Police Brutality at the CCDC

This is a cross post from CopBlock.org: Bridger Kennedy shared the information below via CopBlock.org/Submit about the unwarranted treatment some employed in the Clark County Detention Center used against him. For incidents related to Nevada, you can also submit directly to Nevada Cop Block’s Submit Page.

Date of Incident: September 25th 2014
Individual Responsible: Seargent Newman and colleagues
Outfit: Clark County Detention Center, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department
Phone: (702) 671-3900

Hey, my name is Bridger Kennedy. I was just in jail for a DUI (my own prescription medication) that I had taken four-hours prior to driving and while I was in the Clark County Detention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada I was beat up pretty bad in there by about six correction officers.

Prior to my intake picture my face was pushed up against the wall and my bare feet were stepped on with their boots, then after the picture was taken – both front and sideways being jerked around like a rag doll – fingernails gripped into the inner part of my biceps leaving bruises.

I was then put in this black restraint chair and my hands were handcuffed til the very last notch on the cuff. I was shoved to sit down, my balls kneed on by one of the officers, my ankles were cuffed as tight as possible too, and then put some type of thigh winch strap thing around both my legs – smashing my knees together.

I was very mad at this point and was was left in the chair for two hours. I then was taken out and seated in the big intake room (left side guys, right side girls). I was seated in the last row 2nd or 3rd seat to the left, everything was going fine. About 30-minutes had passed by when I had seen people asking to register on the phone so that they could make calls to people outside of the jail on one of the two phones available to do so.

There was one man on the left phone registering and there wasn’t anyone on the right phone, so I asked this African American female correctional officer (CO) if I can please register? She rudely answered with a snotty ‘No’ and turned away from me, at that point I didn’t say anything. About one-minute later a female inmate asks her if she could register and the CO gladly says ‘Yes’ to her, so at this point I said that is messed up why can’t I register and she can? Then this Hispanic CO says “Stand up motherfucker get over here” so I stood up and by the time I was on my feet he was rushing me and grabbed my wrist then threw me to the side.

By this point two other officers were running up and helped him throw me face down onto the ground and kneeing me in the back of the head.

I just had surgery to get my portacath removed two days prior to being in the jail. I have been in remission from cancer for three years now I was diagnosed with non Hodgkin’s lymphoma when I was 17 (I will be 21 on December 28 of this year). I was face down yelling to them I had cancer and just had surgery.

The CO’s came over and piled their weight on top of my chest head arms legs back and feet while I can barely breathe I was yelling I have asthma as well since I was a little kid and now they are yelling to me to stop resisting when I wasn’t resisting whatsoever.

I couldn’t move and inch of any part of my body, at this point I am in excruciating pain and am being lifted up by my wrists and being taken back the the black restraint chair again. I was then once again strapped into the chair as tight as they possibly could after about 45-minutes in the chair. I just couldn’t bare the lack of circulation to my hands and feet. My upper thighs had lost the feeling in them by now, so I power through another hour and about 25-minutes of the chair each time having a spit mask on when I never spit or attempted to once.

They took me out and went and sat back down once again in the same chair I originally was in the first time I sat.

Editors Note: Bridger was encouraged to reach out to those involved with Nevada Cop Block, who have done an excellent job focusing the disinfecting light of transparency on the criminal LVMPD outfit.

• Nevada Cop Block – website / Facebook / Twitter / YouTube / nvcopblock@gmail.com (read: A big welcome to Nevada Cop Block!!)

Thanks for reading. Another Case of Police Brutality Inside CCDC by the LVMPD is a post from Nevada Cop Block

The following two Agents of SHIELD openers – one from last season and one from tonight – seem, at a superficial level, tonally very different. But upon reflection, despite the frenetic explodiness of the first clip and the cheery calmness of the second, they really are doing very similar things: showing us a slice of the daily life of one of our agents, set to disarmingly eccentric pop music, followed by a twist that reveals the opposite organisational logo from the one we expected to see.

