Archive for the ‘Police state USSA’ Category

Our children live in a world where they pass through a military-style checkpoint every morning and afternoon for school. Every time their parents take them to Tucson shopping. Every time they go to a friends house in Amado, or to Karate in Sahuarita. Men carry guns, dogs bark, lights flash.

dozens-shutdown-us-border-checkpoint

Amado, AZ — In one of the most uplifting acts of civil disobedience this year, the residents of Arivaca, Arizona showed an astonishing level of dedication to freedom. Approximately 100 residents turned out for the public hearing in which citizens demanded the unconstitutional and heavily militarized checkpoint, more than 25 miles inland on Arivaca road be shut down.

According to BorderCommunityAction.org:

Community members called on US Congressman Grijalva to deliver on his promise to hold a federal hearing on the issue before Department of Homeland Security officials.Arivaca residents and supporters gathered at 10am and peacefully proceeded to the checkpoint to hold the hearing. Upon entering the checkpoint, they were met with a blockade of armed Border Patrol agents who used physical force, attempting to move the residents back. Despite this intimidation, protesters held their ground and sat-in while community members held a public hearing calling for the removal of the checkpoint.

From elderly men and women to the children, the attendees remained unfazed in the face of this tyranny. Many of the residents voiced their concern over the entirely unnecessary and despotic checkpoint.

Local business owner Maggie Milinovich said, “our reverse-gated community is a barrier to tourists…this checkpoint is choking our community.”

Carlotta Wray spoke about her experiences being racially profiled by Border Patrol, saying, “because of our brown skin, me and most of my family have to reach into our pockets for ID at the checkpoint to prove that we’re legal citizens in our own town, I’m sick of it.”

Patty Miller said of the ongoing military-style presence of Border Patrol in the Arivaca community, “it’s like a war zone all the time.”

The event was organized by the Community Organization to End Border Patrol Checkpoints. Their mission is described on their Facebook Page.

Arivaca, AZ is a small rural community located in the militarized zone of the border region between the United States and Mexico. With a population of about 700, Arivaca is also a vibrant loving community that cares for each other. As with many border communities, residential life in Arivaca has been deeply impacted by mass migration and the subsequent arrival of thousands of border patrol agents and expansive enforcement infrastructure to the area. Locals routinely encounter federal agents on their property, in town, on the road, or in the many helicopters flying overhead. All residents and visitors to the area must pass through an immigration checkpoint to confirm their citizenship status.And yet while living under this sizable presence of immigration enforcement for years, Arivacans routinely provide critical care and humanitarian aid to migrants in distress. This beautiful community of diverse people care about human dignity and helping others. Arivaca will not turn a blind eye to the death and suffering that occurs in our backyard by the hands of Homeland Security and the US government.

The militarization and its subsequent effect on the lives of the children in the town is well documented by the group.
Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/dozens-turn-epic-border-checkpoint-refusal-ever/#ubYT1fkGPDuHSDWd.99

Officers could be hesitant to draw their guns because doing so would result in more paperwork under the terms of the agreement, Cleveland Police Patrolman’s Association president Steve Loomis said Wednesday. The agreement requires an officer to complete a report each time he or she points a gun at a suspect.

“It’s going to get somebody killed,” Loomis said. “There’s going to be a time when someone isn’t going to want to do that paperwork, so he’s going to keep that gun in its holster.”

CLEVELAND, Ohio — The head of the Cleveland police department’s patrol union said aspects of the agreement that mandates sweeping reforms to the city’s police department could put officers in danger.

Officers could be hesitant to draw their guns because doing so would result in more paperwork under the terms of the agreement, Cleveland Police Patrolman’s Association president Steve Loomis said Wednesday. The agreement requires an officer to complete a report each time he or she points a gun at a suspect.

“It’s going to get somebody killed,” Loomis said. “There’s going to be a time when someone isn’t going to want to do that paperwork, so he’s going to keep that gun in its holster.”

