officers alike,” as the New York Times reports.
What matters is whether you’re going to make it through a police confrontation alive and with your health and freedoms intact. For a growing number of Americans, those confrontations do not end well.
As David O. Brown, the Dallas chief of police, noted: “Sometimes it seems like our young officers want to get into an athletic event with people they want to arrest. They have a ‘don’t retreat’ mentality. They feel like they’re warriors and they can’t back down when someone is running from them, no matter how minor the underlying crime is.”
Making matters worse, in the cop culture that is America today, the Bill of Rights doesn’t amount to much. Unless, that is, it’s the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights (LEOBoR), which protects police officers from being subjected to the kinds of debilitating indignities heaped upon the average citizen.
Most Americans, oblivious about their own rights, aren’t even aware that police officers have their own Bill of Rights. Yet at the same time that our own protections against government abuses have been reduced to little more than historic window dressing, 14 states have already adopted LEOBoRs—written by police unions and being considered by many more states and Congress—which provides police officers accused of a crime with special due process rights and privileges not afforded to the average citizen.
In other words, the LEOBoR protects police officers from being treated as we are treated during criminal investigations: questioned unmercifully for hours on end, harassed, harangued, browbeaten, denied food, water and bathroom breaks, subjected to hostile interrogations, and left in the dark about our accusers and any charges and evidence against us.
Not only are officers given a 10-day “cooling-off period” during which they cannot be forced to make any statements about the incident, but when they are questioned, it must be “for a reasonable length of time, at a reasonable hour, by only one or two investigators (who must be fellow policemen), and with plenty of breaks for food and water.”
According to investigative journalist Eli Hager, the most common rights afforded police officers accused of wrongdoing are as follows:
If a department decides to pursue a complaint against an officer, the department must notify the officer and his union.
The officer must be informed of the complainants, and their testimony against him, before he is questioned.
During questioning, investigators may not harass, threaten, or promise rewards to the officer, as interrogators not infrequently do to civilian suspects.
Bathroom breaks are assured during questioning.
In Maryland, the officer may appeal his case to a “hearing board,” whose decision is binding, before a final decision has been made by his superiors about his discipline. The hearing board consists of three of the suspected offender’s fellow officers.
In some jurisdictions, the officer may not be disciplined if more than a certain number of days (often 100) have passed since his alleged misconduct, which limits the time for investigation.
Even if the officer is suspended, the department must continue to pay salary and benefits, as well as the cost of the officer’s attorney.
It’s a pretty sweet deal if you can get it, I suppose: protection from the courts, immunity from wrongdoing, paid leave while you’re under investigation, and the assurance that you won’t have to spend a dime of your own money in your defense. And yet these LEOBoR epitomize everything that is wrong with America today.
Once in a while, the system appears to work on the side of justice, and police officers engaged in wrongdoing are actually charged for abusing their authority and using excessive force against American citizens.
Yet even in these instances, it’s still the American taxpayer who foots the bill.
For example, Baltimore taxpayers have paid roughly $5.7 million since 2011 over lawsuits stemming from police abuses, with an additional $5.8 million going towards legal fees. If the six Baltimore police officers charged with the death of Freddie Gray are convicted, you can rest assured it will be the Baltimore taxpayers who feel the pinch.
New York taxpayers have shelled out almost $1,130 per year per police officer (there are 34,500 officers in the NYPD) to address charges of misconduct. That translates to $38 million every year just to clean up after these so-called public servants.
Over a 10-year-period, Oakland, Calif., taxpayers were made to cough up more than $57 million (curiously enough, the same amount as the city’s deficit back in 2011) in order to settle accounts with alleged victims of police abuse.
Chicago taxpayers were asked to pay out nearly $33 million on one day alone to victims of police misconduct, with one person slated to receive $22.5 million, potentially the largest single amount settled on any one victim. The City has paid more than half a billion dollars to victims over the course of a decade. The Chicago City Council actually had to borrow $100 million just to pay off lawsuits arising over police misconduct in 2013. The city’s payout for 2014 was estimated to be in the same ballpark, especially with cases pending such as the one involving the man who was reportedly sodomized by a police officer’s gun in order to force him to “cooperate.”
