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Posts tagged Police

INSULT YOUR POSTMAN, BUT NOT A POLICEMAN!!!


        If you insult a bank manager, a shop assistant, a lawyer, or a bus driver, you wouldn't expect to disappear, why should it be different if  you insult a police officer??
This appeal from IUF:
To those who already sent messages in response to our first appeal we offer a huge “thank you!”. Over 4,000 message in the first few hours cannot have gone unnoticed by Algerian authorities. With your support we were able to locate Yacine.

Yacine is being held in custody. On Monday October 8 after all that he has endured he will face the charge of "insulting a police officer".

We are asking you to respond again, this time to the Algerian President to call for his release from custody and proper medical attention.
Please send a message to the Algerian President and Justice Minister immediately to secure the safe release of Yacine Zaïd.
Thank you in advance.
Ron Oswald,
General Secretary, IUF
ann arky's home.

Join Nevada Cop Block for the 2nd Annual Chalk the Police Day, Sunday, Sept. 30th

ChalkThePolice1 243x300 Join Nevada Cop Block for the 2nd Annual Chalk the Police Day, Sunday, Sept. 30th

Be a part of the fun and compete for prizes.

It’s that time of year and once again Nevada Cop Block will be participating in CopBlock.org’s “National Chalk the Police Day” festivities. However, as an added bonus this year we will also be competing for prizes offered by Cop Block in several categories. In addition, this year we will be doing it at a much more visible and significant location. The original “Chalk the Police Day” action was a national action called for by CopBlock.org as a reaction to the arrest of activists in New Hampshire‘s Free State Project for drawing with chalkon sidewalks around the Manchester police station. The charges consisted mostly of intimidation charges such as “graffiti” (for easily washable drawings) and refusal to provide ID, as well as for passive resistance to those arrests.

Groups and individuals throughout the country, including here in Las Vegas, participated in the first “Chalk the Police Day,” which was largely free of additional incidents and/or arrests. Although this event predated the formation of Cop Block’s local affiliate, several people currently involved in NVCopBlock.org participated in last years’ action, which was held at the headquarters for the UNLV campus police. As with other areas, we were never directly threatened or confronted, although there was a rather large, unnecessary, wasteful and downright silly amount of surveillance conducted during the event.

This year, we’ll be relocating to the newly opened and very expensive headquarters building of LVMPD. Partly this is just based on the simple fact that if you intend to “Chalk the Police” you should go where they hang out. A more important reason is because Metro has been holding press conferences every few weeks all year to announce their latest tally of how far they are over budget, which is no part due to their lavish spending in the past on things such as a giant, shiny new headquarters building.


We’ll have chalk available and suggested “slogans” and “catchphrases” to use, but you will be very free to freelance with your own ideas and artistic desires. In addition to the budget issues, we’re going to emphasize the many instances of police abuse, up to and including beatings and murders of innocent people in the Las Vegas area, as well as the complete lack of accountability that has encouraged such actions by local police. We’ll also bring attention to more national issues involving police crackdowns on chalking by activists, such as recent incidents in the Los Angeles and Oakland areas in which people doing nothing more than drawing with chalk have been arrested, beaten, and even fired at with rubber bullets.

As an added incentive this year, the national Cop Block affiliate will be giving away prizes (free CB merchandise and high quality chalk) within various categories (see below).

The time is still somewhat flexible and may change depending on interested individuals’ availability. If so, this meetup will be updated ASAP. Also unlike most groups we will be doing this on Sunday, Sept. 30, rather than the “official” date of Monday, Oct. 1st to accommodate those who work during the week.

For more complete info (including prizes and categories) check the full announcement on CopBlock.org some of which is included below:

“Attention all chalkers, organizers, and lovers of artful dissent! It’s that time of year again to open up the buckets of chalk and find the nearest location of state repression (aka police stations, courthouses, jails) or other public property such as sidewalks, parks or public plazas at the 2nd Annual Chalk the Police Day.