Cleveland and the U.S. Department of Justice unveiled the agreement, known as a consent decree, Tuesday. It is meant to transform a police department that too often used excessive force and failed to conduct thorough internal investigations, according to an investigation by the Justice Department. The agreement will become legally binding once approved by a federal judge.

Loomis said he believes the 105 pages of reforms are a response to high-profile incidents that have happened nationwide, rather than to incidents that have happened in Cleveland, including the 2012 police chase that saw 13 officers fire at two unarmed people 137 times, the police shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice and the death of a mentally ill woman after officers forced her to the ground.

“This is a political agenda,” he said. “This has nothing to do with the actions of the men and women of the Cleveland police department.”

Read the rest @ http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2015/05/union_head_says_aspects_of_cle.html#incart_m-rpt-1

In Fort Worth, the family of a 72-year-old man killed by police who responded to the wrong address after a burglary call has filed a wrongful death suit.

The suit, filed Tuesday, alleges that an officer admitted that he never identified himself as an officer before shooting Jerry Waller, that police moved Waller’s body after the shooting, and that investigators questioned the officers involved in a way to “provide a defense to the police shooting of an unarmed innocent man.”

The lawsuit alleges that officer Richard Hoeppner trespassed on the Wallers’ property, used excessive force against Waller, and destroyed or altered evidence to make it appear as if Waller was armed and posed a threat.

Brender alleges that Waller, a father and grandfather, had been standing in his own garage, unarmed and with both hands in the air, when he was shot and killed by Hoeppner.

In addition to Hoeppner, the suit also names as defendants Hoeppner’s then-partner on the call, Benjamin Hanlon, former Police Chief Jeff Halstead, investigators Dana Baggott and Merle Davon Green, and officers B.S. Hardin and A. Chambers.

Hanlon was later fired from the department for falsifying a report on an unrelated case.

City officials did not immediately return a message seeking comment on the lawsuit. A police spokesman said the department would not be commenting. Halstead also declined to comment.

Police officials have previously said Hoeppner shot Waller after the man pointed a gun at the officer.

A Tarrant County grand jury declined to indict Hoeppner in January 2014.

Halstead, who has since retired, told the Star-Telegram at that time that the grand jury made the right decision.

“I think it was proven through the autopsy and evidence that a gun was pointed directly at officer Hoeppner and he was forced to make his decision ” Halstead said.

But Brender said Tuesday that police relied largely on “junk science” and that the autopsy and crime scene photographs indicate that Waller was unarmed and would have had his hands up at the time he was shot. He released a video Tuesday of a forensic reenactment of the shooting that he said is supported by evidence in the case.

I’m not sure an autopsy can really prove that the decedent was pointing a gun when he was shot. In any case, even assuming what the police say is true, Waller was only defending his home. There’s zero reason to think that a 72-year-old man with no criminal record would knowingly point his gun at police officers who had mistakenly entered the wrong home. Incidentally, a year after Hoeppner shot Waller, he was nominated for an award for exemplary service.

Our next story is also about a lawsuit, also in Texas, also involving an elderly man.

A lawsuit filed against the Georgetown police department alleges unnecessary force against an 81-year-old man.

The suit comes after 81-year-old Herman Crisp says he was the target of unnecessary police force and that officers left him with a broken hip. Then, the lawsuit states, police got no care for him and family members discovered him the next day.

The police were looking for Crisp’s nephew. I suspect that if Crisp had a gun, or was holding something that resembled one, he’d have met the same fate as Waller.

The final story comes from Florida.

On May 11, Justin Way was drinking and threatening to kill himself. His father, George Way, said his son was a recovering alcoholic and had been alcohol-free for five weeks.

“He just lost his job, and he had a setback,” he said.

