Posts Tagged ‘police state’

  • There is evidence of widespread knowledge of and participation by several federal agencies in the controversial Fast and Furious gunwalking case that let traffickers put thousands of weapons into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.
  • Agencies participating in Fast and Furious included the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement branch (ICE), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Phoenix Police Department.
  • A January 2011 “Key Messages: Tasking Points” memo (p. 14) generated by the Public Affairs Division at ATF headquarters in Washington D.C. stated:

“The Fast and Furious investigation is just one of a number of firearms trafficking cases perfected by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF) Strike Force, a multi-agency team of investigators from ATF, DEA, ICE, IRS, and the Phoenix Police Department.”

http://sharylattkisson.com/belatedly-released-and-revealing-fast-furious-docs/

Police have stepped up security at two Brooklyn stationhouses after a report of a threat that they are being targeted by a notorious Baltimore gang, police sources said.

Police have stepped up security at two Brooklyn stationhouses after a report they are being targeted by a notorious Baltimore gang, police sources and the Sergeants Benevolent Association said Tuesday night.

A police source said that Emergency Service Unit cops were sent to the 79th and 81st precinct stationhouses in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville after an informant reported the threat, but it had not yet been validated.

An NYPD spokesman would not confirm the threat or if security was heightened at either station.

But a Daily News reporter witnessed two ESU trucks parked in front of the 79th precinct and four SWAT members standing in the building’s lobby with rifles in hand.

At the 81st precinct, two SWAT members guarded the lobby along with three officers, with a couple more SWAT officers around the corner.

“My wife, she’s actually at home crying right now. It’s tough,” said one of the SWAT members.

http://newsnyork.com/police-step-up-security-at-two-brooklyn-stationhouses-after-reports-of-being-targeted-by-baltimore-gang/

Here’s an idea for police everywhere-stop acting like stormtroopers,stop treating citizens as the enemy,stop seizing peoples legally owned property in the failed war on drugs,stop seizing legally earned cash and property from citizens during traffic stops,stop having drug sniffing dogs falsely “alert”on cars so you can search them,stop violently taking citizens to the ground,tazing and pepper spraying them for not “obeying” your “commands”,remember-shiny badges do NOT grant special rights!

BERKELEY, Mo. (AP) — Violent protests broke out in suburban St. Louis after another black 18-year-old was fatally shot by a white police officer.

St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said the officer was questioning the 18-year-old and another man about a theft late Tuesday at a convenience store in Berkeley when the young man pulled a 9mm handgun on him. The officer stumbled backward but fired three shots, one of which struck the victim, Belmar said

Berkeley is just a few miles from Ferguson, Missouri, where a white police officer fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, on Aug. 9. Brown’s death sparked weeks of sometimes violent demonstrations and a grand jury’s decision to not charge Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting has spurred a nationwide movement to protest police brutality.

Belmar declined to name the 18-year-old killed in Berkeley, but a woman at the scene told reporters she was his mother and identified him as Antonio Martin. Belmar said he was 18 years old and black.

The 34-year-old white police officer, a six-year veteran of the Berkeley Police Department, is on administrative leave pending an investigation, Belmar said.

“He will carry the weight of this for the rest of his life, certainly for the rest of his career,” Belmar said. “So there are no winners here.”

Police released surveillance video from the parking lot outside the store. The nearly two-minute clip shows two young men leaving the store at about the time a police car rolls up. The officer gets out and speaks with them. About a minute-and-a-half later, the video appears to show one of the men raising his arm, though what he is holding is difficult to see because they were several feet from the camera. Belmar said it was a 9mm handgun.

The other man ran away, and police are searching for him.

It was the third fatal shooting of a black suspect by a white police officer in the St. Louis area since Brown was killed. Kajaime Powell, 25, was killed Aug. 9 after approaching St. Louis officers with a knife. Vonderrit Myers Jr., 18, was fatally shot Oct. 8 after allegedly shooting at a St. Louis officer.

Each shooting has been met by protests, and a crowd quickly gathered late Tuesday and early Wednesday in Berkeley. The demonstration involving up to 300 people turned violent.

More than 50 police officers, some in riot gear, responded. Video showed some wrestling with protesters. Belmar said officers used pepper spray but not tear gas. Four people were arrested on charges of assaulting officers.

Belmar said three explosive devices, possibly fireworks, were tossed near gas pumps. Some protesters threw rocks and bricks. One officer was hit by a brick and treated for facial cuts. Another was treated for a leg injury sustained as he tried to get away from one of the explosives.

The protest spilled to a neighboring convenience store where a man in a hoodie set a fire inside the store. The fire was quickly put out, but the glass door was shattered.

Orlando Brown, 36, of nearby St. Charles was among the protesters.

“I understand police officers have a job and have an obligation to go home to their families at the end of the night,” he said. “But do you have to treat every situation with lethal force? … It’s not a racial issue, or black or white. It’s wrong or right.”