Over the past year, many chalkers have been detained, harassed arrested, and jailed by authorities across this country. From the Chalking 8 in Manchester to the Chalk Walk Police Riots in LA, chalking continues to be seen as a threat to status quo and despite the temporary nature of chalk, police and local authorities continue to crack down on our right to free expression.

Do you need extra motivation to chalk? This year there is a fun contest with prizes in each of the categories

Categories:

Best Mural/Chalk Art Design – For the chalk artists who love to draw and can create great murals.

Best Chalk Saying/Slogan – Can’t draw but have a way with words? This category is for you!

Best Location – Chalk the jails? Chalk the steps of city hall? Is there any interesting public property to chalk in your area? We’ll be giving a prize for best location.

Prizes: The best entry in each category will get $66 worth of items from Cop Block’s store. Also, the winner of the Best Mural/Chalk Art Design will receive a Box of Eternity Art High Quality Sidewalk Chalk (you pick up to 35 of your favorite colors!)

Judges: There will be a three “judge” panel with one person each from the East (Kate Ager), Midwest (Melissa Hill), and West Coast (Allan Eaton) that will review the photographs of the chalk and rank them.

You can arrest the chalker but you can’t stop the chalk!”

Thanks for reading. Join Nevada Cop Block for the 2nd Annual Chalk the Police Day, Sunday, Sept. 30th is a post from Nevada CopBlock

Thursday Morning News Clippings

To-day’s clipped stories, from the Opelika Auburn News (September 20, 2012).

  • Front Page. Nothing to clip here, actually. The biggest real estate is occupied by a story about how some super-millionaire said something in private that turned out to be aired in public that may or may not hurt his chances on the margin in his attempt to go from being one of the most massively privileged people in the entire world to the single most massively privileged person in the entire world. This may or may not help out the chances of his super-millionaire opponent to remain the most massively privileged person in the entire world, if it convinces more people that the super-millionaire challenger cares less about ordinary folks than the incumbent super-millionaire does. Somebody is supposed to care about this. I don’t: it couldn’t possibly matter less how much the most massively privileged person in the entire world cares, or who he or she cares about, because the existence of such massive, ruinous and lethal structures of social and economic privilege is exactly the problem, and it is the one problem which such debates over the less-worse of a pair of party-backed super-millionaires will never raise.

  • 2A. Donathan Prater, Bo’s nose: Auburn police get new K-9 tracker. A fairly typical police puff piece to announce that the police force occupying Auburn, Alabama has a new dog that they are going to use to hound people who are trying to get away from them, and to get or fabricate probable cause for harassing people suspected of nonviolent drug offenses.

    Bo has a nose for finding trouble. But in his line of work, that’s a good thing.[1]

    The Auburn Police Division welcomed Bo, an 11-month-old Belgian Malinois, to the force on Wednesday.

    Trained in both narcotics detection and human tracking, Bo was officially introduced to members of the media at Auburn Technology Park North.

    For years, we have called on (Lee County) Sheriff Jay Jones and (Opelika Police) Chief Thomas Mangham for use of their tracking K-9s, for which we’re thankful, but we felt like it was time for us to have our own, Auburn Police Chief Tommy Dawson. We’re very excited about putting this dog to work.

    … Dawson said Bo was purchased last month from the Alabama Canine Law Enforcement Officers Training Center in Northport with approximately $10,000 in seized assets from drug arrests.

    … The acquisition of Bo puts the APD’s number of K-9 officers at four, said Dawson, a former K-9 handler.

    — Donathan Prater, Bo’s nose: Auburn police get new K-9 tracker. Opelika-Auburn News, September 20, 2012. A2.

