Violence

Nicholas Heyward Sr. On The Killing Of His Son By NYPD

August 23, 2014 Josmar Trujillo, www.truth-out.org Educate! NYPD, Police, Politics, Violence

Twenty years ago this September, New York Police Department housing cop Brian George shot and killed 13-year-old Nicholas Heyward Jr. The boy was playing with a toy guy with other kids from the housing projects in Brooklyn where they lived when he and George met in the staircase. The City and the district attorney, Charles Hynes, argued that George mistook the toy gun for a real one and did not bring charges against George. Heyward's family and the kids playing with the young boy insisted he dropped the gun before the shots were fired. George never served a day in jail for the death, but the incident sparked 20 years of activism by Heyward's father, Nicholas Heyward Sr. Today, Hynes is facing a grand jury probe for corruption. I met Heyward Sr. at several policing-reform events over the years and worked with him closely as we campaigned against the appointment and return of Bill Bratton to head the NYPD. Bratton was NYPD commissioner at the time Heyward Jr. was killed. He also famously called Heyward and the mothers of Anthony Rosario and Anthony Baez - who joined him as the well-known parent group Parents Against Police Brutality - a "bunch of fools" during an infamous 1995 town hall meeting in the Bronx alongside then-mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Israel’s Supporters: Where Do You Draw the Line?

August 22, 2014 Fred Branfman, www.alternet.org Educate! Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Violence, Wars and Militarism

Dear U.S. supporters of Israel in Gaza: If you believed the IDF could destroy Hamas by employing portable gas chambers or chemical weapons to publicly gas over 1,400 Gazan civilians, including 400 children, chosen at random, would you favor doing so? I guess not. Perhaps you even feel insulted at the suggestion that you might. But this raises a basic question: if you would not favor gassing Palestinan civilians, how do you justify your support for blowing them to bits? The controversial issue is not Israel trying to destroy Hamas tunnels. Nor is it the attempt to destroy rockets, as if the Israelis can claim that they reasonably suspected the 46-48,000 U.N.-estimated buildings they either partially or totally destroyed contained rockets. Nor is it rightfully condemning Hamas for rocketing civilian targets as well. As even long-term apologists for Israeli violence like the New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier acknowledge, the issue is massive Israeli bombing and shelling of the civilian infrastructure in Gaza, which is wholly disproportionate to combatting tunnels and/or rockets.

Police To Al Jazeera Journalist Near Ferguson: ‘I’ll Bust Your Head’

August 22, 2014 Aaron Ernst, www.aljazeera.com Educate! Ferguson, Journalism, Police, Violence

It’s not every day that a police officer tells you he’s going to bust your head open. The most exasperating thing about almost being arrested near Ferguson, Missouri, for doing my job as a journalist — reporting on tensions among citizens and law enforcement here — was my complete inability to fight back against what was an obvious abuse of police authority. The incident began on Thursday night when “America Tonight” director of photography Jung Park, anchor Joie Chen and I hopped in a taxi to interview Umar Lee, a cab driver and columnist who knows the racial history of North St. Louis County, which has become the focus of worldwide media attention. As we drove near Ferguson’s border with the neighboring town of Kinloch, JP was recording Lee, and I was recording Joie. When the interview was over, we got out of the cab to record a shot of it driving by. Two Kinloch officers in a patrol car stopped and asked what we were doing. I identified JP and myself as a cameraman and producer working for Al Jazeera America for “America Tonight.” The officer who was driving told us to leave the area. When we asked why, he said only that it wasn’t safe to be there and we had to leave. Puzzled, we got in the cab and did as requested. A little farther down the road, we saw a sign that JP wanted to shoot for our story, so we stopped and again got out.

Ferguson Violence Exposes America’s Political Decay

August 22, 2014 Thomas Adams, www.theage.com Educate! Ferguson, Housing, Militarization, Police, Violence

For anyone with a consciousness of American history, the events of the last week and a half in Ferguson, Missouri, a predominately African-American suburb outside of St. Louis, should seem all too familiar. A police officer murders an unarmed black man. As days go by and more information on the shooting is released, residents take to the streets to protest. Their protests are met with force utterly disproportionate to a free society. In response, the protests turn sporadically violent themselves, producing and even more violent response on the part of authorities. Harlem, 1943; Philadelphia and Rochester, 1964; Watts (Los Angeles), 1965; Newark, 1967; Camden, 1971; Tampa, 1987 and 1989; Washington, D.C., 1991; Los Angeles, 1992; Cincinnati, 2001; Benton Harbor (Southwest Michigan), 2003; Brooklyn, 2013 - all these incidents, and many others, contain the basic contours of the situation in Ferguson. By now many in the United States and across the world have weighed in on the underlying causes of the escalating violence in Ferguson. Analysts have rightly pointed out the massive build-up in American police militarisation, the depths of poverty that are endemic to many American neighbourhoods, a broad culture that equates young African-American men with criminality, a failed war on drugs that has led to the incarceration of generations of the American poor and the corresponding transformation of much of urban America into a police state.

Autopsy In Case Of Ezell Ford Put On Hold

August 20, 2014 Matt Ferner, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! California, Police, Protest, Violence

The Los Angeles Police Department has delayed the release of a pending autopsy report for Ezell Ford, the 25-year-old unarmed black man with mental illness who an officer fatally shot last week in a South L.A. neighborhood. "Pending further investigative and forensic analysis, the LAPD Force Investigation Division investigators have requested that The Los Angeles County Coroner place an investigative hold on the pending autopsy report," read an LAPD press release issued Monday. LAPD Commander Andrew Smith told Southern California public radio station KPCC that investigative holds are common in cases that are currently ongoing and and in active investigations, in order to keep witness testimony from being tainted. “They could use information from the autopsy to give credibility to their story,” Smith said. Ed Winter, the assistant chief of investigation at the coroner's office, told The Huffington Post that he didn't know how long the hold would last. The delay on the Ford autopsy report comes after two autopsy reports were released regarding the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson. The autopsy revealed Brown was shot six times.

The Killing Of Black Men Continues

August 20, 2014 Ron Daniels, www.ibw21.org Educate! Mass Incarceration, Police, Racism, Violence

When will it stop? The police killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, coming on the heals of the killing of Eric Garner, an unarmed Black man by a policeman’s choke hold in Staten Island, New York, is yet another painful, traumatic reminder of the long history of occupation, torture, abuse and killing of Black people in America, particularly Black men. Indeed, within hours of the killing of Michael Brown, Ezell Ford, an unarmed Black man with a history of mental problems, was killed in Los Angeles under suspicious circumstances. It doesn’t matter that there is an African American President of the United States or that Blacks are mayors of major American cities, run Fortune 500 companies or are pace setters as high paid and adored hip hop moguls, entertainers and athletes; the killing of Black men continues. Once again legions of Black people and people of conscience and goodwill are in the streets in Ferguson, Missouri and in solidarity rallies across the country. But, to add insult to injury, in scenes reminiscent of the brutalizing of civil rights protesters in Birmingham and Selma in the 60’s, St. Louis County Police units with sharpshooters, sniper squads, mine-resistant trucks and a “Bearcat armored truck” unleashed a ferocious assault on peaceful marchers, firing tear gas, stun bombs and rubber bullets into the ranks of terrorized protesters. The whole nation and the world witnessed this vicious onslaught against the First Amendment by highly militarized police that looked more like soldiers on the frontlines in Iraq and Afghanistan than the suburb of a major American city. There was “shock and awe” throughout the land.

Part II: DoD Data Mining To Track, Kill Activists

August 20, 2014 Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, www.occupy.com Educate! Activism, Data, Politics, Violence

The Pentagon’s multimillion dollar Minerva research program to fund social science research for military applications includes a flagship project established in 2009 at Arizona State University (ASU) to examine “radical” and “counter-radical” Muslim movements in Southeast Asia, West Africa and Western Europe. The project’s "expert wisdom gathering tool," used by academics involved in the project to assess and rank the threat-level from organizations and civil society groups, set its sights on the UK, Germany, France, Europe generally, Nigeria, Niger, Senegal, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines. Although purportedly designed to assess Islamic movements, among the 36 UK organizations targeted for ranking on the tool’s "radicalization" scale are several non-Muslim activist groups critical of US, British and Israeli foreign policy. A deeper analysis of the criteria used by the project to label organizations discloses serious deficiencies that tend to cast suspicion of propensity for violence on any group calling for radical social, political or religious change. Conflating violent and nonviolent "radicalism" Explaining the rationale behind the Minerva initiative, program director Dr. Erin Fitzgerald said, “Decreasing terrorism and political violence requires an understanding of the underlying forces that shape motivations and mobilize action. The vast majority of political movements – even only those with seemingly ‘radical’ political philosophies – do not turn violent or destabilize regional security; we want to understand what makes those leading to armed conflict different.”

Tear Gas Not The Only Thing Connecting Ferguson And Palestine

August 19, 2014 Ryan Rodrick Beiler, www.972mag.com Educate! Ferguson, Israel, Police, Protest, Tear Gas, Violence

The New York Times’ Robert Mackey recently tweeted a photo of the tear gas cartridges found on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, where police have been using the weapon against demonstrators angry at the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager. Both the cartridge and the tactics looked very familiar, and for good reason. Jamestown, PA’s CTS brand tear gas fired in #Ferguson tonight https://t.co/XwMO3tBuDp in the West Bank last week https://t.co/XNWlEDvqFF — Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) August 18, 2014 A different tweet noted that the same brand of tear gas was used in Egypt’s Tahrir Square. As reported here last December, those shining shell casings, as well as the rubber-ball variety and spent stun grenades made by the same company, had decorated a tree in Bethlehem’s Manger Square at Christmastime as activists gathered those used by the Israeli military less than two kilometers away in Aida Refugee Camp and displayed them for holiday tourists.

Violence By Government Escalates Street Violence

August 19, 2014 Gary Younge, www.theguardian.com Educate! Missouri, Police, Protest, Violence

In 1966, Martin Luther King started to campaign against segregation in Chicago only to find his efforts thwarted by violent mobs and a scheming mayor. Marginalised by the city’s establishment, he could feel that non-violence both as a strategy and as a principle was eroding among his supporters. “I need some help in getting this method across,” he said. “A lot of people have lost faith in the establishment … They’ve lost faith in the democratic process. They’ve lost faith in non-violence … [T]hose who make this peaceful revolution impossible will make a violent revolution inevitable, and we’ve got to get this over, I need help. I need some victories, I need concessions.” He never got them. The next year there were more than 150 riots across the country, from Minneapolis to Tampa. As the situation escalates in the St Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, where police recently shot an unarmed black man as he walked down the street, many are clearly losing faith. As the first day of curfew drew to a close, hundreds of police in riot gear swept through the streets, using tear gas, smoke canisters and rubber bullets against an increasingly agitated crowd. Earlier this morning the governor, Jay Nixon, deployed the national guard.

Tell Dept. Of Justice ‘End Racist And Militaristic Policing’

August 15, 2014 Staff, www.popularresistance.org Resist! health, Police abuse, Violence, Wars and Militarism

Although the Department of Justice does not link their new decision to undertake a broad review of police tactics to any specific incident, it comes during a wave of notable instances of police killing unarmed black men and responding with excessive force to a peaceful protest of the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The DoJ is also considering reinstating a national commission to provide guidance to police policies. This move is supported by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. There has been a push to stop the growing militarization of police forces and the overuse of SWAT teams for some time. At present, local police units are being inundated with free military equipment including tanks, assault rifles and vehicles designed to resist land mines. They are also being trained in military tactics. And there is also a push to hire members of the military into the police force.

Rampant Police State: It Is More Than One Killing

August 13, 2014 Nick Bernabe, www.theantimedia.org Educate! Mass Media, police brutality, Violence

Following what may be the greatest few weeks in decades of exposure to police brutality, police in Ferguson, Missouri, have now shot and killed an 18 year old unarmed teen who, according to witnesses, was holding his hands in the air when he was shot. Peaceful protests that began shortly after the shooting yesterday were met with full on military style anti-riot police. What started as a peaceful protest soon turned into a small riot which resulted in some stores being looted and shots being fired at police. While the riots will not help the cause, they are also not surprising considering the sharp uptick in anti-police sentiment stemming from the massive amount of police violence against the working poor and minorities in America. Police violence which is increasingly being captured on cell phone cameras and posted online daily. We have a whole section on the Police State on our website which can be viewed here. Frustration is now boiling over after decades of discriminatory policing, near-zero accountability, and lack of will from lawmakers to reel in the spiraling police state. In fact, as we have documented in depth, the militarization of the police is only rising despite the increased outcry from concerned citizens against it. The overbearing presence of riot police in Ferguson deployed to contain peaceful protesters may have been the very spark which ignited the rioting in the first place.

Report: Obama DoD Covered Up War Crimes In Afghanistan

August 13, 2014 Amnesty International, www.amnestyusa.org Educate! Afghanistan, Violence, Wars and Militarism

The families of thousands of Afghan civilians killed by US/NATO forces in Afghanistan have been left without justice, Amnesty International said in a new report released today. Focusing primarily on air strikes and night raids carried out by US forces, including Special Operations Forces, Left in the Dark finds that even apparent war crimes have gone uninvestigated and unpunished. “Thousands of Afghans have been killed or injured by US forces since the invasion, but the victims and their families have little chance of redress. The US military justice system almost always fails to hold its soldiers accountable for unlawful killings and other abuses,” said Richard Bennett, Amnesty International’s Asia Pacific Director. “None of the cases that we looked into – involving more than 140 civilian deaths – were prosecuted by the US military. Evidence of possible war crimes and unlawful killings has seemingly been ignored.” The report documents in detail the failures of accountability for US military operations in Afghanistan. It calls on the Afghan government to ensure that accountability for unlawful civilian killings is guaranteed in any future bilateral security agreements signed with NATO and the United States.

Justice Dep’t To Conduct Broad Review Of Police Tactics

August 13, 2014 Kevin Johnson, www.usatoday.com Organize! Law, police brutality, Regulation, Violence

The Justice Department is leading a broad review of police tactics, including the kind of deadly force that prompted recent protests in Missouri and New York, a federal law enforcement official said Tuesday. The review is being conducted as the department weighs creating a national commission to provide new direction on such controversial issues. In addition to deadly force, the review is expected to examine law enforcement's increasing encounters with the mentally ill, the application of emerging technologies such as body cameras, and police agencies' expanding role in homeland security efforts since 9/11, said the official, who is not authorized to comment publicly and requested anonymity. The review is slated to be completed early next year while authorities consider establishing a special law enforcement commission similar to a panel created by President Johnson to deal with problems then associated with rising crime. Rather than violent crime, which has been in decline in much of the country, police are now grappling with persistent incidents involving use of force and their responses to an array of public safety issues, from drug overdoses to their dealings with the mentally ill and the emotionally disturbed. The call for a broader federal policy review, while not directly tied to any specific incident, grew out of a meeting involving law enforcement advocacy groups and Justice officials, including Attorney General Eric Holder, the official said.

Communal Lands: Theater Of Operations For Counterinsurgency

August 12, 2014 Renata Bessi, Santiago Navarro F. and Translated Miriam Taylor, www.truth-out.org Create! Indigenous Rights, Mexico, Mining, School of Americas, Surveillance, Violence

In 2006, a team of geographers from the University of Kansas carried out a series of mapping projects of communal lands in southern Mexico's Northern Sierra Mountains. Coordinated by Peter Herlihy and Geoffrey B. Demarest, a US lieutenant colonel, the objective was to achieve strategic military and geopolitical goals of particular interest for the United States. The objective was to incorporate indigenous territories into the transnational corporate model of private property, either by force or through agreements. Demarest's essential argument is that peace cannot exist without private property. "The Bowman Expeditions are taking places with the counterinsurgency logic of the United States, and we reported them in 2009. These expeditions were part of research regarding the geographic information that indigenous communities in the Sierra Juarez possess. The researchers hid the fact that they were being financed by the Pentagon. And we believe that this research was a type of pilot project to practice how they would undertake research in other parts of the world in relation to indigenous towns and their communal lands," said Aldo Gonzales Rojas in an interview with Truthout. A director for the Secretary of Indigenous Affairs in the state of Oaxaca, Rojas ensures that indigenous laws are being instituted and applied correctly in the state.

Eno: Today I Saw A Weeping Palestinian Man…

August 5, 2014 Brian Eno, www.stopwar.org.uk Resist! Arts, Israel, Palestine, Violence

Dear All of You: I sense I'm breaking an unspoken rule with this letter, but I can't keep quiet any more. Today I saw a picture of a weeping Palestinian man holding a plastic carrier bag of meat. It was his son. He'd been shredded (the hospital's word) by an Israeli missile attack - apparently using their fab new weapon, flechette bombs. You probably know what those are - hundreds of small steel darts packed around explosive which tear the flesh off humans. The boy was Mohammed Khalaf al-Nawasra. He was 4 years old. I suddenly found myself thinking that it could have been one of my kids in that bag, and that thought upset me more than anything has for a long time. Then I read that the UN had said that Israel might be guilty of war crimes in Gaza, and they wanted to launch a commission into that. America won't sign up to it. What is going on in America? I know from my own experience how slanted your news is, and how little you get to hear about the other side of this story. But - for Christ's sake! - it's not that hard to find out. Why does America continue its blind support of this one-sided exercise in ethnic cleansing? WHY?

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