Over 78% of the funds paid out by Denver taxpayers over the course of a decade arose as a result of alleged abuse or excessive use of force by the Denver police and sheriff departments. Meanwhile, taxpayers in Ferguson, Missouri, are being asked to pay $40 million in compensation—more than the city’s entire budget—for police officers treating them “‘as if they were war combatants,’ using tactics like beating, rubber bullets, pepper spray, and stun grenades, while the plaintiffs were peacefully protesting, sitting in a McDonalds, and in one case walking down the street to visit relatives.”
That’s just a small sampling of the most egregious payouts, but just about every community—large and small—feels the pinch when it comes to compensating victims who have been subjected to deadly or excessive force by police.
The ones who rarely ever feel the pinch are the officers accused or convicted of wrongdoing, “even if they are disciplined or terminated by their department, criminally prosecuted, or even imprisoned.” Indeed, a study published in the NYU Law Review reveals that 99.8% of the monies paid in settlements and judgments in police misconduct cases never come out of the officers’ own pockets, even when state laws require them to be held liable. Moreover, these officers rarely ever have to pay for their own legal defense.
For instance, law professor Joanna C. Schwartz references a case in which three Denver police officers chased and then beat a 16-year-old boy, stomping “on the boy’s back while using a fence for leverage, breaking his ribs and causing him to suffer kidney damage and a lacerated liver.” The cost to Denver taxpayers to settle the lawsuit: $885,000. The amount the officers contributed: 0.
Kathryn Johnston, 92 years old, was shot and killed during a SWAT team raid that went awry. Attempting to cover their backs, the officers falsely claimed Johnston’s home was the site of a cocaine sale and went so far as to plant marijuana in the house to support their claim. The cost to Atlanta taxpayers to settle the lawsuit: $4.9 million. The amount the officers contributed: 0.
Meanwhile, in Albuquerque, a police officer was convicted of raping a woman in his police car, in addition to sexually assaulting four other women and girls, physically abusing two additional women, and kidnapping or falsely imprisoning five men and boys. The cost to the Albuquerque taxpayers to settle the lawsuit: $1,000,000. The amount the officer contributed: 0.
Human Rights Watch notes that taxpayers actually pay three times for officers who repeatedly commit abuses: “once to cover their salaries while they commit abuses; next to pay settlements or civil jury awards against officers; and a third time through payments into police ‘defense’ funds provided by the cities.”
Still, the number of times a police officer is actually held accountable for wrongdoing while on the job is miniscule compared to the number of times cops are allowed to walk away with little more than a slap on the wrist.
A large part of the problem can be chalked up to influential police unions and laws providing for qualified immunity, not to mention these Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights laws, which allow officers to walk away without paying a dime for their wrongdoing.
Another part of the problem is rampant cronyism among government bureaucrats: those deciding whether a police officer should be immune from having to personally pay for misbehavior on the job all belong to the same system, all with a vested interest in protecting the police and their infamous code of silence: city and county attorneys, police commissioners, city councils and judges.
Most of all, what we’re dealing with is systemic corruption that protects wrongdoing and recasts it in a noble light. However, there is nothing noble about government agents who kick, punch, shoot and kill defenseless individuals. There is nothing just about police officers rendered largely immune from prosecution for wrongdoing. There is nothing democratic about the word of a government agent being given greater weight in court than that of the average citizen. And no good can come about when the average citizen has no real means of defense against a system that is weighted in favor of government bureaucrats.
So if you want a recipe for disaster, this is it: Take police cadets, train them in the ways of war, dress and equip them for battle, teach them to see the people they serve not as human beings but as suspects and enemies, and then indoctrinate them into believing that their main priority is to make it home alive at any cost. While you’re at it, spend more time drilling them on how to use a gun (58 hours) and employ defensive tactics (49 hours) than on how to calm a situation before resorting to force (8 hours).
Then, once they’re hyped up on their own authority and the power of the badge and their gun, throw in a few court rulings suggesting that security takes precedence over individual rights, set it against a backdrop of endless wars and militarized law enforcement, and then add to the mix a populace distracted by entertainment, out of touch with the workings of their government, and more inclined to let a few sorry souls suffer injustice than challenge the status quo or appear unpatriotic.
That’s not to discount the many honorable police officers working thankless jobs across the country in order to serve and protect their fellow citizens, but there can be no denying that, as journalist Michael Daly acknowledges, there is a troublesome “cop culture that tends to dehumanize or at least objectify suspected lawbreakers of whatever race. The instant you are deemed a candidate for arrest, you become not so much a person as a ‘perp.’”
