California Cops Clamp Down on Disneyland Dissent

Tuesday, July 31, 2012 Infantile Disorder

Broad sections of the Anaheim working class are seething with anger at cops

Disneyland in Anaheim is emblematic of 'the American dream' - a make-believe world where 'good' always triumphs over 'evil' in the end, and childhood innocence lasts forever. Yet at the gates of this fairytale paradise, torrents of anger are being directed at police for the huge amounts of state killings in the area, and the guardians of the rich are responding with ever more militaristic displays of power.

The wave of unrest began ten days ago, when cops shot and killed 25-year-old Manuel Diaz. The chief of police immediately labelled Diaz a "documented gang member". According to the official version, Diaz and two other men were talking in an alley when police approached them. The men ran, and the officers gave chase, eventually firing at the unarmed Diaz, after he had thrown an object - possibly heroin - onto a roof.

Considering the local circumstances, it is hardly surprising that many of Anaheim's residents didn't find Diaz's supposed 'gang member' status a good enough reason to kill him. After, Diaz was the fourth victim of the city's finest this year alone. He was followed just one day later by 21-year-old Joel Acevedo. As far as gang war death tolls go, five in just seven months is quite prolific.

In the meantime, demonstrators had crowded the lobby of the Anaheim PD, as the chief held a press conference. They chanted "no justice, no peace, fuck the police", and "cops, pigs, murderers". And even as authorities moved to seal off the scene, they were met with rocks and bottles. Cops retaliated with rubber bullets, and a savage dog attack on one woman, which they later labelled "accidental".

Protests simmered throughout the week, before another police shooting - this time non-fatal - on Thursday, when tensions were brought boiling back to the surface. On Sunday, a mass demonstration of several hundred were faced down by mounted cops in riot gear and heavily armed paramilitary-style troopers protecting the police station. An impromptu march towards the tourist haven of Disneyland was headed off by hundreds of security forces. The demonstration was declared an "illegal assembly", and nine arrests were made.

Despite the obvious groundswell of anger, it is difficult to predict where this new movement is going. Liberal Latino group Presente is trying to channel energy behind a petition for an attorney general inquiry. As the history of policing shows ad nauseam, such an inquiry would inevitably whitewash Anaheim cops.

The scene at Anaheim police HQ on Sunday

Ultimately, the brutal policing in Anaheim, the community's response to it, and then the authorities' nervous and draconian reaction all have their roots in the decaying state of American capitalism itself. With Anaheim's tourism-based economy stagnating since the onset of the economic crisis, official unemployment in the area is currently just under 10% - two per cent above the national average and a huge increase on 2006. The poverty rate is also rising, and is particularly pronounced amongst black and Latino people. With cuts raining down from everywhere, and a new wave of job losses about to crest, the authorities can only offer ever more draconian repression.

An inquiry here or there will never fix the problem of the growing police state. That is something only a massive class conscious movement against the super rich can achieve.

Near-Riot Breaks Out After Officer-Involved Shooting In Anaheim

 July 21, 2012 (CBS/AP)

ANAHEIM  — A police shooting that left a man dead led to a near-riot Saturday as angry witnesses threw bottles at officers who responded with tear gas and beanbag rounds.



The man was shot around 4 p.m. in front of an apartment complex on the 600 block of North Anna Drive following a foot chase, Anaheim Sgt. Bob Dunn said. He died three hours later at a hospital.

The Orange County Register cited family members and neighbors who said the man shot was Manuel Diaz. Dunn said he could not confirm the man’s name early Sunday.

His niece, 16-year-old Daisy Gonzalez, said her uncle likely ran away from officers when they approached him because of his past experience with law enforcement. “He (doesn’t) like cops. He never liked them because all they do is harass and arrest anyone,” Gonzalez said.

Residents, protesting what they say is an increased police violence against them in the community, started the near riot after the shooting on nearby La Palma.

Crystal Ventura, a 17-year-old who witnessed the shooting, told the Register the man had his back to the officer. She said the man was shot in the buttocks area. The man then went down on his knees, and she said he was struck by another bullet in the head. Another officer handcuffed the man who by then was on the ground and not moving, Ventura said.

“They searched his pockets, and there was a hole in his head, and I saw blood on his face,” she said.

Dunn said he could not comment on these allegations because the shooting is under investigation.

Jay Jackson, reporting for CBS2 and KCAL9, said Saturday night’s scene was chaotic.
The residents blocked off a street and set fire to at least one dumpster.
Earlier in the day, police in riot gear, fired rubber bullets into the crowd. Several protesters lifted their shirts to show large red welts on their torsos and backs.

Residents told Jackson that police overreacted and created the disturbance.
One man said, “They just started shooting.”

Police also set a K-9 officer on one woman and a bystander they said were agitating the situation.

Said Susan Lopez, “I had my baby with me. My baby! The dog scratched me and then grabbed me.” She added, “They shot at me while I was holding a baby!” Another woman yelled, “They just shot at us, they shot at a little kid, too.”

According to police, two patrol officers observed three male suspects in an alley.
Police said the suspects tried to flee on foot when a chase ensued.

