Tag: police brutality

Counterpunch has an excellent piece up on the New York City police and wall street’s  cozy relationship / revolving door.

Especially regarding ‘white shirts’.

And, especially something called the “PDU” – the Paid Detail Unit.

The corporations pay an average of $37 an hour (no medical, no pension benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the ability to arrest.  The officer is indemnified by the taxpayer, not the corporation.

New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per hour paid to the police.  The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations were paying  wages of $11.8 million to police participating in the Paid Detail Unit.  The program has more than doubled in revenue to the city since 2002.

Read the whole thing here:

http://www.counterpunch.org/20…

It’s an amazing piece.  Note also the bio of the author: she worked on wall street for more than 2 decades.  

I can’t get it to embed … as usual here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?f…

(ek hornbeck- Only TheMomCat has the magic <iframe> touch.  Set your YouTubes to ‘Use old embed code’ and strip out everything that’s not between the <embed></embed>.  It’s hard for me to even get iframe to print!)

80 Occupy Wall Street Protesters were arrested yesterday alone. There were numerous reports of brutality. This violent repression happened here, is still happening here. The region is New York, sir. Wall Street to be exact. Why are you not against violence to people of that region?

The officer in the video responded on YouTube (misspellings intact):

“ATTENTION: My name is Officer Larson of the NYPD and I am the one you see in this video lawfully restraining that dissident, in response to his aggressive posturing.

If any of you have a problem with that, please send me a private message with your address, and I’ll go down to your house, and drop-kick you in your dumb, beligerent mouths.”

That is the full support of the United States for the risk of peaceful protest. Here, anyway. Which is to say, no support at all. In fact quite the opposite of support. GOVERNMENT OPPOSITION.

Wow.  So this is what can happen if you’re a woman, you get assaulted, and you call the police for help.   The police come and arrest you, then hold you down while male cops forcibly strip search you, and someone videotapes the whole process.

From Cleveland Ohio.  

Cops in this country are absolutely out of control.  They’ll taser anyone, mothers in front of their kids, grandmothers, they don’t care, a cop with a taser is a fucking menace to society.  

And now male officers forcibly strip searching women?  This is in direct violation of the Sheriff Department’s own official policy on strip searches.  

Videotaping this was fuel on the fire of this woman’s humiliation, but at the same time, it’s the only evidence we have as to what really happened.   According to the news report, the police are holding back other video, not providing it to the woman’s lawyers.

I am not making this up.

A pair of cops tasered a legless black man.  

They tried to pull his two-year-old daughter out of his lap, he resisted (who WOULDN’T??) and they got nasty on him and fucking tasered him, leaving lying on his side, NAKED FROM THE WAIST DOWN, outside of his apartment for all to see.

I wish I was making this up.   Because it’s just godawful.

http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/…

The incident began when police responded to a call claiming an argument had broken out at Williams’ home. One of the officers involved, John Pinnegar, claims Williams’ wife said Williams had hit her, a charge Williams denies. Police say when they tried to take his two-year-old daughter from his lap to hand her over to Child Protective Services, Williams resisted. That’s when the violence allegedly began.

In an emotional video interview, Williams said: “I’m not a violent person, I do not have a criminal background.”

Added Williams: “How much resisting am I going to do with no legs, no feet? How much resisting am I going to do?”

“Williams said Pinnegar unholstered his Taser, jammed it into his rib cage and shocked him twice. Williams said he fell from his chair onto his stomach on the ground outside his doorway,” the Sun-Star reports.

Williams also says an officer put his knee on Williams’ neck after he was already on the ground, even though “I can’t get up now — I don’t have any feet to get up with,” Williams said.

He added: “And they tell me that I’m doing stupid stuff in front of my kids? These are cops and they come in my house — what if they had accidentally tased my kid because of their [stupidity]?”

The Sun-Star reports that a “hostile” crowd gathered around the apartment building during the incident. The “apartment complex came to a roar because they were tasing a guy in a wheelchair and it was for no reason,” said one witness interviewed on video.

