The Misleadership Class

Troops referred to Ferguson protesters as ‘enemy forces’, emails show

by Joanna Walters, The Guardian

Friday 17 April 2015 12.12 EDT

As the Missouri national guard prepared to deploy to the streets of Ferguson last year during protests sparked by the shooting death of Michael Brown, the troops used highly militarised language such as “enemy forces” and “adversaries” to refer to citizen demonstrators.

Documents detailing the military mission divided the crowds that national guards would be likely to encounter into “friendly forces” and “enemy forces” – the latter apparently including “general protesters”.

A briefing for commanders included details of the troops’ intelligence capabilities so that they could “deny adversaries the ability to identify Missouri national guard vulnerabilities”, which the “adversaries” might exploit, “causing embarrassment or harm” to the military force, according to documents obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request by CNN.

And in an ominous-sounding operations security briefing, the national guard warned: “Adversaries are most likely to possess human intelligence (HUMINT), open source intelligence (OSINT), signals intelligence (SIGINT), technical intelligence (TECHINT), and counterintelligence capabilities.”

In less military-style language, the briefing then goes on to detail how protesters might obtain this intelligence – a list of sources no more technical than public records, social media and listening to conversations “being carried out in public” by civic officials or law enforcement, according to the report.

The Missouri governor, Jay Nixon, deployed the state national guard to Ferguson in August after local police forces caused international uproar by firing teargas on demonstrators while armed with gear that even US military veterans said was better suited for the streets of Afghanistan than an American suburb.

After Walter Scott Shooting, Scrutiny Turns to 2nd Officer

By MANNY FERNANDEZ, The New York Times

APRIL 17, 2015

Clarence W. Habersham Jr., the first officer to arrive on the scene after the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man named Walter L. Scott, is drawing intense scrutiny both for the questions surrounding his response to the shooting and for what his role has illuminated about the pressures and expectations black officers face in largely white police departments.

Critics of Officer Habersham, 37, including black leaders and lawyers, have called for him to be prosecuted for what they say was his failure to provide adequate aid to Mr. Scott, 50, and for appearing to go along with what many viewers of a video of the shooting believe was an attempt by Michael T. Slager, the white officer who fatally shot Mr. Scott in the back, to plant a Taser by his body.

Officer Habersham later said in a brief police report that he tried to aid the victim by putting pressure on his wounds, but critics say the video does not show him performing CPR or acting with urgency in response to the shooting.

…

On April 4, Officer Habersham arrived on the scene after Mr. Slager, 33, who has since been charged with murder, fired eight shots at Mr. Scott as he was some distance away, fleeing after a traffic stop and a confrontation. In the video, as Mr. Scott lies in a grassy lot after Mr. Slager has handcuffed him, Officer Habersham can be seen crouching over Mr. Scott and at other times standing over him while directing medics to the lot on his radio. He does not appear to perform CPR on Mr. Scott, and he did not claim to have done so in his two-sentence report, stating that he “attempted to render aid to the victim by applying pressure to the gunshot wounds.” Yet there are moments in the video when neither officer appears to be tending to Mr. Scott as he lies dying.

Some experts question that response.

“I wouldn’t have expected him to jump immediately into CPR,” Seth W. Stoughton, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and a former police officer, said of Officer Habersham. “You need to treat the bullet holes first to make CPR even remotely effective. But I didn’t really see him doing that. When I see two officers on scene with someone who has just been shot, I certainly do not expect to see both of them standing up and away from the body, neither one of them offering aid.”

Mr. Slager is shown in the video picking up an object from another part of the lot and then dropping either that object or something else by Mr. Scott’s body. Officer Habersham was standing over Mr. Scott, putting on blue medical gloves, when Mr. Slager dropped the object, and it is unclear in the video if he saw it happen. Civil rights activists contend that the dropped object was a Taser that Mr. Slager said Mr. Scott had tried to take from him.

The shooting is also being investigated by state and federal agencies.

…

Officer Habersham and four other officers are accused in a federal lawsuit filed last year of beating a black robbery suspect who was handcuffed in November 2011. It was unclear whether Officer Habersham participated in the beating, witnessed it but failed to stop it or played some other role, if any, but the lawsuit also accuses him and other officers of failing to render aid to the suspect.

“This is the Old South, and you have the Old South mentality here,” said Edward Bryant, president of the North Charleston chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. “The whites are always in charge. They’re the lead person, and Mr. Habersham is being in that role as they had it in the 1800s.”

Meaning of course that of Quimbo and Sambo.

Now it’s not like my Viking heritage is devoid of this, I invite the study of Vidkun Quisling who in many respects is even more reprehensible than Harriet Beecher Stowe’s stereotypes.  I once traveled with a Norwegian through New Haven and mentioned it was Benedict Arnold’s home town.

“Who is he?”, she asked.

“Well, he’s kind of the U.S. Quisling.”, I replied sort of off handedly but also to prove I was at least passingly familiar with the history of Scandinavia.

She turned to me and said, with real anger in her voice, “How do you know that name!”

Umm… well… uh…

Folks, this struggle is not about identity politics.  It’s not about your race, your creed, your gender, or sexual orientation.  It is a class struggle and identity politics is just another distraction to keep the corporatist Billionaires in charge and their political toadies in office.  It’s not a struggle of White and Black, it’s a struggle of Blue and Green and Gold above all against every one else.

Maybe if I had said it was the city Jim Morrison got arrested for obscenity in.

I once went to the New Haven Arena to watch a hockey game.  It’s now the headquarters of the New Haven division of the FBI.

Officer Cleared; Protesters Crash Cops’ Protest

by Paul Bass, New Haven Independent

Mar 27, 2015 3:31 pm

A week of building tensions over race and policing came to a peak as chanting cops crashed a press conference announcing the exoneration of an officer – and then anti-police demonstrators crashed the cops’ interruption.

…

A citizen video captured the officer slamming the handcuffed girl to the ground, sparking public criticism. The video went viral. It became a Rorschach test revealing America’s divide on policing. Some saw a handcuffed girl manhandled by an officers. Others saw an endangered officer carefully protecting himself and the public against a lawbreaker. The lack of crucial facts about the case, compounded by a week of missteps by the police department in communicating with the public, exacerbated tensions in town.

…

The teen’s mother, Valerie Boyd, reacted to the decision by saying “there’s no justice.”

“The department of training failed [the officer] as well as they failed me and my daughter. The department is at fault. He should have been retrained coming into New Haven as a police officer. He should have been given the proper procedures of how to apprehend a suspect,” Boyd said.

“He’s back on the street. I don’t feel safe.”

…

The officers’ crashing of the press conference was in turn crashed by protesters critical of the police protest. These demonstrators, most of whom were black, called the police protesters racists who are deaf to the concerns of the black community.

…

“We’re protecting you, you dumbbell!” shot back one of the pro-police protesters.

I am a class traitor.  Welcome to Stars Hollow Connecticut “the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve … where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”