The shooting reportedly occurred after one of the officers encountered one of the suspects in a courtyard.

No officers were injured.

The other two suspects are at-large.

Dunn said, “What exactly led to the shooting, we don’t know. We’re still investigating. But a shooting did occur. And the male was taken to a hospital.”

Authorities said the circumstances regarding the shooting were under investigation by members of the gangs unit and Orange County District Attorney’s office.

Four people told Jackson that police offered to buy their cell phone video.

Report on the Extrajudicial Killings of 110 Black People

Jul 9, 2012 Malcolm X Grassroots Movement

Report on Black People Executed without Trial by Police, Security Guards and Self-Appointed Law Enforcers January 1 – June 30, 2012.

This report was produced for the “No More Trayvon Martins Campaign”, demanding a National Plan of Action for Racial Justice. This is the 2nd Major report of the Campaign.

Download this report as a PDF using this link.

A human rights crisis confronts Black people in the United States. Since January 1, 2012, police and a much smaller number of security guards and self-appointed vigilantes have murdered at least 110 Black women and men. These killings are definitely not accidental or random acts of violence or the work of rogue cops. As we noted in our April 6^th, 2012 “Trayvon Martin is All of US!” Report (see http://mxgm.org/trayvon-martin-is-all-of-us/), the use of deadly force against Black people is standard practice in the United States, and woven into to the very fabric of the society.
The corporate media have given very little attention to these extrajudicial killings. We call them “extrajudicial” because they happen without trial or any due process, against all international law and human rights conventions. Those few mainstream media outlets that mention the epidemic of killings have been are unwilling to acknowledge that the killings are systemic – meaning they are embedded in institutional racism and national oppression. On the contrary, nearly all of the mainstream media join in a chorus that sings the praises of the police and read from the same script that denounces the alleged “thuggery” of the deceased. Sadly, too many people believe the police version of events and the media’s “blame-the-victim” narratives that justify and support these extrajudicial killings.
However, we have studied each of the reports of these deaths — including false, implausible and inconsistent claims by police and witness reports that contradict police reports. From this study and many peoples’ experience, we must reject the corporate media’s rationalization for the horrible fact that in the first six months of this year, one Black person every 40 hours was executed. This wanton disregard for Black life resulted in the killing of 13 year-old children, fathers taking care of their kids, women driving the wrong cars, as well as people with mental health and drug problems.
This report documents how people of African descent remain “without sanctuary” throughout the United States. Nowhere is a Black woman or man safe from racial profiling, invasive policing, constant surveillance, and overriding suspicion. All Black people – regardless of education, class, occupation, behavior or dress – are subject to the whims of the police whose institutionalized racist policies and procedures require them to arbitrarily stop, frisk, arrest, brutalize and even execute Black people.
Invasive policing is only one aspect of the U.S. states comprehensive containment strategies to exploit Black people and to smother resistance. To contain the upsurge of the Black liberation movement of the 1960’s and 70’s and protect the system of white supremacy the institutional forces of racism have worked through governments at every level to destabilize the Black community via community divestment, massive employment discrimination, outsourcing, gentrification and other forms of economic dislocation. In addition, schools, housing, healthcare, other social services and transportation in Black communities have been denied equitable provision and distribution of public goods and resources.
The U.S. state maintains and reinforces these economic injustices with the militarized occupation of Black communities by the police and a web of racist legislation like the “war on drugs”, discriminatory polices like “three strikes” and “mandatory minimum” sentencing. The result is a social system that mandates the prison warehousing of millions of Black people and extrajudicial killings where the killers act with impunity and more often than not are rewarded and promoted for murder. The oppression and police occupation of Black communities parallels the brutalization, denial of human rights and killings being committed by the Israeli occupying forces in Palestine, and the persecution of Afrodescendants in Columbia and the Indigenous peoples of Brazil over the past several years. Nothing short of the structural integrity and survival of the Black community is at stake when we consider the historic record.
For those who doubted the framing of the “Trayvon Martin is All of Us!” Report, this 6^th month update proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the institutionalized violence of white supremacy is not only alive and well, but is, in fact, intensifying. To complete the picture, we must take into account the extrajudicial killings and other repressive policies directed at other targeted peoples and communities such as Indigenous peoples, Latinos, Arabs, Muslims, and immigrants. These, in conjunction with the oppression of Black people, demonstrate that the U.S. government remains committed to maintaining the system of white supremacy created by the aggressive and illegal European settler-colonies that first established the national-state project.
This crisis can only be stopped through decisive action. First, the Black community must organize its own self-defense. Second, we must build a broad, mass movement capable of forcing the government to enact transformative legislation based on our demands. The fundamental transformative demand must be for a National Plan of Action for Racial Justice to eliminate institutional racism and advance the struggle for self-determination. The Black community itself will determine the specific contents of The Plan, drawing from the foundation of CERD (the Convention to Eliminate all forms of Racial Discrimination) and the DDPA (Durban Declaration and Programme of Action).
We call on everyone who believes that decisive action must be taken by Black and other oppressed peoples to confront and defeat national oppression and white supremacy to join us in developing an independent, mass movement for human rights that builds power in our communities and will have the capacity to force the Federal authorities to implement a comprehensive National Plan of Action for Racial Justice.  You can join us immediately by helping us secure 1 million signatures to our petition (see http://mxgm.org/trayvon-martin-is-all-of-us/), organizing Copwatch and People’s Self-Defense campaigns, fighting for elected Police Control Boards, the demilitarization of our communities, and the reinvestment of the military and security budget into community reinvestment and social programs amongst other suggestions provided in our “Local Struggles” paper (see http://mxgm.org/no-more-trayvons-campaign/). We also encourage communities to organize their own grassroots crisis intervention, domestic violence prevention/control and mediation teams so families in crisis do not become so desperate for help that they compound their problems by calling 9-1-1 and inviting the police into their homes.
We also call all organizations and individuals who agree with the demand and framework for a National Plan of Action for Racial Justice to help us build the National Alliance for Racial Justice and Human Rights (NARJHR) as a structure that will help us develop and implement a comprehensive national plan that centers oppressed peoples’ right to self-determination and the full realization of our human rights.
For more information about the Report or any of these action proposals, contact Kali Akuno at kaliakuno@mxgm.org.
FOOTNOTES
¹ The figures for the number of Palestinians killed in 2011 can be found at http://www.ochaopt.org/poc.aspx?id=1010002.  Figures for Afro-Colombians can be found at http://www.americasquarterly.org/node/2322/, http://www.afrocolombians.com/pdfs/PCNonFTA-April12.pdf and http://news.afrocolombians.com/news/?sectionid=8.  Figures on Indigenous peoples killed in Brazil can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/world/americas/in-brazil-violence-hits-tribes-in-scramble-for-land.html.
² To read the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination see http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/cerd.htm. To read the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action see http://www.un.org/durbanreview2009/ddpa.shtml.