Way’s live-in girlfriend, Kaitlyn Christine Lyons, said she’d caught Justin drinking a bottle of vodka, which she took away from him to pour out. She said he was drunk, lying in their bed with a large knife, saying he would hurt himself with it. She called a non-emergency number in an attempt to get her boyfriend to a local St. Augustine, Florida, hospital for help—and told them she did not feel threatened.

“My brother has been Baker Acted three times because he was threatening to hurt himself so I figured that would happen with Justin,” said Lyons. Florida’s Baker Act allows the involuntary institutionalization of an individual, and it can be initiated by law-enforcement officials.

“The only person Justin threatened was himself and I honestly don’t think he wanted to die.”

Minutes later, two St. Johns County Sheriff’s deputies, 26-year-old Jonas Carballosa and 32-year-old Kyle Braig, arrived at the home, armed with assault rifles, and told Kaitlyn to wait outside.

“I thought they were going into war,” she remembered thinking when she first saw the large guns. Within moments, Justin was shot dead.

This is normally where’d I’d strongly caution against ever calling the police if you believe a loved one is unstable or a threat to himself. Too many police departments get too little training in how to resolve these situations peacefully. But that isn’t even what happened here. His girlfriend called a help line. I can’t think of a more inappropriate first response to someone in the midst of a breakdown than to send the SWAT team. But it’s not uncommon. Nor is the result that we saw here.

Source http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/05/28/this-week-in-excessive-force/

This is a valid point- 

“I can guarantee if you look up here and look down there, it might be five people who ain’t been fucked over by the police,” says Baltimore resident Shaun Young, waving a hand at a crowd of maybe a hundred people gathered at Penn and North, site of the protests. “It’s small shit — they get taken advantage of.”

When Baltimore exploded in protests a few weeks ago following the unexplained paddy-wagon death of a young African-American man named Freddie Gray, America responded the way it usually does in a race crisis: It changed the subject.

Instead of using the incident to talk about a campaign of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of illegal searches and arrests across decades of discriminatory policing policies, the debate revolved around whether or not the teenagers who set fire to two West Baltimore CVS stores after Gray’s death were “thugs,” or merely wrongheaded criminals.

From Eric Garner to Michael Brown to Akai Gurley to Tamir Rice to Walter Scott and now Freddie Gray, there have now been so many police killings of African-American men and boys in the past calendar year or so that it’s been easy for both the media and the political mainstream to sell us on the idea that the killings are the whole story.

Fix that little in-custody death problem, we’re told, perhaps with the aid of “better training” or body cameras (which Baltimore has already promised to install by the end of the year), and we can comfortably go back to ignoring poverty, race, abuse, all that depressing inner-city stuff. But body cameras won’t fix it. You can’t put body cameras on a system.

As a visit to post-uprising Baltimore confirms, high-profile police murders are only part of the problem. An equally large issue is the obscene quantity of smaller daily outrages and abuses that regularly go unpunished by a complex network of local criminal-justice bureaucracies, many of which are designed to cover up bad police work and keep all our worst behaviors hidden, even from ourselves.

Go to any predominantly minority neighborhood in any major American city and you’ll hear the same stories: decades of being sworn at, thrown against walls, kicked, searched without cause, stripped naked on busy city streets, threatened with visits from child protective services, chased by dogs, and arrested and jailed not merely on false pretenses, but for reasons that often don’t even rise to the level of being stupid.

“I can guarantee if you look up here and look down there, it might be five people who ain’t been fucked over by the police,” says Baltimore resident Shaun Young, waving a hand at a crowd of maybe a hundred people gathered at Penn and North, site of the protests. “It’s small shit — they get taken advantage of.”

Even though Rolling Stone is a leftist rag that’s not even good for lining bird cages,hell,it ain’t even good enough for starting fires. I don’t think kids even read it any more-never seen any of our six kids,or their boyfriends/husbands or any of their friends reading a copy.

