Recent quotes:
Police violence as a symptom
The problem is an economic and political system that has by design created a nation of serfs and obscenely rich masters. The problem is deindustrialization, offshoring of manufacturing, automation and austerity programs that allow families to be priced out of our for-profit healthcare system and see nearly one in five children 12 and younger without enough to eat. The problem is an electoral system that is legalized bribery designed to serve a tiny, unaccountable cabal of oligarchs that engage in legalized tax boycotts, deregulation, theft and financial fraud. The problem is that at least half of the working class and working poor, a figure growing exponentially as the pandemic swells the ranks of the unemployed, have been cast aside as human refuse and are being sacrificed on the altar of profit as the country reopens for business and the pandemic crashes in wave after wave on front line workers. The problem is the diversion of state resources, including over half all federal discretionary spending, to an unaccountable military machine that wages endless and futile wars overseas, the savage face of white supremacy beyond our border. This military machine perfects its brutal tactics and tools for control on people of color in the Middle East, as it did in other eras in Vietnam, Latin America and the Philippines. It passes on this knowledge, along with its surplus equipment, including sophisticated equipment for wholesale surveillance, drones, heavily armed SWAT teams, grenade launchers and armored vehicles, to police at home. Smashing down a door and terrorizing a family in a night police raid in Detroit looks no different from a night raid carried out against an Afghan family by Army Rangers in Kandahar. Empires eventually consume themselves. Thucydides wrote of the Athenian empire that the tyranny it imposed on others it finally imposed on itself.The blank blackness of Ferguson
According to a recent analysis by the Times of American communities with at least ten thousand black residents, the city with the largest proportion of black men who are “missing”—in jail or prematurely dead—is Ferguson. Foster said, “There’s no real design for a middle class, or even a lower-middle class, in this area.”Police priorities in Ferguson
Mark Byrne, who has been a councilman in Ferguson since 2010, told me that there were things he had missed: “I didn’t know, on August 9th, that we only had four African-American police officers on a force of fifty-three.” In 2014, the city spent four times as much money on police uniforms as it did on police training. Byrne said, “I could have done a better job.”The Man Who Shot Michael Brown - The New Yorker
From 2012 to 2014, the Ferguson police issued four or more tickets to blacks on seventy-three occasions, and to whites only twice. Black drivers were more than twice as likely as others to be searched during vehicle stops, even though they were found to possess contraband twenty-six per cent less often. Some charges, like “manner of walking in roadway,” were brought against blacks almost exclusively.The economics of poor policing in poor towns
There are almost fifty municipalities in North County. The officers in some of the towns are not just fighting crime; they also issue countless traffic tickets and ordinance-violation citations. The local governments often rely on the fines generated by tickets and violations to balance their budgets. (In 2013, the town of Edmundson, which comprises less than a square mile, issued nearly five thousand traffic tickets.) Police officers, meanwhile, can be paid as little as ten dollars an hour, according to Kevin Ahlbrand, the president of the Missouri Fraternal Order of Police. Ahlbrand says that the low pay can create “unprofessional police officers,” adding, “You get what you pay for.”NYC police slowdown means department is overstaffed?
Furious at embattled mayor Bill de Blasio, and at what Police Benevolent Association chief Patrick Lynch calls a "hostile anti-police environment in the city," the local officers are simply refusing to arrest or ticket people for minor offenses – such arrests have dropped off a staggering 94 percent, with overall arrests plunging 66 percent.Punishments for slander or sedition
Twelve year old shot dead on the playground, Cleveland.com does expose on his parents
People from across the region have been asking whether Rice grew up around violence. The Northeast Ohio Media Group investigated the backgrounds of the parents and found the mother and father both have violent pasts.Three French Islamists Turn Themselves in After Police Miss Them - Bloomberg
Three men suspected of having fought for Islamic State in Syria and deported by Turkey are now in police custody after French police waited for them at the wrong airport. The men turned themselves in this morning at a gendarme station in southern France, BFM TV reported. They rang the bell at the station in the town of Caylar and were told to wait outside because no one was there. A police car came 20 minutes later to pick them up, according to a BFM TV reporter at the nearby police station they were eventually taken to.How many "angelic" teenagers do you know?
Michael Brown, 18, due to be buried on Monday, was no angel, with public records and interviews with friends and family revealing both problems and promise in his young life. Shortly before his encounter with Officer Wilson, the police say he was caught on a security camera stealing a box of cigars, pushing the clerk of a convenience store into a display case. He lived in a community that had rough patches, and he dabbled in drugs and alcohol. He had taken to rapping in recent months, producing lyrics that were by turns contemplative and vulgar. He got into at least one scuffle with a neighbor.
The PROP report also compiled select stories of arrests from court documents: officers arresting a woman with a license to sell flowers because two of the flowers on her cart were artificial; an officer arresting a man for having his backpack on an adjacent seat on in a subway car; officers stopping a 14-year-old girl on her way to school, and arresting her for truancy when she questioned why she was being stopped.
the police and the prosecution in the State of Connecticut were seeking extraordinary authority to detain/seize anyone lawfully walking down the street in a public place in Connecticut, if they believed that people in the vicinity may have committed a crime. One of the bulwarks of the Fourth Amendment protection is that the police need something called particularized suspicion, meaning that they need to have some evidence to believe that you have committed a crime in order to stop you.
This opinion does away with that. In fact, the police don’t even have to be correct about the person in your vicinity they are seeking to stop. In Kelly, the opinion at issue, they had the wrong guy they wanted to stop. In other words, they completely botched their job and as a result, we’ve all lost our ability to freely walk down the street without being forced to submit to police authority for no reason at all.
In some other countries, we call that martial law. In America, we call that officer safety.
During Burrage's initial walk through the complex, she spoke through the microphone to the police officers, frustrated that she didn't recognize anybody in the parking lot.
"Nobody," she muttered. "I'm gonna knock on this person's door."
Morgan greeted her inside. "What's up?" he said enthusiastically. "Have a seat!"
Burrage explained she couldn't stay and asked Morgan where she could score drugs. She said she was working as a middle-man for another buyer interested in the Duke Manor market.
Morgan couldn't suggest anyone in the complex that would sell to Burrage. But he admitted he had his own small stash.
"I just keep it around the house," he said. "I'll show you what it look like."
Inside his bedroom, Morgan showed Burrage drugs that aren't very distinguishable on the video. Morgan had been drinking that day and suggested that Burrage get high with him. She wasn't interested.
"I'm not trying to get in trouble," she said, leaving.
"Sorry about that, guys," she told the police officers through the microphone as she walked across the parking lot.
When she returned to the police truck, she explained Morgan was not a dealer; nonetheless, police sent her back out to score drugs from him. Upon her arrival, Morgan suggested that she buy drugs from someone living on the floor above him. Burrage went upstairs, but the man at that apartment had no drugs to sell her.
Burrage returned to Morgan's place. There is no footage of a drug transaction on the video. But when she reunited with the police officers, they searched her and found a bag of crack; she didn't have the $20 they had given her. An SBI analyst later determined that the crack amounted to one-tenth of a gram.
I’ve reported on jurisdictions where all felony search warrants are now served with a SWAT team. At least one federal appeals court has now ruled that under the Fourth Amendment, there’s nothing unreasonable about using a SWAT team to perform regulatory inspections.
"I know that it is hard for people not in law enforcement to understand how someone could be capable of shooting themselves while handcuffed behind the back," Lopez said.