Brown said he was pepper-sprayed during the protest and that his friend was arrested for failing to disperse.

Toni Martin, Antonio Martin’s mother, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that her son was with his girlfriend at the time of the shooting. The video did not appear to show a female with the two young men.

Belmar said the 18-year-old had a considerable criminal record in the less than two years since he turned 17, with three assault charges, armed robbery, armed criminal action and unlawful use of a weapon.

The chief said some protesters questioned why the officer couldn’t use pepper spray or a stun gun.

“Frankly, that’s unreasonable,” Belmar said. “When we had somebody pointing a gun at a police officer, there’s not a lot of time.”

Berkeley has body cameras and dashboard cameras. The officer wasn’t wearing his body camera, Belmar said. The dashboard camera activates when the red lights are on, and they were not on at the convenience store.

Belmar said the body of the young man remained on the scene for about two hours. After Brown died in August, the fact that his body remained on the street for more than four hours drew widespread criticism. Belmar said two hours is fairly typical as police gather evidence, and he said interference from protesters may have prolonged the situation in Berkeley.

http://news.yahoo.com/police-officer-missouri-shot-killed-man-pulled-gun-084531706.html

“Pre-Crime” is a concept that was focus of the movie Minority Report. Now, a new software allowing for predictive policing may be coming to a police department near you. “Beware”, made by telecommunications company Intrado, searches billions of records to find and predict potential crimes.

What is most alarming is that this software will not only scour record’s databases for info on suspects but will pull info from social network pages and look for words that could be deemed as “offensive”. With that information a suspect is assessed a threat level.

http://benswann.com/pre-crime-software-can-tell-police-who-will-commit-a-crime-based-in-part-on-social-media-posts/

(Reuters) – Mayor Bill de Blasio’s attempts to soothe a city dismayed by the slaying of two officers were further rebuffed on Tuesday as protesters defied his call to suspend what have become regular demonstrations over excessive police force.

De Blasio led a moment of silence at City Hall in the afternoon three days after the attack on the officers before asking his staff to hug those nearby “as a symbol of our belief that we will move forward together.”

Hours later, about 200 protesters began marching through the drizzle and traffic in the center of Manhattan, enraged by the mayor’s demand that they suspend their rallies until after the funerals of police officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.

The shooting of the officers in their patrol car shocked a city that has seen largely peaceful demonstrations after decisions by grand juries in New York and Missouri not to indict white police officers in the killings of unarmed black men.

The killings have also intensified friction between City Hall, the police department and reformers who voted for de Blasio, a liberal Democrat, last year.

Protests against the use of excessive force by police have been held across the United States, reigniting a bitter debate about how American police forces treat non-white citizens that has drawn in President Barack Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder.

Since Saturday, de Blasio’s attempts at unity in New York have been rebuffed by both sides, police unions and protesters.

After saying de Blasio, who has reservedly sympathized with the protesters, had “blood on his hands” for the officers’ death, police unions disputed on Tuesday the claims by City Hall that they had agreed to a request to suspend their rhetoric.

“I never had a conversation about silence,” Ed Mullins, the president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, said in a telephone interview.

Answer Coalition, organizers of the march on 5th Avenue in midtown Manhattan, called the mayor’s demand to suspend protests an attempt to “chill” their speech.

http://news.yahoo.com/ny-protesters-reject-plea-hiatus-despite-police-slayings-000327155.html

Another data point supporting the argument that too many police agencies just aren’t adequately equipped to deal with the mentally ill.

It started when a friend concerned for [Chad] Chadwick’s emotional well-being called Missouri City police to Chad’s Sienna apartment where he’d been distraught, drinking and unknown to anyone, had gone to sleep in the bathtub.

A SWAT team was summoned.

“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,” said Chadwick.

Chadwick did own a single shotgun, but had threatened no one, not even himself. Chadwick’s firearm possession apparently prompted SWAT to kick in his door, launch a stun grenade into the bathroom and storm in, according to Chadwick, without announcing their identity.

“While I had my hands up naked in the shower they shot me with a 40 millimeter non-lethal round,” said Chadwick.

A second stun grenade soon followed.

“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,” said Chadwick.

That’s when officers shot the unarmed Chadwick in the back of the head with a Taser at point blank range.

“They claimed I drew down with a shampoo bottle and a body wash bottle,” said Chadwick . . .

“They grabbed me by my the 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.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/12/18/your-police-raid-outrage-of-the-day/

There are no frills to be found at www.killedbypolice.net. The site is just a simple spreadsheet. The information it contains, though, is invaluable. It is a list of every single person documented to have been killed by police in the United States in 2013 and 2014. There are links to a media report for every single death, as well as their names, ages, and when known, sex and race.

The site is so valuable because, as we’ve noted previously, there is no reliable national database for keeping track of the number of people killed by police each year. The FBI tracks homicides by law enforcement officers, but participation is voluntary, and many agencies don’t participate. As I noted last week, Eric Garner’s death at the hands of a New York Police Department won’t show up in the FBI’s statistics for 2014 because the state of New York does not participate in the program.