Older cops are equally troubled by this shift in how police are being trained to view Americans—as things, not people. Daly had a veteran police officer join him to review the video footage of 43-year-old Eric Garner crying out and struggling to breathe as cops held him in a chokehold. (In yet another example of how the legal system and the police protect their own, no police officers were charged for Garner’s death.) Daly describes the veteran officer’s reaction to the footage, which as Daly points out, “constitutes a moral indictment not so much of what the police did but of what the police did not do”:
“I don’t see anyone in that video saying, ‘Look, we got to ease up,’” says the veteran officer. “Where’s the human side of you in that you’ve got a guy saying, ‘I can’t breathe?’” The veteran officer goes on, “Somebody needs to say, ‘Stop it!’ That’s what’s missing here was a voice of reason. The only voice we’re hearing is of Eric Garner.” The veteran officer believes Garner might have survived had anybody heeded his pleas. “He could have had a chance,” says the officer, who is black. “But you got to believe he’s a human being first. A human being saying, ‘I can’t breathe.’”
As I point out in my new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, when all is said and done, the various problems we’re facing today—militarized police, police shootings of unarmed people, the electronic concentration camp being erected around us, SWAT team raids, etc.—can be attributed to the fact that our government and its agents have ceased to see us as humans first.
Then again, perhaps we are just as much to blame for this sorry state of affairs. After all, if we want to be treated like human beings—with dignity and worth—then we need to start treating those around us in the same manner. As Martin Luther King Jr. warned in a speech given exactly one year to the day before he was killed: “We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-0...nt-amount-much
Ponce
8th May 2015, 09:48 AM
Cops are supposed to have a mind of their own........more and more people (in different ways) are now saying NO MOR.
===========================
While I don't disagree with the idea that part of this is an agenda being enacted from the top down, as suggested.
However, at least in my AO, these guys follow orders. Orders to arrest and ticket every infraction.
There is no more 'officer's discretion'. For anything.
As a teen in the 80's, I was let go on the officer's discretion... once they poured our beer on the ground, another time they took an acquaintance's bag of weed and dumped it on the ground and sent us scurrying away.
Rather than put us in the system and mark us as criminals, they simply used their authority to scare us.
In my case it worked.
Nowadays they arrest 11 year old boys for fighting in school, the aggressor and the defender. And both kids now have a record.
They arrest people here for the most trivial reasons, entrapping their victims into a nightmare of court appearances, court costs, fines, drug tests, classes, and all sorts of un-consitutional things.
They run seine nets, err checkpoints and bust everyone. They set speed limits with poor signage to entrap out of town people. Every speeding ticket nets the county at least $300 regardless of circumstances and a court appearance by the accused, I mean guilty, is required by law in NC no matter the infraction.
Mrs Foothiller does a lot of court appointed criminal defense work. She finds that most of the time the police violate the suspects rights (such as promising to 'go easy', searching, then going as hard as possible on the person who mistakenly believed them -- all 100% legal).
When she asks them, why did you arrest this man for possession of .1 grams of marijuana? They say "we have to arrest everyone -- just following orders."
Don't you all see where that mentality leads? I do. As an amateur historian who's spent a lot of time on 20th century Germany.
If a new law was passed that said "all Christians must be summarily executed" or "all blue eyed people" or "all white people" these 90 IQ goons would follow orders without conscience or thought.
They are hired with that trait in mind. Thinking and intelligent men are not hired very often, particularly at the local PD and County Sheriff level.
They are oftentimes military veterans (with a different mentality) who understand pacifying an enemy, and are not what we think of as a peace officer.
I also not that none of the various agencies that police this area have 'protect and serve; on their cars anymore. The only thing there beside 'police' or 'sheriff' is "Call 911".
Yeah, call 911 and somebody is getting hurt. That's how they roll.
So, yeah the local PD and their leaders are part of the problem whether they realize it or not; but I honestly believe that their leadership knows exactly what they're doing. And it's not for our benefit.
They're protecting alright. They're protecting their revenue streams, their pensions, and the property of the wealthiest people.
Regular people who get victimized don't get a lot of attention and are made to feel as if their problems are insignificant.
