Tag: United Police States of America

Submit, Slave

Remember what I said in the previous post about the police not liking any of our government granted privileges? Here’s another example:

[Waterbury Conn.] Police Chief Vernon L. Riddick Jr. brought a message of cooperation with police to a mostly African-American crowd of more than 200 people at Mount Olive A.M.E. Zion Church on Wednesday night.

If an officer stops your car, if they ask to search your person or vehicle, if they demand entry into your home, comply and then complain later to the department’s internal affairs office and police chief’s office if you feel your rights have been violated, Riddick said.

In other words, when an officer asks to search your vehicle or home you should just roll over and be a good little slave.

The exact opposite is true however. If an officer requests to search your property the only response you should give them is, “Come back with a warrant.” Officers asking to search your property are on fishing expeditions. They’re asking permission because they don’t believe they have enough grounds to get a warrant issued. Fishing expeditions can’t help you but they certain can hurt you. As police are required to tell you when reading you your Miranda warnings, anything you say can and will be used against you in court. Likewise, anything an officer finds during a fishing expedition can and will be used against you in court.

Always keep in mind that the police are out to get you. That’s their job. The politicians pass laws and then task the police with finding and dealing with anybody who breaks them. Many of these laws, such as traffic citations and drug offenses, include a nice kickback to the department that makes the arrest. So do yourself a favor and always exercise what few privileges you have against the police.

Like You and Me, Only Better

Law enforcers have a proud tradition of hating any government granted privilege that inconveniences them. The Fourth Amendment irritates them because it throws up roadblocks between them and searching every vehicle and building. The Fifth Amendment irritates them because it stands between them and forcing suspects to incriminate themselves. The Second Amendment irritates them because they want to be the only ones carrying guns:

In Cleveland, police union head Steve Loomis said he made the request to protect officers following recent fatal shooting of three police officers in Louisiana on Sunday and the killing of five officers in Dallas on July 7. Kasich said he did not have the power to circumvent the state’s open-carry law.

[…]

Across the country, similar battles are playing out in states where municipal authorities, often backed by police departments, are clashing with state lawmakers over how to regulate the open carrying of firearms.

Dallas’s police chief drew criticism from gun rights advocates for saying open carriers made it more “challenging” for his officers to respond to a shooter who killed five policemen at a demonstration this month.

[…]

Police in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, have been trying and failing to restrict the open carrying of guns for years. The state attorney general argues that citizens have a constitutional right to publicly display weapons, which cannot be overruled by city authorities.

“I wish more of our legislators could see past the ideology,” said Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn. “They have no concern about the impact in urban environments that are already plagued by too many guns and too much violence.”

These officers are focusing on open carry, not because it makes their job more challenging (after all, it’s pretty easy to distinguish a person with a holstered gun from a person actively shooting people), but because it’s currently the most controversial form of carry. This is how these fights always play out. You start with the most controversial aspect of the thing you’re trying to crush because it’s the aspect you can get popular support for. Once you’ve crushed the most controversial aspect the next aspect can be made controversial.

These officers aren’t against open carry, they’re against carry. If they achieved their goals and managed to get open carry abolished they would then move on to claim that concealed carry makes their jobs difficult because it’s hard for them to know who is legally carrying a firearm and who is a drug dealer illegally carrying a firearm.

In the end these officers want a world where us mere serfs have no protections whatsoever against them.

An Honest Cop

The Republican National Convention is happening in Cleveland this year. As part of the standard convention process of turning the city into a dystopian prison state, the head of the Cleveland Police Union wants open carry banned. The best part is how blatant his he about not caring whether or not such a ban is even legal:

“We are sending a letter to Gov. Kasich requesting assistance from him. He could very easily do some kind of executive order or something — I don’t care if it’s constitutional or not at this point,” Cleveland Police Union president Stephen Loomis told CNN.