The FBI’s statistics for 2013 say that law enforcement officers killed 461 people that year. Killedbypolice.net apparently got its start last year. Using their system of monitoring by news report, they have calculated that police actually killed 748 people between May and December. That’s 287 more than the FBI reports for the whole year.

And for 2014, which still has a couple of weeks left, the site has reported 1,029 people have been killed by police. That’s about a 30 percent increase over last year, though with four-month gap at the start of 2013 (measuring 25 percent of the year), it’s possible the numbers would be much closer if we had January through April. Even with the FBI’s broken numbers, we know that 2013 marked a two-decade high in killings by police.

Neither the site nor its Facebook page indicates who is responsible for compiling this information, and they’re protecting their identity by hosting the site through GoDaddy. We can’t talk to whoever is responsible for this database about how or why they started it and how much effort it is to keep track of this information. Here is a page for people to submit information to help improve the quality of the database.

http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/09/more-than-1000-people-have-been-killed-b

Brent Skorup and Andrea Castillo at the free-market think tank the Mercatus Center have put together a couple of graphs to illustrate the rise of the 1033 program, the law that instructs the Pentagon to make surplus military gear available to police departments across the country. The first graph looks at the growth of the program in general:

Note that the graphs were made from data compiled from NPR through the end of August.

The second graph looks at the increase in giveaways of mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles, or MRAPs, which we’ve also covered here at The Watch.

I should admit that I haven’t done much research on this, but I’m guessing that a graph of the number of land-mine incidents in the places those vehicles have ended up would look like something pretty close to this:

Radley Balko blogs about criminal justice, the drug war and civil liberties for The Washington Post. He is the author of the book “Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/12/16/charting-the-growth-of-mraps-and-the-1033-program/

New jersey…

Thanks to the military, local police are arming themselves with high-powered assault weapons, raising the question: how much firepower do cops need?

From 2006 to 2013, towns and police agencies across the state received a total of 1,328 M14s, M16A2, shotguns and pistols, and more than 22,000 other military items, from shirts to an 18-ton armored truck, from the Department of Defense’s 1033 military surplus program.

The state’s Office of Emergency Management, which is responsible for transferring the weapons, is in the process of doling out 300 more M14s and M16s from a Nov. 13 distribution to local police departments across the state. M16s can kill at 800 or more yards.

Police in Monmouth and Ocean counties took in 135 M14s and M16s, according to an inventory of the weapons. The high-powered rifles have been converted to from automatic to semi-automatic.

A national debate about whether it’s appropriate for community police departments to have such weapons erupted in the months after police used them to contain riots in Ferguson, Missouri, after the police shooting death of Michael Brown.

Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey don’t believe local police officers need battlefield equipment, and that there should be more oversight and transparency when it comes to the decisions to acquire such weapons.

“Communities — if given a chance to know about this and speak out against it — might not like the militarization of their local police,” said Ari Rosmarin, director of public policy for the ACLU of New Jersey.

As the conversation continues, public officials all over the country are demanding more transparency about the weapons transfers — New Jersey included. The state Senate Thursday approved two bills to increase oversight over the transfer of weapons.

Local weapons

In Central Jersey, police departments in Clinton, Dunellen, Linden, Milltown, Monroe, Perth Amboy, Piscataway, Raritan Township and Readington, along with the Union County Prosecutor’s Office have received weapons since 2006. The items include different types of rifles, according to data from the defense department.

In Raritan Township, the rifles are currently not being used and are kept in a locked in a gun locker at police headquarters, officials said.

The four .223-caliber M16s obtained by the Clinton Police Department through the government surplus program are currently assigned to a trained, authorized officer, said a police spokesman, who added that obtaining the firearms was a “proactive measure” in keeping officers adequately armed during times of crisis. The surplus program helped to save the department and taxpayers money, since they were free, the spokesman said.

New Brunswick, Perth Amboy, Plainfield, Sayreville and Scotch Plains also received different types of surplus items, according to Department of Defense records, ranging from cargo trucks and ammunition chests to digital computers systems and an Ipad.

Plainfield this summer received more than 100 items worth nearly $2 million. A bulk of the supplies were vehicles such as a dump truck, a forklift, more than a dozen utility, cargo and pickup trucks and a number of trailers.

The shipment also included 20 bayonet knives, which Police Director Carl Riley returned because he initially believed they could have been used as utility knives. ***WTF? How could anyone with more than 3 working brain cells believe a freakin’ bayonet could be used as a “utility knife”? Last I checked a utility knife is a razor knife-not even remotely close to a bayonet. Must be some real mental giants working for that PD ***

Riley said the vehicles will be painted in police colors and used by officers for water rescues and other calls. He said the equipment, which also includes radios, battery chargers and a power washer, helps the city save money on having to buy equipment on its own.

http://www.mycentraljersey.com/story/news/local/2014/12/11/military-weapons-nj-police-departments/20275065/