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Police abuse

Oregon Officials Decry Federal Agents After Protest Clashes

July 19, 2020 Andrew Selsky and Gillian Flaccus, AP News. , , ,
Militarized federal agents deployed by the president to Portland, Oregon, fired tear gas against protesters again overnight as the city’s mayor demanded that the agents be removed and as the state’s attorney general vowed to seek a restraining order against them. Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum also sued Homeland Security and the Marshals Service in federal court Friday night. The complaint alleges that unidentified federal agents have grabbed people off Portland’s streets “without warning or explanation, without a warrant, and without providing any way to determine who is directing this action.” Rosenblum said she was seeking a temporary restraining order to “immediately stop federal authorities from unlawfully detaining Oregonians.” Federal agents, some wearing camouflage and some wearing dark Homeland Security uniforms used tear gas at least twice to break up crowds late Friday night, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported.

Scheer Intelligence: The Cartoonist The Cops Didn’t Let Get Away

July 17, 2020 Robert Scheer, ScheerPost.com. , , ,
Ted Rall, the Pulitzer Prize finalist, columnist and cartoonist joins Robert Scheer on in this week’s episode of “Scheer Intelligence” to talk about his firing by the Los Angeles Times and and his latest book, “Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.” The host commends the journalist for his “courageous” and “gutsy” reporting on the Afghanistan War and a long, noteworthy career. Yet, it is precisely his candid storytelling through words and visual arts that earned him a place in the Los Angeles Police Department’s crosshairs. The story of Ted Rall’s firing as a cartoonist by Los Angeles Times in 2015 reveals the historically cozy relationship that existed between the media and the police.  Writing a blog for the LA Times, in which he detailed an encounter with an LAPD officer who’d detained and handcuffed him for allegedly jaywalking years earlier, ultimately led to Rall’s very public firing and a legal case that now threatens to bankrupt him.

87 Charged With Felonies After Breonna Taylor Protest

July 17, 2020 Jordan Freiman, CBS News. , , ,
Eighty-seven people were arrested and charged with a felony after a Tuesday protest on the lawn of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, the Louisville Metro Police Department said in a statement. The protesters were demanding that charges be filed against the officers responsible for the March shooting death of Breonna Taylor.   The protest began Tuesday evening near Ballard High School in Louisville, Kentucky, CBS affiliate WLKY-TV reports. The protesters marched from the school to Cameron's home, with many of the demonstrators sitting and standing on Cameron's lawn. The protesters, who were chanting slogans demanding justice for Taylor, were asked to leave by the police, but many chose to stay. Those who did were arrested without incident, according to WLKY-TV. "In total, 87 people were arrested," LMPD said in their statement. "Due to their refusal to leave the property and their attempts to influence the decision of the Attorney General with their actions, each person was charged with Intimidating a Participant in a Legal Process

The Police Defunding Con Game

July 13, 2020 Margaret Kimberly, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
Cutting police budgets without establishing public control over their behavior doesn’t solve the problem, and invites politicians to shuffle budget numbers around like a three-card monte swindle. Unfortunately, a key demand of the new movement has led to confusion and to political defeats at a crucial moment. At first glance, the idea of defunding the police seems to have merit. Everyone who wants to end police brutality welcomes the idea that they might lose some of the resources they use in their terrorism spree. The police are the modern-day slave patrol and any effort to diminish their capabilities seems like a good idea. But the state doesn’t work that way. 

Training The Warrior Cop: US Empire Is A Laboratory For Militarized Policing

July 11, 2020 By Morgan Artyukhina Sputnik News. , ,
In addition to the paramilitary attitude that any civilian is a potential terrorist insurgent, US police have brought numerous tactics and weapons back from their Israel trips for use against US civilians, such as the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) infamous Muslim surveillance program, which was modeled in part on Israeli surveillance of Palestinians in the West Bank. Another is the chemical weapon “skunk water,” a noxious liquid sprayed from hoses that imparts a foul smell on anything it touches that will not disappear for days. Humans struck by skunk water can experience nausea, vomiting and skin rashes. While US police have not yet been reported using skunk water, some police forces have bought the substance, including the St. Louis police in the aftermath of the 2014 uprisings in nearby Ferguson, Missouri, that followed the police shooting of Michael Brown.