Matt Taibbi does come up with a good one once in a while, like this…

From the article on the LeBron James: Global Superdouche broadcast-

See if those reality-show zoom-ins don’t start to creep into interviews with candidates-

This is the beginning of our big Lost in Space journey together, where news and reality-show programming fuse completely and we all end up complete morons, voting strippers and X-games athletes into the White House. I’m psyched. Are you?

Sacramento, CA — Sacramento cops are rolling out a new program this Memorial day to allegedly combat drunk drivers. While the reasoning for this new program may sound just, its implementation is anything but.

If you are out in a bar this weekend, be prepared to have multiple officers come in and ask the patrons in the bar to blow into a breathalyzer.

DUI roadblocks are apparently not invasive enough, so the Sacramento PD instituted a program to attack the source, the places where alcohol is consumed.

Obviously the site of several armed officers walking into a bar with breathalyzers in hand is a buzz kill, to say the least.

One of the bar patrons who’s been exposed to the program explains, “Admittedly we were a bit put off when we were gonna walk in and saw a bunch of cops with breathalyzers.”

A “bit put off” is an understatement, however

While these officers are promising not to “test and arrest,” the very idea of police entering private property and having people submit to breathalyzer tests is appalling. The inside of your body is no business of the state and when this clear violation of your personal space is accepted, freedom loses.

This program also leaves the door wide open for entrapment and further rights violating searches by creating unnecessary confrontations.

Hopefully, this program does not take wings and spread to other municipalities as it is a leap forward for the nanny surveillance state, and giant step back for liberty.
Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/dui-checkpoints-tip-iceberg-cops-bars-breathalyzers/#OVamTCcgwfsDpPcy.99

Anyone still doubt that we are living in a police state?

A series of reports over the last few weeks have shed more light on the increasingly predatory enforcement of misdemeanors across the country, and how this trend disproportionately hurts the poor. The first report comes from an area familiar to readers of The Watch — St. Louis County, Missouri. It was published by the Police Executive Research Forum. Among the key findings:

  • Policing is extremely fragmented: St. Louis County contains a patchwork of police departments, many of which have jurisdiction over very small areas. About one-third of the municipalities in the County that have a police department occupy less than one square mile. This has led to confusion and distrust among residents, who often feel targeted and harassed by police officers and the municipal court system.
  • Many police departments have inappropriate goals: In many municipalities, policing priorities are driven not by the public safety needs of the community, but rather by the goal of generating large portions of the operating revenue for the local government. This is a grossly inappropriate mission for the police, often carried out at the direction of local elected officials.
  • The “muni shuffle” is unprofessional: Police standards, training, pay, and professionalism vary dramatically throughout the region. Of particular concern is the so-called “muni shuffle,” in which police officers who are fired or allowed to resign because of disciplinary or performance issues in one department are quickly hired by another department, because it can be less expensive to hire an experienced (albeit compromised) officer than to recruit and train a new officer.

These criticisms have now been reiterated in several forums, by several different organizations. Perhaps most damning, all of this attention on petty offenses has distracted the area’s police departments from fighting crime. Despite the saturation of police departments, the report found elevated crime rates in the area, and that violent and property crime cost about $1,187 per resident. In other words, the people who live in St. Louis County aren’t being protected by the police, the police are preying on them. And they’re doing at the instruction of these local governments.

Up next, a well-reported three-part series on policing and the poor by the CBS affiliated in Miami. The report focuses on a city “crime suppression team” that’s supposed to improve the quality of life in poor areas. This excerpt is from part three.

During its five-month investigation into the Miami-Dade Police Department’s Crime Suppression Team, CBS4 News reviewed every arrest the officers from the South District Station made in 2014.

The results: CBS4 News found a unit whose actions resulted in the arrests of hundreds of individuals – mostly young black males – for petty offenses. Even more troubling, the arrests failed to result in a reduction in crime in the South District. In fact, crime went up in most of the major categories, according to records obtained by CBS4 News.