    Well, that’s a damn shame. The primary purpose that they will use Bo for, as they use all police dogs, will be to provide pretexts to justify what are essentially random sweeps, searches and seizures; to harass, intimidate and coerce innocent people on easily fabricated, often mistaken and incredibly thin probable cause, with the minutest of ritual gestures at a sort of farce on due process, in order to prosecute a Drug War that doesn’t need to be prosecuted and to imprison, disenfranchise, and ruin the lives of people who have done nothing at all that merits being imprisoned, disenfranchised, or having their lives ruined by tyrannical drug laws. It’s not the dog’s fault, of course; he looks like a perfectly nice dog. But the people who bought him (with the proceeds from their own search-n-seizure racket), and who are using him, are putting him to a violent and degrading use, and they ought to be ashamed of themselves.

  • Op-Ed Page, 4A. Muslim religion should be feared in US. Rudy Tidwell, of Valley, a God-and-Country fixture on the Op-Ed page, decides that he doesn’t like Church-State integrationists when they aren’t part of his favorite church. Then, by means of an insanely ambitious collectivism, he assimilates the actions of his least favorite hypercollectivists to the thoughts and feelings of literally all 1,600,000,000 (he rounds up to 2 billion) Muslims in the world.

    The phrase Arab Spring has become a catchphrase for the media and other liberals to minimize the real dangers of the actual enemy of America.[2] The so-called Arab Spring is actually a Muslim Spring, meaning that the growing takeovers we see in various Middle Eastern countries[3] are Muslims rising up worldwide.

    Why is this aspect of the Middle East unrest not recognized for what it is? The euphemism[4] made between so-called radical Muslims and peaceful Muslims. Islam is a dangerous body of more than 2 billion people who are determined to convert or kill, and there is no compromise to be made?

    It’s not just a few radical Muslims who make terrorist attacks. How then do you account for the fact that when the attacks on 9/11 occurred, Muslims around the world rejoiced and danced in the streets?

    More recent events in Libya and Egypt have been recognized as and declared to be planned attacks, not benign protests. Were all the people burning the embassies and tearing down and burning the American flags peace-loving Muslims?

    We have a growing number of Muslims in the United States. There are enclaves of Muslims who rule with rigid and brutal Shariah law. Dearborn, Mich, is perhaps the most notable. Muslims are entering the U.S. in numbers that would shock us if we knew the full extent.

    I encourage you to get a copy of the Quran and read it. It is a frightening book that demands faithfulness to its teachings to the point of death. It is the guide book for a worldwide takeover, not by reason and diplomacy as Communism said it would do over time,[5] but by conversion or death.

    Rudy Tidwell
    Valley

    Well, then. 2,000,000,000? Really? Did they all do the converting and killing and rejoicing and dancing all at once, or do they maybe take it in turns? Well I suppose the gigantic hive mind that they all link up to when they join that dangerous body no doubt ensures that such problems of coordination don’t really arise.

  • Op-Ed Page, 4A. Today in History.

    On Sept. 20, 1962, James Meredith, a black student, was blocked from enrolling at the University of Mississippi by Democratic Gov. Ross R. Barnett. (Meredith was later admitted.)

    . . .

    In 1884, the National Equal Rights Party was formed during a convention of suffragists in San Francisco.

    In 1958, Martin Luther King Jr. was seriously wounded during a book signing at a New York City department store when Izola Curry stabbed him in the chest. (Curry was later found mentally incompetent.)

    In 1973, in their so-called battle of the sexes, tennis star Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in straight sets, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3, at the Houston Astrodome.

    In 1996, President Bill Clinton announced that he was signing the Defense of Marriage Act, a bill outlawing same-sex marriages, but said it should not be used as an excuse for discrimination,[6] violence or intimidation against gays and lesbians.

    In 2011, repeal of the U.S. military’s 18-year-old don’t ask, don’t tell compromise took effect, allowing gay and lesbian service[7] members to serve[8] openly.

Section A contains no international news at all today, unless you count the collecto-eliminationist letter from Rudy Tidwell on the Op-Ed page.