Cops Off Campus And Out of Our Unions!

July 6, 2020 By David Klassen, Spectre Journal. , , ,
The union I am a part of, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) at the City University of New York (CUNY), voted not only to kick the cops off campus but also to drive the cop union out of the AFL-CIO, the national labor federation with which our parent union is affiliated. Before the June 25 delegate assembly where we voted on it, union members working in Rank and File Action drafted the resolution with these clear demands. The union leadership, who has regularly taken more conservative positions on a range of issues, offered a substitute resolution that expanded some language but dropped the demand on expelling the police unions. A rank-and-file delegate amended it back in and the complete resolution overwhelmingly passed. This is an early step in a larger struggle but the victory shows that in moments of mass struggle rank and file members can push forward radical demands. 

Protesters Attacked By Police Are Suing To Vindicate Their Constitutional Rights

July 6, 2020 By Marjorie Cohn, Truthout. , , ,
Victims of police abuse are filing litigation, and at least one judge has put a halt to some of the most egregious misconduct. Plaintiffs allege that police misconduct resulted in the violation of their First, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights. They charge that the LAPD used “indiscriminate and unreasonable force against thousands of protesters” and used unreasonable and excessive force by hitting “at least close to a thousand protesters with batons and/or ‘rubbers bullets.’” Plaintiffs attest to being restrained with tight handcuffs, denied bathroom access and access to food or water, and provided insufficient ventilation during transport, making them vulnerable to COVID-19.

Prisoners Mobilize For Black Lives And Against Brutality Behind Bars

July 4, 2020 Ella Fassler, Truthout. , , ,
Prisoners say that abuse reminiscent of the “modern-day lynching” of George Floyd is common practice behind bars. Swift Justice, who is also incarcerated at Kilby Correctional Facility and prefers a pseudonym, tells Truthout: “What happens in here is just like the rhetoric police on the street used to justify killings.” Outside of prison, the officers say, “‘He had a gun or appeared to have a gun,’” Swift explains. In prison, they often say, “‘he had a knife, or failed to comply with the direct order.’ And in here it’s hard to prove different and, we don’t have cell phones to capture it. These guys in here know it and it scares them! And rightfully so.” Potential, another Black man confined at a different facility in Alabama, says that guards “know where the cameras are and where they aren’t. They take guys where there aren’t cameras and they will beat the sh*t out of them. That’s the system here. And the supervisors allow it

NYPD Officers Arrest And Pepper Spray Queer Liberation March Protesters

June 30, 2020 Sydney Perriera and Aviva Stahl, The Gothamist. , , ,
NYPD officers arrested and pepper-sprayed protesters at the Queer Liberation March Sunday afternoon while attempting to arrest two people for graffiti, according to witnesses. Numerous videos shared on social media show a crowd of officers shoving outraged protesters where arrests were being made near Washington Square Park. As two were being arrested for graffiti, protesters intervened in an attempt to free them, at which point police responded with pepper spray, multiple witnesses told Gothamist. A legal observer said at least four people were arrested and 10 others pepper-sprayed—including someone running a fruit stand nearby protesters.

AFL-CIO Leader Richard Trumka Defends Police Unions

June 29, 2020 By Hamilton Nolan, In These Times. , , ,
Union locals and progressive factions within larger unions have taken up the call. The King County Labor Council expelled the Seattle police union last week, and even SEIU leader Mary Kay Henry, the head of the most powerful union outside of the AFL-CIO, said that disaffiliation “must be considered” if police unions don’t reform. Last Friday, the proposal from the Writers Guild received its first serious and direct discussion at a meeting of the AFL-CIO’s executive council, the elected body that governs the group. Mark Dimondstein, the head of the American Postal Workers Union, raised the issue, saying that the AFL-CIO would eventually have no choice but to deal with the issue head-on. Trumka, who was leading the meeting, pushed back claiming many police officers today are “community-friendly.” He also disagreed with Dimondstein’s characterization of labor’s differences with police as “irreconcilable.” 