CBS4 News also found that most of the cases made by the Crime Suppression Team fell apart once they made it to court. Overall, the Crime Suppression Team had a conviction rate of just eleven percent.

And of the 245 individuals arrested for marijuana – only two ended up being convicted. In addition to those two convictions, 80 individuals – or one third of those arrested – accepted what is known as a “withhold of adjudication.”

“Withhold of adjudication is something that exists only in Florida and it’s kind of a legal fiction,” said Miami-Dade County Public Defender Carlos Martinez. “It’s a conviction, a judge has made a finding of guilt, but we are going to say you are not really a convicted person, but in fact you are.  Immigration does not look at the difference between a withhold or no withhold, they look at it as a conviction. And most employers that I’ve talked to about these issues, and they see withhold, to them it looks like a conviction. They don’t see the difference.”

Most of the people appearing in court don’t realize this because they are not represented by an attorney, Martinez said. “Seventy percent of the people in Dade County go to court without an attorney.”

In Florida, if prosecutors are not requesting jail time for a crime, the person charged doesn’t have the right to have a public defender appointed to represent them.

So once again we have police in predominantly poor, predominantly black communities making “broken windows” and “quality of life” arrests for petty offenses. This is saddling large percentages of these communities with burdensome fines and debilitating arrest records, it’s poisoning the relationship between the police agencies and the communities they’re supposed to be serving and it’s all doing little to nothing to make these communities any safer. This particular anecdote is just chilling:

Read the rest @ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/05/14/the-ongoing-criminalization-of-poverty/

Fontana Police Chief Rodney Jones watched Monday as the Rook – the Inland Valley SWAT team’s newest tactical weapon – used a battering ram to punch a hole in the wall of a building during a demonstration.

Other attachments to the tractor-like, bulletproof vehicle that runs on tank tracks could be used to rescue a police officer or lift debris from a building that collapsed in an earthquake.

Thousands of miles away Monday, President Barack Obama announced that the Pentagon would no longer be allowed to transfer some types of military equipment to police departments, in an effort to improve trust between law enforcement and communities.

“We’ve seen how militarized gear can sometimes give people a feeling like there’s an occupying force,” Obama said in an appearance in Camden, N.J., where he praised that city’s community policing. The changes follow criticism over how police departments deployed military-style gear to confront protesters in Ferguson, Mo., and other cities.

Jones said Obama was making a mistake.

“What he did was restrict 15,000 law enforcement agencies the ability to get some equipment that they don’t have the funds to buy,” Jones said.

Smaller departments don’t have officers they can spare to share with drug task forces, Jones said. The departments that make up the task forces share in asset-forfeiture funds – cash seized from drug dealers – that can be used to buy equipment.

****“We’ve heard significantly about the ‘militarizing’ of police departments. I’ve been doing this for 34 years. When we started this job we did not see the type of weapons that we see now. Our officers are confronted with people with hand grenades, with rocket launchers and high-powered weapons. If we’re sending these officers into harm’s way, we are not giving them the proper tools to protect themselves. To the people who say there’s a concept of the militarization of police departments, police departments did not create it (trouble); we’re responding to it,” Jones said.*****

Read the rest of this horsepucky @ http://www.pe.com/articles/police-767572-equipment-officers.html

Grapevine, Texas – Monday, a Texas grand jury chose not to indict a Grapevine Police Officer, Robert Clark, for the shooting death of an unarmed man. Ruben Garcia Villalpando, was killed by Clark as he had his hands on his head but was slowly moving towards the officer, contrary to the officer’s commands.

The officer’s dash cam video shows an initial police chase, as Villalpando attempts to evade Clark at high speeds, with Clark eventually holding him at gunpoint and orders him out of the vehicle after the chase concludes.

The officer then commanded Villalpando to put his hands on his head and walk backwards toward the front of the police cruiser. While Villalpando complies with the order to put his hands on his head, the obviously intoxicated suspect doesn’t comply with the demands to walk backwards.