  1. [1] [For whom? —R.G.]
  2. [2] [Sic. Of course what he means, as he makes clear, is the enemy of the United States government. Which is not true either, but in any case obviously not the same thing. —RG.]
  3. [3] [Sic. Of course all governments are usurpers, and thus are ongoing takeovers by nature. That includes transitional and revolutionary states; on the other hand it also obviously includes the hyperauthoritarian regimes recently challenged or thrown out. What the hell was the Mubarak regime, say, if not a constantly repeated, jackbooted takeover of innocent people’s lives? —RG.]
  4. [4] [Sic. What he describes is not a euphemism, but rather a distinction that he regards as being misapplied. —RG.]
  5. [5] [Rudy Tidwell is speaking outside of his area of expertise. —RG.]
  6. [6] [. . . —R.G.]
  7. [7] [Sic. —RG.]
  8. [8] [Sic. —RG.]

The Truth About the Establishment’s Hillsborough Cover-up

The events of April 1989 will never leave me. As Liverpool and Nottingham Forest kicked off their FA Cup semi-final at Sheffield Wednesday's Hillsborough ground, the seven year old me went for a short walk with my mum to do some shopping. We were over the Mersey in Wirral, but many radios along our route were blaring out strange and horrific commentaries. We knew something was wrong, but we

Show me what a police state looks like… (2012 edition, part 1 of ????)

These are from the streets of Tampa, Florida. The first is from Brian Miller, via Radley Balko (August 28, 2012) (via my cousin Emily): it’s a picture of the out-of-town police brought in to Tampa to guard the 2012 Republican National Convention. The others are from many sources, collected in Examiner.com’s article on the use of the newest technology in civilian surveillance and police weaponry in Tampa and Charlotte.

* * *

Show me what elected government looks like…

(A photograph of a line of State Troopers in heavy body armor and riot gear.)

This is what elected government looks like.

* * *

Show me what a police state looks like…

(A photograph of two police officers on a boat with a mounted carbine pointing off toward the top of the photo.)

This is what a police state looks like.

(A photograph of a huge crowd of bicycle cops arresting a young man in a Misfits t-shirt, while other bike cops hold onlookers off at a distance.)

* * *

From the Examiner.com article:

Officials in Tampa are preparing for mass arrests; Orient Road Jail has been vacated to ensure that the 1,700 beds can be utilized if needed. It has been reported that an Occupy Tampa protester was arrested on August 27, 2012, for refusing to remove his mask at the request of the police. Occupy Tampa has also reported that homeless people are being arrested near the convention by ‘secret service.’

Tampa received a $50 million federal grant just for security. Tampa bought high-tech security cameras, body armor, and an armored tank. During the RNC, Tampa will have boat patrols armed with fully automatic .308 caliber rifles. Trapwire surveillance systems have also been installed throughout Tampa . . . .

. . . According to 2012Tampa.com “The Convention is designated by the Department of Homeland Security as one of only four National Special Security Events (NSSE) to be held in 2012; other examples of potential NSSE events include G-8/G-20 Summits and the World Bank/IMF meetings.”

— Chris Time Steele, Examiner.com (August 27, 2012): From the DNC in Denver to the RNC in Tampa, the surveillance state grows

* * *

(A photograph of a crowd of sheriffs walking past an MSNBC pavilion.)

* * *

Here is what I wrote a few years ago, during the paramilitary occupations of the Twin Cities during the last Republican National Convention.

. . . Remember that so-called electoral democracy — in fact, nothing more than an imperial elective oligarchy — never means that we (meaning you and I and our neighbors) are respected as sovereign individuals or left alone to manage our own affairs. What it means is that a highly organized, heavily armed elite insists on the privilege of representing us, ruling over us, and ordering us around, on the excuse that, once every several years, we are given some minimal opportunity to select which of two tightly regimented political parties will take control of the ruling apparatus. It is, in other words, not freedom, but rather a Party State, in which we are given only the choice of which of two bureaucratic political parties might control our lives and livelihoods, with their authority supposedly justified by the ritual of elections and the mandate of popular sovereignty. And if the people (again, meaning you and I and our neighbors) should dare to think that we might challenge the authority of the regime supposedly representing us, you’ll find that it’s the people that go out the window, not the rigged electoral system or the parties’ grasp on the authority supposedly derived from those people.