Mathematicians Urge Colleagues To Boycott Police Work In Wake Of Killings

June 28, 2020 Davide Castelvecchi, Nature. , , ,
The tide of reckoning on systemic racism and police brutality that has been sweeping through institutions — including scientific ones — has reached universities’ normally reclusive mathematics departments. A group of mathematicians in the United States has written a letter calling for their colleagues to stop collaborating with police because of the widely documented disparities in how US law-enforcement agencies treat people of different races and ethnicities. They concentrate their criticism on predictive policing, a maths-based technique aimed at stopping crime before it occurs. The letter, dated June, 15 is addressed to the trade journal Notices of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), and comes in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests in the United States and around the world, sparked by the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May. More than 1,400 researchers have now joined the call.

Arrest Of Activist Leads To Protests; At Least Four Vehicles Strike Protesters

June 24, 2020 By Robert Chappell, Madison365.   , , ,
Hundreds of people are protesting in downtown Madison after the arrest of activist Yeshua Musa. Videos of the arrest posted to social media show as many as five police officers wrestling Musa, also known as Devonere Johnson, to the ground and carrying him to the back seat of a police cruiser, while he asks what he’s being arrested for. After officers get him into the car, he can be seen jumping out of the opposite car door before being tackled again and taken into custody. In one of the videos, witnesses can be heard asking why Musa is being arrested and saying he had only been speaking in a megaphone, exercising his first amendment rights.

NYPD Enforcement Of Low-Level Offenses Accounts For Huge Department Expenditures, Racial Disparities

June 24, 2020 Drug Policy Alliance. , , ,
New York City criminalizes drugs and low-level broken windows offenses at a startling rate, with enforcement in these areas accounting for a vast proportion of the NYPD’s policing activities and the city’s budget, according to a new brief from Drug Policy Alliance. DPA released the brief in support of the Communities United for Police Reform coalition call for Mayor de Blasio and the NYC Council to cut the FY21 NYPD expense budget by $1 billion and redirect savings to core needs in Black, Latinx and other NYC communities of color that have long been the target of the drug war and racist policing.  The brief, “NYC’s Costly Drug Enforcement & Broken Windows Policing,” finds that in 2019, NYC spent an estimated $96 million enforcing drug arrests and violations, and an estimated $456 million enforcing low-level broken windows offenses, which accounted for 28.5% of all NYPD arrests and violations issued for the year. 

Mapping Police Violence Across The USA

June 24, 2020 Amnesty International. , , ,
Police forces across the United States have committed widespread and egregious human rights violations in response to largely peaceful assemblies protesting systemic racism and police violence, including the killing of Black people. Amnesty International has documented 125 separate incidents of police violence against protesters in 40 states and the District of Columbia between 26 May and 5 June 2020. These acts of excessive force were committed by members of state and local police departments, as well as by National Guard troops and security force personnel from several federal agencies. Among the abuses documented are beatings, the misuse of tear gas and pepper spray, and the inappropriate and, at times, indiscriminate firing of less-lethal projectiles, such as sponge rounds and rubber bullets.

Court Refuses To Block Information On Who Police Targeted In Social Media

June 22, 2020 By Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, The Appeal. , , ,
Massachusetts’s highest court will not block the disclosure of police reports that could show the Boston police department has targeted Black and Latinx men for surveillance on social media.  Boston attorney Josh Raisler Cohn, who represents a man charged with several gun violations, began seeking the police reports in November 2018 to determine if the police have surreptitiously used the social media service, Snapchat, to target people of color. Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins appealed Ullmann’s order, but her office’s petition was denied. After an unsuccessful appeal to a single justice of the state’s Supreme Judicial Court, the commonwealth appealed again to the full Supreme Judicial Court. The full court denied Rollins’s petition.
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