Law enforcers are supposedly tasked with upholding the law. If Governor Kasich were to issue an unconstitutional, that is to say illegal, executive order then the police, if they were actually interested in upholding the law, should arrest his. But we have the president of the Cleveland Police Union stating in no uncertain terms that he’s okay with the governor breaking the law. Once again we see that laws only apply to us little people, not to the State.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

In computer science the term garbage in, garbage out is used frequently to note that if you have garbage data as an input you will get garbage data as an output. This is applicable in any research. A new study has been released that claims there is no racial bias in polices’ use of lethal force in the United States. Quite a few people have jumped on this because it supports their bias that there isn’t a problem with policing in this country. However, Radley Balko points out a serious flaw in the study. It uses reports written by police officers:

For the purpose of the discussion, let’s break shootings and killings by police into three categories: incidents that were illegal and unnecessary, incidents that were legal and necessary, and incidents that were legal but unnecessary. If you’re asking whether current laws and policies allow for too many police shootings, looking at how many shootings are justified under current law and policy is just question begging. It’s that last category — legal but unnecessary — that we want to explore. Unfortunately, it’s also a category that is plagued by subjectivity and the simple fact noted above: Most of the data we have comes from police reports themselves.

If we were to compile statistics on, say, medical mistakes in an effort to make policies that would improve the state of medicine, we wouldn’t get all of our data from written statements by the accused doctors or hospitals. If we wanted to compile data on conflicts of interest in politics, we wouldn’t rely on members of politicians to self-report and adjudicate when their vote may have been influenced by a campaign donation. But this is essentially what we do with shootings by police officers.

The study is simply an extension of the phrase, we investigated ourselves and found that we did nothing wrong. Studying police use of force in the United States is difficult because most of the data is created by the police themselves. There is very little third-party oversight and what little exists is usually tied to the law enforcement community in some manner.

I’m sure Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who killed Philandro Castile, wrote a report that exonerated him of wrongdoing. This isn’t just because he wants to avoid punishment but also because he probably wants to justify his actions to himself. We humans are great at twisting logic to justify our actions to ourselves. Thieves will tell themselves that since the person they were stealing from was wealthy no real harm occurred to him and therefore the theft was justified. Domestic abusers will tell themselves that they have to hit their partner in order to teach them important lessons. Police, likewise, will tell themselves that lethal force was necessary to preserve their lives. We cannot rely on the reports thieves, domestic abusers, and police write about their own actions because they are necessarily biased. So long as rely on such data as our input we’re going to get garbage as our output.

Like You and Me, Only Better

Online harassment is pervasive. Death threats on the Internet are a dime a dozen and if you’re a woman there’s a good chance punk kids are going to subject you to a constant stream of variations on “Show me your tits,” followed by accusations that you’re a whore and should be killed. Anybody who has played online games has probably lost track of how many times pissed off children have claimed to have slept with their mother and challenged them to a fight in real life.

I’ve received enough threats online that I could paper my living room walls if I printed them all off but I mostly ignore them because I don’t really care. However, if you do feel the threats are credible and report them to the police you’ll likely receive little more than a shrug and a claim that there’s nothing the department can do. Things are a bit different when the harassment is aimed at police officers though:

Five police officers were killed in the Dallas shootings, constituting the highest number of police casualties in an attack since September 11. And as a result, law enforcement officials everywhere are suddenly much more sensitive to threats against their lives.

But one result has been that several police departments across the country have arrested individuals for posts on social media accounts, often from citizen tips — raising concerns among free speech advocates.

The police are like you and me, only better.

Another issue here, as pointed out by The Intercept, is free speech. A lot of people will argue that since many of the posts in question were threatening in nature that free speech doesn’t apply. But statements such as “I have no problem shooting a cop for simple traffic stop cuz they’d have no problem doing it to me,” aren’t threats in my opinion because the person is stating an opinion, not a course of action that they’re planning to pursue. If the statement had been “I will shoot any cop for pulling me over,” then it could been seen differently as the statement is expressing a potential planned course of action (of course it could also been seen as a statement expressing a willingness to defend one’s self). But then questions of means must be answered because a threat is meaningless if the person making it doesn’t have the means to go through with it.

Regardless of your opinions on threats in regards to freedom of speech, there is no question that the police are treating people who threaten them online different than people who threaten regular Janes and Joes. It’s no different than a politician who argues regular people shouldn’t be allowed to carry a gun but then carries a gun themselves or hires armed body guards to protect them.

The Minneapolis Police Department is a Bit Red in the Face

The Minneapolis Police Department is well known for its high speed, low drag attitude. Instead of deescalation and conflict avoidance the MPD prefers throwing down with anybody it can create an excuse to throw down with. In fact the department is so cocksure that it didn’t even try to hide its love of violence in its recent recruiting video. However, many people weren’t amused by the video so the MPD was a bit red in the fact and decided to abuse the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in an attempt to erase the video from the Internet:

Less than a week after an officer from a nearby force shot and killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop, leaving him to die in front of his child and girlfriend (and the world on livestream) the Minneapolis Police Department has perjured itself in issuing a copyright takedown notice to Youtube in order to suppress a controversial recruiting video that depicted the jobs of MPD officers as being a firearms-heavy shoot-em-up.