— GT 2008-09-03: This is what a police state looks like (part 1 of ???)

* * *

(A photograph of a line of police in body armor and riot gear standing in front of a group of seated, unarmed protesters in casual dress.)

* * *

Also.

From 2008.

If it moves, regulate it.

This is from the OA News from a few days ago.

. . . On another issue, AU is requiring all students, staff and faculty bringing a bicycle to campus to register it with AU’s Parking Services, Smith said.

Although people have previously been asked to register, the requirement will be more strictly enforced now, something Smith said is necessary as the campus has become more pedestrian.

We’re seeing many, many more bikes on campus and because of that we’ve got to get a handle on how many we have …

— Donathan Prater, Opelika-Auburn News, August 15, 2012

(No, you don’t.)

. . . and registering them is a good way to do that, Smith said.

— Donathan Prater, Opelika-Auburn News, August 15, 2012

(No, it isn’t.)

You register your car on campus and the same is true for bicycles.

— Donathan Prater, Opelika-Auburn News, August 15, 2012

(This is a completely specious comparison.)

Registration is free.

— Donathan Prater, Opelika-Auburn News, August 15, 2012

(Don’t count on that lasting forever.)

Smith said the number of bicycles registered with the university will help ensure that an adequate number of bicycle racks are available on campus.

— Donathan Prater, Opelika-Auburn News, August 15, 2012

The reason the University requires you to register cars is specifically to limit and control access: parking space near campus is extremely limited, it’s expensive to build more, and the parking tags regulate who can park in which zones. None of these rationales apply to bicycles on campus, no matter how many there may be. The idea that you just have to know the exact number of bicycles might be brought in at any given time is inane. If you’re seeing many, many more bikes on campus, then evidently you have some idea of the order of magnitude you’re dealing with, and if you want to tell whether you need to install more bike racks, you can do this pretty easily by looking at the bike racks and seeing whether or not they’re full up all the time, or by watching for bikes chained up to lightpoles when the racks are all full. If you see these problems, you need more bike racks. If you don’t, you don’t. The cynic in me would point out that one reason to enforce this policy is that it’s a way of making up for the declining revenues from on-campus cars, by extracting a little more revenue from the bicycles they are going to seize and impound. But really this, and a lot of other policies controlling bicycling that are justified by the same kind of specious comparisons to motor-cars, seems to be driven, more than anything, by a reflexive belief if there’s ever a lot of any damn thing at all, it’s a Problem that has to be counted out and controlled; that any and every important part of civic life, or campus life, must be registered with, and legible to, the controlling authorities. There is no reason at all to enforce this policy, other than an irrational compulsion to control anything that moves in your field of vision. In practice, the effect of the policy will be to waste students’ time, to cost students money, to punish bicyclists, to impound bikes, and to make campus less accessible to the rest of the community. (A lot of us have bikes. But we’re not eligible to register them.)

Also.

U.S. Commission on Civil Rights holds hearings on Arizona and Alabama apartheid bills

This was on the front page of to-day’s OA News (front page, continued on p. 8A). The online copy is a bit longer than what appeared in print (there are a couple paragraphs at the end that the OA News cut from the printed edition). The U.S. Civil Rights Commission recently held a meeting in Birmingham to discuss SB 1070 and HB 56, the international apartheid police-state bills in Arizona and Alabama. Demonstrators showed up to inject some reality into the proceedings.

From the Associated Press.

Quarrelsome commission

Civil rights panel has first meeting to discuss laws

BIRMINGHAM — A quarrelsome U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held its first hearing on state laws that target illegal immigration, with Republican backers arguing Friday that the measures are vital to protecting American jobs and fighting crime.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who helped write similar immigration laws in Arizona and Alabama, said unemployment in Alabama has dropped three times faster than the national average since parts of the state’s law took effect last fall — a change he credited at least in part to the act.

Attempting to head off claims that the laws lead to racial profiling by police, Kobach said the immigration enforcement specifically bars officers from making stops or arrests based on appearance.

As he spoke, four Hispanic women and a girl stood in the audience with their backs toward Kobach. Demonstrators, some speaking Spanish, stood up holding signs that said Undocumented and shouted at Kobach.

These laws are based on hate, said one man.

The meeting room quieted after officers escorted protesters away, but the commissioners still bickered among themselves. . . . Congressional appointee Todd Gaziano, legal director of the conservative Heritage Foundation, accused the demonstrators of hateful speech . . . . Gaziano and chairman Martin R. Castro, appointed by President Barack Obama, exchanged sharp words throughout the opening session. Members even disagreed over who should be allowed to testify, with organizations accusing each other of being hate groups.

The commission will issue a report within months on the findings of the hearing, which focused on whether the state laws foster discrimination and run counter to civil rights laws. But the panel doesn’t have any enforcement power, and it can’t make states alter their laws.

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down three parts of Arizona’s law in June, but it upheld a section that requires police to check the status of people who might appear to be in the country illegally. The ruling was closely watched because Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Indiana and Utah have approved similar laws.

Courts have blocked all or parts of the laws in each state, and legal challenges are now moving forward since the justices ruled on the Arizona statute . . . .

Law opponent Tammy Besherse, an attorney with South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center, accused law officers of destroying immigrants’ legal documents and of playing computer games in which participants kill Mexican immigrants.

GOP state Sen. Scott Beason, a key sponsor of Alabama’s law, said opponents of the laws and the media place more value on the rights of illegal immigrants than the plight of legal U.S. citizens who can’t find work because of people living in the country unlawfully.

We cannot solve the world’s problems, but we can make sure we don’t import some problems, Beason said. Responding to a question about a U.S. Chamber of Commerce that cast immigration in a positive light, Beason said the business organization is pretty slanted because some of its members employ illegal immigrants.[1]

Castro said the Alabama hearing was the commission’s first outside Washington, D.C., in years. The panel’s first-ever was held in Birmingham in 1958, when state and local laws mandated racial segregation.

— Jay Reeves, Associated Press, Quarrelsome commission: Civil rights panel has first meeting to discuss laws. Opelika-Auburn News, 18 August 2012.

* * *

The article goes to some effort to make it out that the fights amongst the panel members were signs of a clear divide between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. Of course the notion that the Democratic Party appointees maintain any divide, or have any quarrel, other than a purely rhetorical one, from the Republicans, is absurd. In 2008, presidential candidate Obama promised comprehensive immigration reform, paths out of the shadows for undocumented immigrants, and promised that immigration reform would be a top priority in my first year as President. In 2012, four years later, Liberal Democratic President Barack Obama has accomplished nothing at all towards comprehensive reform or towards paths to citizenship. The claim that it would be a top priority in his first year in office was a lie; he abandoned it as soon as he sat down in the Oval Office, concentrated on pushing stimulus bills and fighting wars and bailing out failed capitalists — and then he radically escalated the militarization of the border, and he presided over the largest mass deportations of peaceful immigrants in the history of the United States. Even his weakest, latest-coming promises have been lies, broken as soon as they were made. But there is a real divide here. It’s not a divide on the panel; it’s the divide between the panel, and the protesters who courageously stood up to challenge them. I am glad to see people calling out Kobach, and challenging this kind of political palavering over the lives and livelihoods of immigrant families. More power to them.

Also.

  1. [1] [I-word and xenophobia sic. —RG.]

The Riots: In Their Own Words

BBC Two, 13th August 2012 To not much fanfare, the BBC finally showed The Riots: In Their Own Words last night. This, if you remember, was the docu-drama which was suspended a month ago, by an unknown judge, in an unknown court, presiding over an unknown case. But watching it, the reasons for the postponement became obvious - the powers that be clearly couldn't stand the idea of such an accurate

Tagged with: , , ,

Cops are here to help you: Tacoma, Washington police Officer Ryan Koskovich and Officer Michael Young taser, handcuff and imprison a deaf assault victim for not obeying commands that she could not hear.

In Tacoma, a few months ago, a woman called 911 seeking protection when a fight with a guest turned violent. Unfortunately, when you call 911 they send the cops, and government police are not interested in protecting you; they are interested in controlling the situation. The victim in this case is a black woman who has been deaf since birth. The cops were told ahead of time that she was deaf, but what with a situation to control, when they showed up at the apartment they tortured her with a taser, handcuffed her, and hauled her off to jail for running at the police in an assaultive manner. She was running outside to meet the police, so that they could protect her from the person that was beating her up. Instead, a white police officer, Ryan Koskovich, screamed at her, whipped out his taser to drive her to the ground with a painful electrical shock, and then handcuffed her and arrested her, all because she didn’t stop running immediately when they bellowed commands at her that she could not hear. The police claimed, in reports that they wrote up after the fact, that they had also held a hand out. Other people in the neighborhood were watching and nobody else says they saw the cops hold a hand up. Of course, it’s possible that nobody saw it because it was 11:30 at night and dark; but then, that might be a reason for the police to think that someone might not necessarily be able to see their hands, and might not necessarily be able to hear their bellowed commands, and perhaps they ought to adopt a different strategy from maximal confrontation and Taser first, ask questions later. But that of course is only the sort of thing that you do if you give a damn about not torturing and imprisoning innocent people.

Officer Ryan Koskovich, Tacoma, Washington
Tasered, handcuffed and imprisoned deaf assault victim Lashonn White
Photo from NY Daily News

Police use Taser on deaf crime victim

TACOMA, Wash. — KIRO TV’s investigative unit has discovered Tacoma police used force to arrest and handcuff an innocent deaf woman after she called 911 for their help.

Instead of an apology, she ended up bloody and in jail for nearly three days without an interpreter before a prosecutor declined to press charges.

After months of digging, investigative reporter Chris Halsne found significant discrepancies in the official police version of events leading up to Lashonn White’s arrest.

Late in the evening on April 6, White said she called for police assistance after a guest reportedly attacked her in her own apartment.

. . . Computer-aided dispatch (CAD) logs show Tacoma police officer Ryan Koskovich and his partner, Michael Young, were outside White’s apartment complex in about six minutes.

It also reflects that officers received texts along the way stating, Person doing the hitting is a Sophia and Vict. is Lashonn White.

In addition, it appears from internal police records obtained by KIRO Team 7 Investigators, Koskovich and his partner were repeatedly given information that the victim could not hear a thing.

. . . To her, what happened next defies common sense — especially, for a woman with no criminal record, no arrests and just one minor driving violation on her record.

Within seconds of running outside to meet police, Officer Koskovich pulled his Taser and fired a two-barbed electric wire into White’s ribs and stomach.

All I’m doing is waving my hands in the air, and the next thing I know, I’m on the ground and then handcuffed. It was almost like I blacked out. I was so dizzy and disoriented, White said.

Witnesses said White began bleeding heavily from her knuckles and the right side of her face swelled up immediately after she hit the pavement following the Taser jolt.

Pictures acquired by Team 7 Investigators also show injuries to her cheek, chin, ribs, neck and arms.

Worse yet to White was the incredible confusion that came with suddenly being handcuffed, under arrest and without the ability to communicate with Tacoma officers, who had no sign language skills.

The next thing I know, they took me to jail. Told me to stand up, you’re going to jail. I said, What? What have I done? I couldn’t figure it out. I had no idea what was going on, said White.