It’s no secret that economists and libertarians have developed a bad habit of assuming things about history and other societies on first principle without actually checking archaeological or anthropological findings. On occasion the divide can be quite stark. David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years gets a lot of momentum by attacking a widely circulated…

Continue reading at Center for a Stateless Society …

In the now classic article “A esquerda punitiva” (“The Punitive Left”), Maria Lucia Karam criticizes the Brazilian left for forsaking their deeply held beliefs on social change and uniting with those who wish to strengthen criminal law as the principal means of solving society’s conflicts and guarantee social peace.

Karam notes that the left seems to have forgotten that the repressive apparatus of the state turns itself mainly against marginalized groups, serving more often than not as a form of social cleansing, and the very proposal of more criminalization and repression coming from the left (such as the fight against financial crimes) does not solve this structural contradiction.

An example of that is the security problem created by drug trafficking: Instead of supporting even more repression to drug trafficking to reduce the feeling of insecurity, the Brazilian left should reflect on the fact that it is drug criminalization itself that creates the cycle of violence related to drugs in the country. Thus, fighting against criminal law is fighting against violence.

Karam concludes that it is the left’s role to criticize the prevailing system, not to reinforce its logic.

In Brazil’s presidential debate on 09/29, so-called dwarf candidate Levy Fidelix made some vile, homophobic and offensive statements on national TV after being asked by fellow candidate Luciana Genro about his position on gay marriage. Fidelix showed the typical heteronormative revulsion to homosexuality disguised as “defending family values,” but he went even further in declaring that the “excretory system” is not a means of reproduction and that non-heterosexuals should be excluded somehow from social life, “far away” from the rest of society to treat their supposed affection and psychological problems.

Never skipping a beat, many leftists manifested themselves in favor of criminalizing homophobia and used Fidelix’s statements as an instance of what criminal law should ban. Homophobia should be a crime in the same way racism is, according to this sector of the Brazilian left. But in defending that position, they make the punitive left’s mistake.

Criminalizing a conduct cannot be the primary means through which social conflict is solved, because it is the most coercive way of doing so and the one that should be invoked only versus aggression against individual liberties.

The idea of criminalization as a solution for all human problems has dramatically expanded state regulation of life. And according to that point of view, there is no individual behavior that cannot be potentially included in our police records.

Criminalizing unacceptable opinions has been a common tool used by each and every authoritarian regime in human history. It is not ever a tool of social transformation, but of reaction. It will not be purified because we are finally criminalizing opinions that are actually worthy of scorn. It is still an authoritarian means to shut off dissent.

As Steven Pinker shows in The Better Angels of Our Nature, great changes in human history have not come from the “criminalization of conservative opinions” (something that was not even possible at the time), but through a more complex historical process that included the decriminalization of opinions and freedom of expression. To guarantee social peace, the great liberal discovery is that we do not have to agree on everything, but only on who should have the right to decide who is right: the individual.

The process of criminalizing homophobia and racism can turn ugly in the future: Many people accuse feminists of being misandric and the LGBT movement of being “heterophobic.” While these are absurd accusations, it is not difficult to think of a defense of suppression of their discourse on those grounds, since their opposite (machismo and homophobia) can become crimes. There is no guarantee that these discourses will not become criminalized and labeled as hate speech in the future, in detriment of free debate and minorities’s rights.

Therefore, the best way to fight against racism, homophobia, and other discriminatory cultures is not through their criminalization. As Mano Ferreira wrote on his article “Por um principio da nao opressao” (“For a Non-Oppression Principle”): “In putting together a libertarian principle of non-oppression, we should have in mind an expansion of human liberty. Thus, I believe that it is through voluntary cooperation and social empowerment of the oppressed that we build legitimate and efficient bases for fighting oppression. In that process, it is necessary to deeply analyze oppression mechanisms and its possibilities of undoing – a mission in which we should recognize the importance of authors who adhere to other epistemologies, understand them and resignify them.”

Direct action and social boycott might be very useful tools for that, something which I have pointed as a helpful tool for feminists against rape culture.

The paradigm of criminalization of opinions should be abandoned when we are fighting for social progress, since the emancipation of minorities is being obtained and will be achieved through a historical consolidation, amplification and enlightenment of the networks of voluntary social cooperation, where state criminality and social oppression will be fought and rejected in favor of human freedom.

Translated into English by Erick Vasconcelos.