The video had attracted alarm and criticism by officials and the public, who saw it as indicative of a deep culture of violent, shoot-first policing in the Minneapolis police.

When you start repeating a lie often enough you also start to believe it. The MPD believes that their job is to be domestic soldiers. Who are they at war with? The people. At least that’s the only enemy that exists in Minneapolis because the city isn’t really known for being in a state of civil war. That leads the department to choose violence before deescalation. At this point the attitude is so prevalent that the department’s recruiters can’t even make their recruitment videos looks like anything other than an Army recruitment video. When their videos are finally criticized by the public the MPD resorts to its default tactic, government violence, by threatening anybody hosting the video with a DMCA takedown notice.

Another Man Shot Dead by The Police

The polices’ war on the people continues. This time a supposedly broken taillight initiated a series of events that ended in another black man’s execution. What makes this situation stranger is that the victim, Philando Castile, supposedly held a valid carry permit and was legally armed. Supposedly Castile had his hands on the steering wheel and informed the officer that he had a valid carry permit and was armed. At that point the officer is said to have demanded his identification and permit. When Castile moved his hands to comply with the officer’s demand the officer shot him:

A St. Paul man died Wednesday night after being shot by police in Falcon Heights, the immediate aftermath of which was shown in a video recorded by the man’s girlfriend as she sat next to him and which was widely shared on Facebook.

[…]

The girlfriend said on the video that the officer “asked him for license and registration. He told him that it was in his wallet, but he had a pistol on him because he’s licensed to carry. The officer said don’t move. As he was putting his hands back up, the officer shot him in the arm four or five times.”

The video shows a uniformed police officer holding a pistol on the couple from outside the car. The officer can be heard to say, “I told him not to reach for it. I told him to get his hand out.”

The video, unfortunately, only shows the aftermath of the shooting. But based on the officer’s statements in the video it’s clear Castile didn’t pose an immediate threat as he didn’t have a weapon in hand. Was he shot because the officer gave conflicting orders or because he failed to get into a submissive position fast enough? We can’t be sure but neither act is worthy of execution.

It’s also important to note that both the woman recording the video, Diamond Reynolds, and a young girl, assumed to be Reynolds’ 7-year-old daughter, were in the car when the officer shot Castile. Even when it was clear that Castile was incapacitated the officer aimed his gun into the car again when he was yelling at the camera claiming he told Castile not to reach for his permit. The officer appears to have no concern for the safety of the bystanders, which should give everybody cause for concern.

Finally, as if the officer was purposely trying to make the situation as bad as possible, Reynolds is ordered out of the car, handcuffed, and kidnapped. Why was she kidnapped? If I were to hazard a guess it was because she was collecting evidence that could incriminate the trigger happy officer who is probably desperate to sweep this entire matter under the rug.

While there are some questions regarding the events that lead up to the shooting we do know that Castile is dead because an officer claimed to have seen a broken taillight. Let that sink in. A man was killed because a pathetic municipal revenue generator either saw or fabricated a chance to write a citation for a few bucks. There is no justification for executing a man over a few dollars. Every law is a death threat.

All Laws are Backed by the Threat of Death

When somebody says, “There ought to be a law.” you should ask if they really want people to die for breaking that law. The fact that all laws are backed with the implicit threat of death is best illustrated by the recent rash of shootings committed by officers. Many of these shootings start because officers initiated contact over a petty offense:

There is still no comprehensive study to determine just how many cities pay their bills by indenturing the poor, but it is probably no coincidence that when you examine the recent rash of police killings, you find that the offenses they were initially stopped for were preposterously minor. Bland’s lane change signal, DuBose’s missing plate. Walter Scott had that busted taillight—which, we all later learned, is not even a crime in South Carolina. Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes. When Darren Wilson was called to look into a robbery, the reason he initially stopped Michael Brown was for walking in the street—in Ferguson, an illegal act according to Section 44-344 of the local code. Between 2011 and 2013, 95 percent of the perpetrators of this atrocity were African American, meaning that “walking while black” is not a punch line. It is a crime.