But you damn well better understand that if you do something like ride without your seat belt on you're going down and hard.
So many things are 'illegal' now, and so many things are considered crimes that most of us could be busted at any moment and be guilty of something considered a crime.
The sad part is that most of understand crime to mean victimizing other people.
Not riding without a seat belt, answering a phone call while driving, having our windows tinted too dark (why are undercover cop car windows tinted darker than we're allowed), forgetting to renew our registration, having small amounts of the wrong drug (while the state owned ABC store has enough poison in the showroom to kill at least 500 people).
And illegals here can commit basically any crime then just be let go.
But a citizen will always be prosecuted as far and as hard as possible for the most minor infraction. Then, once the cops know who you are, you will be singled out and harassed constantly even if you're doing everything in your power to comply with every malum prohibitum rule and regulation.
The problem exists at every level, from town, to county, to state and all the way to DC.
They hate us for our freedom and work tirelessly to destroy it.
Every new law is an attack on us. And people who say "we need to outlaw ____ (their safety fear du jour)" are enabling it.
I just want to be left alone. If I'm not hurting anyone then I'm not committing a crime.
That's the system our culture has been based on for hundreds of years.
This current system is an abomination and is designed to make us all criminals so they can control us.
WAKE UP!
Ponce
8th May 2015, 11:18 AM
No matter which way you look you can see the answer to......."Why the attack on local police".
==============================
Nonviolence for Whom?
If violence isn’t the answer, somebody should tell the police.
By Nathalie Baptiste
May 07, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - Ferguson. New York. Baltimore.
As cities erupt after decades of oppression and violence at the hands of police, calls for nonviolence can be deafening. “Violence isn’t the answer,” the moralists chide when protesters throw rocks and clash with police.
They’re right. But they’re telling the wrong people.
On April 12, Baltimore resident Freddie Gray made eye contact with a police officer and ran. Sometime after the police detained him, his spine was severed. He died a short time later.
After days of large, peaceful protests that the mainstream media largely ignored, Baltimore erupted. Police donned riot gear as buildings and cars burned.
Maryland’s state attorney has since announced a range of charges — from false imprisonment to second-degree murder — against the six police officers involved in Gray’s death, who’d had the gall to claim that the handcuffed Gray inflicted his injury on himself.
Upon the news, some Baltimore residents stopped protesting and started celebrating. But some damage can’t be undone: A 25-year-old man is dead.
And for what? Making eye contact?
Gray joins the infuriatingly long — and ever-growing — list of black people killed by police.
Seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones was sleeping when Detroit police broke into her house and shot her in the head. Akai Gurley was just taking the stairs in his New York apartment building when a startled cop shot him dead. The unarmed and unresisting Eric Garner was gruesomely choked to death by police officers on Staten Island.
Why are the killers of a sleeping child or an innocent man in his own apartment building not condemned as murderers when rock-throwing teenagers are castigated as violent thugs?
Garner’s gruesome choking death, which a bystander caught on video, didn’t elicit calls by mainstream America for nonviolence. But when a few angry people in Baltimore burned a CVS, critics unleashed a landslide of Martin Luther King Jr. quotes, sanitized for white consumption.
These aren’t isolated cases. Last year, for instance, police killed more than 100 unarmed people. Nationally, an unarmed black person is almost six times more likely than an armed white person to be killed by police.
And in at least 17 major U.S. cities, black men have a higher chance of being killed by cops than the average American has of being killed by anyone.
Each death leaves the black community and its allies a little bit sadder, but united nonetheless. Marches, rallies, and protests have reverberated in every major city — most of them peaceful, but a few resulting in the destruction of property and violence.
Nobody wants to see people hurt, businesses burned, or innocent lives disrupted by violence in their communities. But you can’t understand Baltimore’s unrest in isolation from the violence its residents face at the hands of their own government.
They threw rocks and burned cars because of their unbelievable anguish at seeing their brothers, sisters, and neighbors slain by those who are supposed to serve and protect.
Yes, violence isn’t the answer. Maybe somebody should tell the police.
Nathalie Baptiste is a writing fellow at the American Prospect, where an earlier version of this op-ed appeared. Prospect.org. Distributed by OtherWords.org.
Powered by vBulletin® Version 4.2.0 Copyright © 2025 vBulletin Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved.