Western politicians claim to intervene, bomb, invade and sanction other countries for 'humanitarian reasons' and 'human rights abuses'…
Where have they been as Macron's police brutally suppress #GiletJaunes protests for weeks on end? pic.twitter.com/6cN5Ll0CKi
— Going Underground on RT (@Underground_RT) July 30, 2019
In scenes one would expect to see in Turkey, or some token third-world dictatorship, on Sunday morning Spanish riot police violently cracked down on the scheduled Catalan independence referendum, smashing their way into polling stations in Catalonia in a dramatic quest to shut down the banned Catalan independence referendum, as they fired rubber bullets and brutally beat peaceful people trying to vote for or against independence from a Spanish government, which many commentators this morning have called “fascist.”
Images that Madrid has been fearing as police uses force to remove young and old from voting stations. @FT pic.twitter.com/F09fpak5FI
— Michael Stothard (@MStothard) October 1, 2017
Guest Post by Eric Peters
Have you noticed that it’s become common – if not practice – for armed government workers to force people to the ground, knee in the back – guns trained on them – as part of seemingly every arrest?
Violent men, okay. They are potentially a “threat” to the “safety” of armed government workers. But what about men not violent? Women not “resisting”? Junior high kids?
They are being “taken down” just the same.
Guest Post by
If you still haven’t heard of the psychotic violence perpetrated on a high school girl by Senior Deputy Ben Fields, it’s time to get up to speed. If you want a gauge as to how far this society has fallen, this is all you need to see.
First, a little background from the AP:
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A school resource officer in South Carolina is on leave and his boss has asked the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate after a video showed him flipping a female high school student from her desk to the floor and dragging her across a classroom.
The sheriff’s department said no one was hurt during the confrontation, which was captured on cellphones by several students and posted online. One student said it all started when the girl pulled out her cellphone and refused her math teacher’s request to hand it over during class.
During the moments captured on video, Fields can be seen standing over the girl, asking her to stand up. The girl remains seated and the officer wraps a forearm around her neck. The desk then flips and the girl is slammed backward onto the floor, where the officer tosses her toward the front of the classroom and handcuffs her.
A second student who verbally objected to the girl’s treatment also was arrested.
Go ahead and read that again.
Surveillance footage released by the New York Police Department shows officer James Frascatore ambushing US tennis star James Blake in what appears to be a startling, illegal arrest. Frascatore has a history of using excessive-force and has been sued four times.
He’s a repeat offender.
The hard-charging NYPD officer who body-slammed tennis star James Blake outside a Manhattan hotel has been sued four times for roughing up suspects during arrests, documents show.
Officer James Frascatore, on the force for four years, is a defendant in four ongoing civil cases that charge he and other officers used excessive force during false arrests.
The 38-year-old Long Island resident has also had at least five complaints lodged against him with the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
A Fredericksburg police officer recently resigned, following claims of police brutality, a video released on Saturday shows the incident in which the officer tasers and pepper-sprays an innocent black man suffering from a medical emergency, before forcing him to the ground next to his car which ran over the man’s foot.
The man, David Washington, had previously struck another car and responded slowly to the armed officers that arrived to the scene, as he had suffered from a stroke.
Hat tip i95east
YouTube
Jessica Cooke, a 21-year-old from Ogdensburg, New York, recently graduated from SUNY Canton with a degree in law enforcement leadership and had already applied for a job as a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent when she was surprised by an impromptu final lesson at a CBP checkpoint on Route 37 in Waddington last week. What she learned—that people who insist on their constitutional rights in this setting run the risk of being roughed up and shot with a stun gun—should help make her a better CBP agent, although CBP may not see it that way.
Cooke was driving from Norfolk to her boyfriend’s house in Ogdensburg, the northern border of which is the St. Lawrence River. If you cross the river, you are in Canada, but Cooke was not crossing the river. She nevertheless became subject to the arbitrary orders of CBP agents by driving through one of the country’s many internal immigration checkpoints, which can be located anywhere within 100 miles of the border (a zone that includes two-thirds of the U.S. population). For some mysterious reason, she was instructed to pull into a secondary inspection area, where she used her cellphone to record a five-minute video of the stop (below).
After presenting her driver’s license, Cooke, who surely learned in college that police (and even CBP agents!) need “reasonable suspicion” to detain someone, asks why she was pulled over. “You guys have no reason to be holding me,” she says. A male agent who identifies himself as a supervisor has no explanation for the detention, but he says Cooke will have to wait for a drug-sniffing dog to inspect her car. “Well, they’d better be here soon, because if not, I’m calling 911, and this can all be figured out,” Cooke says. “You guys are holding me here against my will.” Eventually the female agent who first interacted with Cooke says she seemed nervous—an all-purpose excuse for detaining someone, since people tend to be nervous when confronted by armed government officials.
WASHINGTON—Describing the murder charges brought against a white South Carolina police officer who was filmed shooting an unarmed black man as an encouraging step in the right direction, the American populace reported Wednesday they were hopeful that future victims of police abuse would have an equally random chance of receiving justice.
“The number of law enforcement officers who have shot unarmed civilians and gone free over the past year has been extremely discouraging, but the fact that this policeman was arrested so swiftly shows that there can be justice for victims so long as a bystander is nearby, has a camera phone on them, captures the whole interaction, and several dozen other circumstances play out in the precise sequence,” said North Charleston, SC resident Jenine Williams, echoing the sentiments of millions of Americans who told reporters they have faith that, as long as a fair-minded eyewitness happens to be passing by at the exact right time; has the inclination to stop and film; an unobstructed view; enough battery life and memory on their phone; a steady hand; the forethought to start filming an interaction with the police before it escalates into violence; is close enough to get detailed footage, but far enough away to avoid being shot themselves or seen by the officer and potentially having their phone confiscated; and it is daytime, then justice would certainly be served.
“I have a 17-year-old son who I worry about every day when he heads out into our neighborhood. But now I can take heart knowing that if, God forbid, he were ever in a situation like this, there would be a tiny fraction of a chance that every single element would fall into place and my family would receive the fair and just legal outcome we deserve.” The nation added that they were also hopeful the situation would change the behavior of police officers by making them look around to see if anyone was filming them before they moved from excessive to lethal force.
A Texas woman has accused a cop of beating her when she was 38 weeks pregnant. Thanks to a surveillance system in her parents’ home, a video has been published online that appears to prove her allegations. An investigation is under way.
The Hunt County sheriff’s deputy has been identified as one of several officers who stood in the woman’s home in Quinlan on the evening of March 4. Two officers can be seen keeping Deanna Robinson in the corner of her kitchen, next to the counter, restraining her, as her 18-month-old toddler watched.
Next, the deputy can clearly be seen taking at least two quick punches at Robinson, who wouldn’t stop yelling. This was after she shouted, “I’m pregnant.” She was handcuffed during this, she told the attorney’s office on Monday, according to WFAA.
Continue reading “Video shows 9 months pregnant, handcuffed woman punched by Texas police”
Is the NYPD really confused as to why two of their members were executed? You reap what you sow. It’s harvest time and the NYPD better duck.
NEW YORK CITY, NY — Surveillance video recorded the way a man was approached by NYPD, frisked for no reason, and then beaten by multiple officers.
The incident happened on August 18th, 2014 at about 6 p.m. While waiting for a friend, 23-year-old Santiago Hernandez stood in front of a building in the Melrose section of the Bronx. He and another individual were approached by officers who were allegedly investigating a noise complaint.
Video shows that officers immediately ordered Mr. Hernandez to stand up and put his arms out so that he could be “stopped and frisked.” Mr. Hernandez complied. The patdown produced no evidence, and it is unclear why a noise complaint would lead to a contraband search.
After being shaken down by police, Mr. Hernandez was allowed to sit back down on the stairs. ABC-7 News reported what happened next:
When the search came up empty, he says he asked the officers why he had been searched.
And with that, he says, one of the officers grabbed his arm and slapped on handcuffs.
“I’m like, ‘Miss what you doing? You are hurting my arm,’” Hernandez said.
The surveillance video is silent, but a cell phone video captured part of it.
“She just was telling me to put my hands behind my back, but ‘I’m like trying to understand what are you are arresting me for. Can you please tell me?’” Hernandez said.
Moments later, half-a-dozen officers arrived and appeared to pile-on. Hernandez said he was punched, kicked, beaten with nightsticks, and blasted with pepper spray.
“They was taking turns on me. One kicks me, he steps back. Another one comes to punch me and he steps back. And another one comes and grabs my arm and hits me like 10 times with the baton. Another one comes and pepper sprayed me, they were taking turns like a gang,” Hernandez said.
Mr. Hernandez was left with bruises all over his body. On top of being brutalized, he was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.
However, the transparent bullying was not supported by the Bronx district attorney’s office, which later declined to prosecute the case.
NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau was said to be investigating, but no officer involved has been publicly disciplined or criminally charged as of this date.
New Yorkers patiently await the promised reforms to the city’s infamous “stop & frisk” program. So far under Mayor Bill de Blasio, the baseless stops have only slowed in frequency, not ceased or substantively changed in procedure.
FORT BEND COUNTY, TX — An innocent man was ripped from his bathtub in a surprise no-knock raid, then suffered an onslaught of beatings, electric shocks, concussion grenades, and rubber bullets. The man spent 3 years and his entire life savings attempting to vindicate himself from the false charges and malicious prosecution which followed.
Chad Chadwick is the man who fell victim to the horrific series of events, which began on the night of September 27, 2011. Mr. Chadwick was home alone that evening and feeling distraught. A concerned friend eventually phoned the police to check on Mr. Chadwick’s emotional well-being. Mr. Chadwick had consumed some alcohol and had fallen asleep in the bathtub in his apartment.
Mr. Chadwick had not threatened himself or anyone else, and had a spotless criminal record. Nonetheless, police responded to the concerned friend by sending a paramilitary, multi-jurisdictional SWAT team to conduct a no-knock raid on the man’s apartment. According to Mr. Chadwick, police lied in order to obtain the warrant.
“They told a judge I had hostages. They lied to a judge and told him I had hostages in my apartment and they needed to enter,” Mr. Chadwick explained to MyFoxHouston.
NO-KNOCK WELLNESS CHECK
The SWAT team arrived in short order and broke down the apartment door without identifying themselves, then quickly made their way to the bathroom where the resident was bathing. Their first maneuver was to lob a concussion grenade into the bathroom, causing extensive damage to the furnishings and disorienting Mr. Chadwick.
“While I had my hands up naked in the shower they shot me with a 40 [caliber] non-lethal round,” he recalled.
A second concussion grenade detonated, and SWAT officers swarmed in and attacked Mr. Chadwick.
“I turned away, the explosion went off, I opened my eyes the lights are out and here comes a shield with four or five guys behind it. They pinned me against the wall and proceeded to beat the crap out of me,” he said.
FOX 26 News | MyFoxHouston Mr. Chadwick went on to explain the extent of his injuries.The police “claimed [Chadwick] drew down with a shampoo bottle” and proceeded to respond with heightened levels of force. Mr. Chadwick was accosted and shot in the back of the head with a taser. “They grabbed me by my one hand that was out of the shower and grabbed me by my testicles slammed me on my face on the floor and proceeded to beat me more,” Mr. Chadwick told FOX 26. By the end of the ordeal Mr. Chadwick had suffered a broken nose, bruised ribs, multiple lacerations and bruises, a taser barb in the back of his skull, and permanent hearing loss. He was hauled off to the Fort Bend County Jail, where he was left in an isolation cell for 2 days.
TEXAS WITCH HUNT
Rather than admitting a mistake had taken place, police began to file charges against the man in an apparent effort to cover up the incompetence and justify the brutality.
First, Mr. Chadwick was charged with two felony counts of assaulting police officers. But a grand-jury found no basis for the charges and declined to indict him.
When that didn’t work, the prosecution filed new charges; this time for misdemeanor resisting arrest. Those charges were dropped as well. Then a third round of charges were issued. In total, the prosecution — led by Ft. Bend County District Attorney John Healy — filed six criminal charges against Mr. Chadwick and eventually put him on trial for “interfering with police.”
After more than three years fighting the corrupt system, Mr. Chadwick was cleared by a jury. He was found not guilty of interfering with police on the night he was attacked in his bathroom.
“They came in did what they did, figured out that they messed up and now they are doing everything they can to cover it up. They treated a normal American citizen like an animal. It’s not right,” Mr. Chadwick said in an interview with FOX 26.
“They tried to make me a convict. It broke me financially, bankrupted me. I used my life savings, not to mention, I lost my kids,” said Mr. Chadwick.
According to FOX 26, Ft. Bend County District Attorney John Healy declined to comment on camera, but did say he stands by his decision to prosecute Chadwick, despite the multiple no-bills and not guilty verdict. Asked how much the case cost taxpayers, Healy said “I wasn’t keeping a tally.”
The SWAT team raided Mr. Chadwick’s apartment was comprised of officers from Missouri City, Sugar Land, Stafford, and the Ft. Bend County Sheriff’s Department. To date, no officer has faced any disciplinary action or criminal charges.
“These cops are out of control. They are ruining good people’s lives. I am a good man. I have done everything I can to show that, as a father, as a citizen, as a worker,” said Mr. Chadwick to FOX 26.
Mr. Chadwick is now pursuing a civil suit against the police agencies involved.
His ordeal goes to show that even an innocent person minding his own business in his home can have his life destroyed without warning by agents of the police state.
Police in Victoria, Texas, placed an officer on administrative duty pending an investigation after an altercation with a 76-year-old man who didn’t have an inspection sticker on his car.
Victoria resident Pete Vasquez pulled over at the Adams Auto Mart, where he helps with mechanical work, when the officer, 23-year-old Nathanial Robinson, got out of his patrol car and confronted him. The 76-year-old is seen on dashcam video pointing to the dealer license plate on the back of the car.
The Victoria Advocate newspaper reported that Vasquez told Robinson the vehicle was exempt from requiring an inspection sticker because it still had dealer tags. Police chief Jeffrey Craig later confirmed to the paper that the vehicle was, in fact, exempt.
Robinson appears to have tried to take something out of Vasquez’s hand but failed to do so. That’s when Robinson twists Vasquez’s arm behind his back, eventually landing the man on the ground out of view of the dashcam. Moments later, Robinson is seen standing in front of the patrol car holding a stun gun, which he used on Vasquez at least twice, police told the Victoria Advocate.
“He just acted like a pit bull, and that was it. For a while, I thought he was going to pull his gun and shoot me,” Vasquez said, according to the Advocate.
Another man, sales manager Larry Urich, emerged from the auto mart, appearing to shout at the officer, “What in the hell are you doing? This gentleman is 76 years old.”
Urich told the Advocate, “The cop told me to stand back, but I didn’t shut up. I told him he was a godd**m Nazi Stormtrooper.”
“Public trust is extremely important to us,” Craig said, according to the Advocate. “Sometimes that means you have to take a real hard look at some of the actions that occur within the department.”
Craig later apologized to Vasquez, the Huffington Post reported. Additional officers later arrived on the scene and asked Vasquez for his side of the story and whether he was hurt in the scuffle.
“Are you hurting anywhere?” one of the officers asked Vasquez.
“Not yet,” he said. “Probably later on. I’m 76 years old.”
Vasquez was taken to the hospital, but was not cited by police.
District Attorney Stephen Tyler said he has not been contacted by police. However, Tyler told the Advocate that if authorities determine Robinson committed criminal wrongdoing, moral wrongdoing or violated department policy, he could face a variety of charges including official oppression, injury to elderly, aggravated assault or assault.
The Associated Press was not able to reach Robinson for comment, Huffington Post reported Monday.
(H/T: Huffington Post)
Guest Post by Michael Reagan
Remember Kelly Thomas?
Didn’t think so, but it’s understandable.
Thomas was an unarmed mentally ill homeless man from Southern California who was tasered, clubbed and beaten to death in Fullerton by three cops in July of 2011.
Thomas’ face was pounded to a pulp and, after losing the ability to breathe normally, he died later in a hospital of brain damage.
Video of the awful incident — including Thomas’ screams and his cries of “Dad! Dad!” — was recorded on security cameras and there was a minor outcry at the time over police brutality.
Unlike the case of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., county prosecutors brought the Fullerton cops to trial on serious charges.
But last January a jury acquitted two of them and charges against the third policeman were dropped.
When the “peace” officers who killed Thomas got off the hook, what happened? Almost nothing.
There was no 24/7 media circus. No “Dad! Dad!” T-shirts were printed up. The Rev. Al Sharpton didn’t come to town.
And there were no big marches like the one in Berkeley the other night to protest the death of corner cigarette salesman Eric Garner of Staten Island, N.Y.
Why was no big fuss made over Thomas’ unjustifiable death?
It was on videotape. It was far more violent than Eric Garner’s death. It clearly was not an accident or caused in part by his weight or bad physical health.
Thomas was killed by three men who were either bad cops or poorly trained, or both. But he was the wrong color — white.
That’s why there were no sad commentaries from President Obama and no public protests from professional football or basketball players when the three cops who killed Thomas got off.
We have a serious law enforcement problem in America, but it’s not about race. It’s about bad cops and how we’ve built our policing system.
No one knows how many people cops kill unjustifiably each year. The statistics are fuzzy because of problems with under-reportng, but the number is said to be at least 400.
The media — and the president — pick and choose which victims of police stupidity or brutality to emphasize.
It’s all about politics — racial politics. And it’s usually designed to fit the myth that cops hate or fear black males, or devalue their lives compared to whites, and are therefore more likely to shoot them dead.
But it’s become clear to me that it’s not racism that’s the real problem. It’s our police.
Most cops, by far, are good. But we also have too many bad or dumb cops.
We’ve lowered standards and hired people who are under-qualified or not suited psychologically to be cops in the first place.
Then we train them poorly, equip them with all kinds of deadly weapons, give them too much power over our lives and excuse them when they do bad or dumb things.
Making everything worse are our politicians.
Both parties pass all kinds of stupid or harmful laws that cops are then expected to enforce — laws like the one in New York City against selling loose cigarettes that resulted in Garner’s death.
New York’s lawmakers have jacked up the tax on cigarettes so high that they’ve created a black market and turned harmless entrepreneurial people like Garner into criminals.
They are the ones who should be put on trial. For criminal greed and stupidity.
Every talk show host in the country, including me, predicted years ago that putting exorbitant taxes on cigarettes would create a thriving black market in New York. The high price of a carton of cigarettes cost Garner his life.
The team of cops who killed Eric Garner shouldn’t have been wasting their time harassing him for his minor victimless crime.
He didn’t deserve to die. But his death — like Kelly Thomas’ death — had nothing to do with his race. It had everything to do with a broken system of policing that badly needs to be fixed.
Out of control police brutality (including outright murder), and the militarization of cops across America, while significant issues in their own right, take on an even more pressing degree of concern when viewed as a reflection of society as a whole. For years now, I have been trying to point out the connection between banker bailouts, corruption in Washington D.C., imperialistic foreign policy and police aggression. They are all different sides of the same coin. All of these things are merely symptoms of the core cancer, which is a sociopathic elite running the nation and not applying the rule of law to those who are in power; wherever that power happens to reside.
This article is a perfect followup to my piece from earlier in the week, To Protect and Perve – California Cops Share Nude Photos Stolen from Citizens’ Cellphones, in which I wrote:
The worst thing about the government’s reckless response to the financial crisis of 2008, even worse than the trillions in taxpayer bailouts and backstops granted to the financial criminals that created the disaster, is the primary lesson that it sent to American society as a whole. Some people like to call it “moral hazard,” but in more pedestrian terms it really just boils down to: The Bad Guys Got Away with It.
As long as the worst amongst us continue to get away with their criminality, the more of it we will see. In fact, the more brutal and cartoonish it will get.
A very sad and disturbing example of this happened in 2012, when a terrified, 49-year old, mentally illl homeless man, Milton Hall, was gunned down to death in broad daylight by 8 cops in Saginaw, Michigan.
He represents everything our superficial, greed obsessed, immoral culture despises. He was a homeless, mentally ill black man.
This is how cops disposed of him:
This happened in 2012, but the reason it is being highlighted today is the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan recently released a statement highlighting the fact that the “Justice” Department has failed to prosecute the officers involved. The DOJ claims that: “this tragic event does not present sufficient evidence of willful misconduct to lead to a federal criminal prosecution.”
How can anyone who sees this video agree with that statement. The bad guys won again. Justice no longer resides in America. No wonder Ferguson exploded.
Read the ACLU of Michigan’s full statement here.
In Liberty,
Michael Krieger