. . . Margaret Sims’s apartment is right over the spot where White fell to the ground after being tased. She said it was around 11:30 at night and dark, but she heard Lashonn screaming in pain and ran to the balcony.

I hollered down and said, She’s deaf and can’t speak!

Sims says she went down to the street and spoke with officers while Lashonn was still in handcuffs. She told us during an on-camera interview that the police officers at the scene admitted there was a misunderstanding.

They had tased her because he thought she was coming at him, but what she was doing was running to him. But he said, stop and he didn’t put his hand up. He just said, stop and she couldn’t understand that, replied Sims.

Another apartment tenant, Geraldine Warren, said she also heard the commotion and talked to police.

They just told her to halt. She kept running, she can’t hear—she’s deaf. I said, Aren’t you supposed to say halt like that? asked Warren holding up her right hand.

Tacoma police arrested Lashonn on two criminal charges, simple assault and obstruction of a public servant (law enforcement officer). Then they carted her off to jail. She spent 60 hours there[1] – also without an interpreter- before a city prosecutor reviewed her case and asked that charges not be filed at all. . . . White said despite her repeated requests to police for a certified ASL interpreter, one was never provided.

— Police use Taser on deaf crime victim, by Chris Halsne, for KIRO TV 7 (5 August 2012)

The Incident Is Being Investigated. But Police Officer Naveed Benjamin has already said that the actions of the officers do not appear to be outside of policy. Probably not. And what does that tell you about the policy?

This is of course not the first time this sort of thing has happened. See for example GT 2007-12-07: Law and Orders #4: Wichita cops take control by shocking a deaf man for not following orders he couldn’t hear, GT 2007-11-11: Taser first, ask questions later, AP 2005-03-22: Autistic Teenager is Beaten by Deputies After Being Mistaken for a Prowler, GT 2008-02-05: Rapists in uniform, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam.

  1. [1] [In other words, a crime victim was imprisoned for nearly three days, because police could not speak her language and chose to respond to her with escalating brutality before they knew what was going on. —CJ.]

The Police Beat: Las Vegas Metro Edition

From Rikki Cheese and Spencer Lubitz at ABC 13 Action News:

Civil rights advocates want those treated unfairly by police to speak out

Las Vegas, NV (KTNV) — A group of civil rights advocates want to hear from people who feel they’ve been mistreated by Metro police.

People have been shot, beaten and tasered by Metro officers across the department’s jurisdiction. Civil rights groups hope airing those stories in public forums could help change police behavior.

Mitchell Crooks was beaten by a cop for videotaping a burglary investigation across the street from his home near Desert Inn and Maryland Parkway. Erik Scott was shot and killed at a Costco in Summerlin. Both Caucasian men. Civil rights advocates say they’re not Metro’s usual suspects in officer-involved shootings, or accusations of excessive use of force.

I can’t say whether there’s a conscious racial bias, but certainly the evidence reveals a disproportionate impact on minority populations, and that’s just brought out by the data, Staci Pratt with the ACLU said.

Pratt says 2010 census data shows the largest proportion of officer-involved shooting occur in African-American and Hispanic neighborhoods in Clark County.

Advocacy groups also want to hear from people who feel they’ve been mistreated by law enforcement in all ways, and who feel their complaints have not been heard.

Pratt applauds Metro’s recent changes in their use of force policy and for accepting recommendations from the ACLU and NAACP but says officers need to be more sensitive to the people they police.

That may not be a conscious thing on Metro’s part, Pratt said. But it certainly is an issue that needs to be raised and addressed.

It is good that they are doing this. Legal reforms and use of force policies don’t do a damn thing, but here and elsewhere they may be reflections of, and concessions to, something much more poewrful. The only thing that is ever going to restrain police abuse is a culture of popular resistance, public exposure and social accountability for abusive cops, and hard driving community activism.

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