Instead of walking backwards, the suspect slowly shuffles closer to the Clark, as the officer continually orders Villalpando to stop walking towards him.

As Villalpando stepped out of the camera’s view, Clark fired two rounds into him, subsequently killing Villalpando.

Toeing the standard blue line in cases such as this, Clark claimed that he feared for his life during the encounter and thus shot and killed Villalpando.

What is extremely troubling about this situation, aside from the fact that the grand jury didn’t see fit to indict and allow a jury to decide guilt or innocence, is that Villalpando, while not fully compliant, was not in any way violent or aggressive towards the officer.

An autopsy revealed that Villalpando had a .14 blood-alcohol level at the time of his death. It seems more plausible that his non-compliance was less about endangering an officer and had more to do with his inebriated state.
Propaganda video…

Palm Beach County, FL — Jeremy Hutton is a 17-year-old boy with Down Syndrome, who nearly lost his life after an officer shot him three times as he fled.

The incident happen in October of 2010, and the subsequent internal “investigation” cleared Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Deputy, Jason Franqui, the officer who shot Hutton.

Hutton was a somewhat troubled teen and had taken his mother’s minivan for a joy ride.

Deputy Franqui was the officer who responded to the mother’s call for help. When Franqui caught up to Hutton, he stopped at a red light. Franqui then pulled in front of the van in an attempt to stop Hutton.

According to the report and the results of the investigation, Franqui feared for his life because he said Hutton drove directly at him, so he was forced to shoot.

“I watched the driver, he turned the wheel and started coming right at me,” Deputy Franqui told investigators. “I was in fear he was going to hit me.”

Dashcam video of the incident did not refute the deputy’s claims as it only showed a portion of the perspective. The shooting was eventually ruled justified.

The incident was also caught on traffic camera video and despite the “investigation” mentioning the existence of the video, its detail was not mentioned

The traffic cam video refuted the entire deputy’s description. It showed that Hutton made an overt attempt to steer away from deputy Franqui. After the van passed Franqui, is when he opened fire. Hutton was struck in the head, shoulder and arm. Thankfully he lived.

“I don’t think anybody knew or anticipated that they were going to get caught by a traffic camera,” said Stuart Kaplan, the Hutton’s civil attorney.

“This case is one of the most egregious, one of the most disturbing cases that I have pending in my office,” explained Kaplan.

“The traffic camera clearly shows that Jeremy Hutton apparently was driving away from the deputy but actually turned his vehicle as far to the left as possible to completely try and avoid hitting this deputy so it’s completely inconsistent to what was told by the deputy, it’s appalling,” said Kaplan.

“The deputy was not in any danger,” said Kaplan.

What this case illustrates is that not only did an officer lie about what happened and go unpunished, but the officers involved in the investigation seemingly covered up the lies.
Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/video-refutes-cops-claim-fearing-life-shot-unarmed-boy-syndrome/#OKGY6vHh07UCGxGC.99

Via NC Renegade

The Kentucky 10 - The Nauglers

If the government does not like the way that you are raising your kids, they will come in and grab them at any time without giving any warning whatsoever.  Of course this is completely and totally unlawful, but it has been happening all over America.  The most recent example of this that has made national headlines is particularly egregious.  Joe and Nicole Naugler of Breckinridge County, Kentucky just had their 10 children brutally ripped away from them just because the government does not approve of how they are living their lives and how they are educating their young ones.  Let’s be very clear about this – Joe and Nicole had done nothing to violate the law whatsoever.  All of their kids were happy, healthy and very intelligent.  But because the control freaks running things in Kentucky got wind of their “off the grid lifestyle”, they have now had all of their children unlawfully abducted from them.

Read the rest @ http://ncrenegade.com/editorial/police-abduct-10-children-from-a-family-in-kentucky-because-of-their-off-the-grid-lifestyle/