For many months now, we’ve been hard at work on a new anarchist outreach project that picks up where Fighting for Our Lives left off—drawing on everything we’ve learned since then and updating the contents and format. Now that work is completed—we just need your help to get it into the world.

To Change Everything is a full-color 48-page booklet. In fresh, accessible language, it explores the virtues of self-determination, illuminates why authoritarian power structures cannot resolve the crises they produce, and discusses how to weave our personal revolts together into a collective struggle for liberation.

We want to print 100,000 copies and circulate it for free, so as to reach the generations radicalized by the global movements and catastrophes of the past few years. We’ve worked with Submedia.tv to produce an accompanying video; we’re coordinating with comrades around the world so the text will appear simultaneously on at least three continents in at least a dozen languages. The video and text will be available in all those languages on a fully responsive website. With your help, we can accomplish all this by the end of 2014.

We’re using Kickstarter to raise the funds to cover printing. If you aren’t familiar with Kickstarter, you can learn about how to use it here. If you’re curious why we’re using a fundraising platform for this project, read our explanation Why a Kickstarter? Why Now?. If you think we do good work, please help us—every little bit counts, and you’ll be ensuring that this project is available to everyone for free. To sweeten the pot, we’ve come up with some fancy rewards for donors, including our first-ever t-shirts.

Kickstarter To Change Everything

 
New anarchist outreach material is long overdue. Even entrenched representatives of the status quo are now admitting that it is necessary to change everything, but the best they can come up with is to appeal to the same authorities that are responsible for our problems in the first place. Meanwhile, the rise of the far right in Europe and the ongoing debacle in Ukraine show how high the stakes are and how bleak the future will be if fascists succeed in presenting themselves as the partisans of change. When the next round of uprisings arrives, it may be too late to reach out to people.

We don’t ask for much, but if ever there were a time for you to help us, this is it. Even if you can’t contribute financially, please send word of this project out on twitter or Facebook, yell it out from street corners. Thanks so much, dear friends.

Why a Kickstarter? Why Now?

For practically our entire existence, we have avoided using traditional fundraising drives and platforms. In the beginning, taking our cue from the bank robbers who financed the anarchist press a hundred years ago, we utilized nonstandard methods to produce and distribute our materials for free.

Once the scale of our operations grew too large to depend on inconsistent sources, we shifted tactics. We didn’t want our agenda to be dictated by funders, as in the case of so many non-profit organizations; we believe that this inevitably causes groups to water down their politics in order to pander to the wealthy. [For more on this, consult the excellent The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex by INCITE! Women of Color against Violence.] Nor did we wish to tire the patience of our grassroots supporters with constant NPR-style pleas. For a decade and a half, we have mass-produced materials to keep the cost per item down, sold them at close to production costs, and used any returns to fund free projects like Fighting for Our Lives—indeed, we sunk tens of thousands of dollars of our own money into that project. None of this would have been possible if we weren’t willing to work for free, living, in most cases, significantly below the poverty line.

This approach will remain the basis of our efforts. However, much has changed in the economy in the years since we set out on this path. As the majority of people get poorer, it is becoming more difficult to fund projects through sales alone, even as interest increases in our projects. It seems we are entering a sort of new feudalism, in which a small part of the population has disproportionate resources and leverage even when it comes to determining what materials are mass-produced: the question of patronage is almost inescapable. Today, some of our supporters can barely afford the materials they depend on us for, while others would gladly pay significantly more than we charge. Utilizing a crowd-funding model only acknowledges this already present reality. We don’t share the optimism of those who believe that crowd-funding is somehow liberating or “democratic”—it’s just the best sales system for an era of dramatic income disparities.

At the same time, we remain staunchly committed to setting our agenda with complete integrity and autonomy, regardless of financial incentives. We will not water down our politics to attract wealthier funders; we will not change the ways we speak and organize. The upshot of this is that if you appreciate what we are doing, we depend on you to help us to keep at it, even if your means are paltry compared to those big NGO foundations that are currently rendering toothless all the political campaigns they talk about in their press releases. Really changing everything will take a lot more than tax write-offs and paid publicity work. If you want what we want, help us however you can.