Williams was arrested on suspicion of domestic violence and resisting arrest. He spent six days in lock-up before he was released, and the county prosecutor has laid no charges.

A legless black guy, tasered, humiliated by police, locked in jail for six days.

No charges filed.

Cops are just way out of control with these tasers.  Tasers can kill you.   That kind of electric shock is downright dangerous, anyone who has to do any kind of professional safety training regarding electricity KNOWS that.   They can kill you.   But cops are tasering people just for the sheer rollicking hell of it, constantly, tasering old women, legless men, pretty much everybody who is already helpless against them.

This is disgusting.

I’m way too tired to really develop this any more, just wanted everyone to know about it.    Pass it along.   I won’t post it anywhere else.

This first hand account can be seen as a supplement to the work here of BentLiberal. It is a firsthand account of the last two weeks by a longtime Oakland resident, crossposted from Fire on the Mountain, which also has some cool photos.

New Year’s Day

On the early morning of January 1, I happened to be in the Emergency Room of Oakland General. Word came in that there had been a disturbance on a Bay Area Rapid Transit train at Fruitvale Station and patients were expected. The first ambulance brought in a guy who had leapt from the platform when BART police stopped a crowded train and started pulling young male “troublemakers” off. His legs were fucked up.

Then the paramedics brought in Oscar Grant. He was still alive and talking. Techs were telling him “Hang in there, hang in there,” as they tried to reinflate the lungs collapsed by a police bullet and to re-transfuse the blood he was losing–fast. His heart rate collapsed and CPR brought him back so he could be wheeled into the Operating Room, but the internal bleeding couldn’t be stanched in the OR, and Oscar Grant died.

There’s one thing I want to highlight here. When Oscar Grant was brought in, he had a deep hole in his back, the entry wound, but on the other side you could actually see the bullet pressing out against the skin of his chest from the inside like a big pimple. It was removed on the spot. (ER personnel don’t often go around fishing out bullets, unless it’s life-threatening–that’s TV stuff–but this one took only a quick incision to remove.) The slug was flattened, completing the picture of someone who had been shot in the back while pressed right up against a very hard, flat surface.

Original article, and editorial from Marxistiki Foni (Marxist Voice), via In Defence of Marxism:

On Saturday night, an officer of the Special Forces of the Greek Police killed a young 15-year old school student, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, in Exarchia in the centre of Athens, (just 200 meters from the office of our paper). This is the modern “democratic” manner in which a police officer answered the usual anti-police slogans that a small group of ordinary and completely unarmed school students were raising against him. The police officer shot at the group of school students in an area where there are many coffeehouses full of people and at an hour (9pm) when there are many youth gathered together enjoying an evening out.

2 nd Update:

Thanks to Meteor Blades for finding this photo!

http://www.dailykos.com/story/…

Imagine beginning to walk from San Francisco in order to raise awareness about American Indian concerns in a good way and having walked over 2,400 miles since February; but then, you get to Ohio where eight police cars come swooping at you while one does the blocking. Suddenly, an officer comes and reaches into the window, grabbing the wheel.

Source

COLUMBUS Ohio – Unprovoked Columbus, Ohio police, attacked Long Walkers, by first pointing a taser at the head of Michael Lane and then forcing Luv the Mezenger to the ground and handcuffing him.

The Longest Walk Northern Route was walking this prayer through Columbus on Monday, June 2, when squad cars and arrest wagons arrived. Without discussion of the purpose of the prayer walk, or even verify that the Ohio Department of Transportation had been notified of the prayer walk, police attacked the walkers.

Is this police abuse? You tell me.

The woman who was forcibly strip searched and thrown naked into a cell wanted this to be shown in order to prevent it from ever happening to anyone again. I am assuming that part of the justification for wanting it to be shown is to ask difficult questions; so, I’m thinking of the questions she might want asked as I watch this horrific violation of her rights again. I’m not looking forward to watching this again. In fact, I dread it.

The story may be hard to watch, but the victim and her husband want me to show you what happened – in hopes that you and those you love will never experience a night like this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…