Failing to signal before a turn, having a nonfunctional taillight, and walking in the street should not be punishable by death. But when those acts are declared law they automatically elevate from minor nuisances to execution worthy acts. The Mother Jones article explains how turning police officers into revenue generators has exacerbated the problem of officer related violence. However, there is a more fundamental issue at hand. Interactions with police officers are never voluntary. One side, the officer, wields all of the power while the other side, the suspect, has no power whatsoever.

When a police officer turns on their attention whore lights you must get out of their way. If they’re turning on the lights because they’ve targeted you then you must pull over and, if you’re smart, place your hands on the top of the steering wheel. During the encounter you cannot drive away until you’re given permission to do so. You also cannot legally defend yourself in most cases if the officer escalates the situation to violence. If you fail to pull over, drive away, or defend yourself it is considered a crime and more men with guns will be sent to hunt you down. In other words, voluntarily disassociating with an officer who isn’t to your liking is a possible death sentence. Under such circumstances the officer has no motivation to treat you decently.

Watch Our Brave Boys in Blue Defend Themselves Against a Pinned Down and Helpless Man

It’s a day ending in “y”, which means police officers somewhere in the United States gunned down a man whose only crime was having a complexion darker than mine. But this time some high quality video has surfaced that leaves little doubt that the act was little more than a summary execution (obviously the video is graphic as it involves somebody being gunned down at point blank range):

The new video shows officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake II on top of Alton Sterling, threatening him not to move. One of the officers is seen with his gun drawn and pointed directly at Sterling’s head, then the camera pans away when shots are fired. After the camera pans back to Sterling, he’s seen struggling to breathe with a massive gunshot wound in his chest. The officer is still pointing his gun at Sterling, while his partner grabs an unidentified object from Sterling’s pocket.

The suspect, Alton Sterling, was lying on his back. One officer was on top of him, pinning his body down. The other office was pinning his left arm down with his legs. His other arm was stuck under the bumper of the car. From this position the officer pinning Sterling’s left arm apparently felt his life was in immediate danger because he drew his pistol and put it over Sterling’s chest. Shortly after drawing his pistol he fires into Sterling’s chest.

As expected, the neocon news sources have jumped into action and dug up as much dirt on Sterling as they could find in some strange attempt to justify the shooting. Of course none of what they present matters. Whether Sterling was a gang member, a felon, or even a pedophile is irrelevant in a self-use of force situation. What matters in a use of force situation is whether the threat at the time of the situation warranted the amount of force that was used.

The officer drew his gun, which a regular person like you or me could only legally do if we had a reasonable belief that we were in immediate danger of great bodily harm or death. I can’t see how the officer could reasonable believe that with the suspect immobilized on the ground. Even if Sterling was armed he wasn’t in a position where he could retrieve his weapon and use it. Those are the facts that matter in this case. Sterling’s past is entirely irrelevant. But some people hold a misguided belief that all police officers are heroes and will therefore go to any lengths and twist logic in any way to justify what would be unjustifiable if the perpetrator wasn’t wearing a badge.

Until society overcomes its hero worship of police officers and begins to focus solely on the facts the scourge of abusive officers will remain unaddressed. As long as the issue remains unaddressed innocent people will continue to die and the hands of almost entirely unaccountable officers.

How Do You Get on The Terrorist Watch Lists? Be in the Wrong Place When an Officer Needs to Fill a Quota.

With all the talk about prevent terrorists from buying guns I think it’s time we sat down and asked what a terrorist, in this context, means. When people say they want to prevent terrorists from buying guns what they really mean is that they want to prevent people on the terrorist watch lists from buying guns. But being on the terrorist watch lists doesn’t mean you’re a terrorist. In fact, over 40 percent of the names on the lists aren’t affiliate with any known terrorist organization.

So what lands somebody on the lists if they’re not affiliated with any known terrorist organization? One way is to be in the wrong place when an officer needs to fill a quota:

You could be on a secret government database or watch list for simply taking a picture on an airplane. Some federal air marshals say they’re reporting your actions to meet a quota, even though some top officials deny it.

The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they’re required to submit at least one report a month. If they don’t, there’s no raise, no bonus, no awards and no special assignments.

This is the problem with secret lists that have secret criteria. Anything can potentially land you on the lists. Since they’re secret you don’t even know you’re on one. Furthermore, if you do find out you’re on one there’s no way of getting off of it.

This is the problem with using lists that involve no due process to punish people. Under the laws the gun control advocates are fighting for you could lose your right to purchase a gun just because you were sitting near an air marshal when they needed to fulfill a monthly quota.