Highlights from the Report

110 Black People Executed without Trial by Police, Security Guards and Self-Appointed Law Enforcers between January 1 – June 30, 2012

1. These executions primarily destroy Black communities’ future and spirit by stealing the lives of our youth. Of the 110 lives taken:
• 13 or 12% were children under 18 years old.
• 20 or 18% were 18-21 years old, just entering adulthood.
• 45 or 41% were 22-31 years old.
• 17 or 15% were 32-41 years old.
• 9 or 8% were 42-51 years old.
• 4 or 4% were over 52 years.
• 2 or 2% were of undetermined age.

71 Per Cent of the Lives Lost Belonged to People from the Ages of 13 to 31.
2. These executions happen nationwide: from north to south; east to west; in rural towns and large metropolitan areas. Like in the years of lynching, there is no geographic sanctuary. Yet some cities—especially in the South– execute Black people without trial in numbers disproportionate to the size of their Black populations. Here are the cities with 2 or more executions.

States where Black People were killed by Police (January through June 2012)

US Cities - Extrajudicial Killings of Black People

Search:

U.S. City Name	Number Executed (Jan-June 2012)	Black Population (2010 Census)	Ratio of Deaths per Million Black People
New York City	9	2,228,145	4
Atlanta Metro (includes Clayton County)	9	399.505	23
Dallas	8	308,087	26
Chicago Metro (includes Calumet City & Dolton)	7	915,436	8
New Orleans	5	213,918	23
Jacksonville	4	252,421	16
Baltimore	4	403,998	10
Cleveland (includes Maple Heights)	3	227,451	13
Memphis	3	414,828	7
Tulsa	3	65,771	46
Saginaw	2	38,800	52
Miami	2	481,812	2
Birmingham	2	155,791	13
Dothan	2	21,286	94
Fayetteville	2	84,040	24

3. A significant proportion of the 110 were killed because they suffered from mental health problems or were intoxicated and behaved in ways the police allegedly could not control.
   • 24 people or 22% might be alive today if community members trained and committed to humane crisis intervention and mental health treatment had been called rather than the police.
4. What is the relationship between “stop and frisk” policies and procedures and racial profiling and these deadly encounters? This report documents how these encounters were initiated. Encounters that began because the “suspect was engaged in suspicious behavior or looked suspicious or was driving suspiciously” show how often racial profiling leads to death.
• 43 (39%) of police accounts explicitly cite “suspicious behavior or appearance” or traffic violations (“driving while Black”) as the reason for their attempt to detain the person who they eventually killed.
• 20 (18%) deadly encounters began with calls to 9-1-1 to seek help in resolving “domestic disturbances”. These included family members seeing assistance in dealing with mentally troubled people.
• 11 (10%) people who had violated no law or had not been involved in any harmful behavior were killed.
• That leaves only 36 people or 33% killed in the course of police investigating activity they define as “criminal”.
5. Most of the people executed were not armed.Here is the breakdown:
   • 47 had no weapon at all at the time they were executed.
   • 40 were alleged by police to have weapons (including a cane, toy gun and bb gun) but this allegation is disputed by witnesses or later investigation. Police are infamous for planting weapons or deciding that a cell phone, wallet or other harmless object is a gun.
   • 21 were likely armed
6. Police and other executioners typically justify their murders by reporting that the “suspect” ran away, pointed a gun or crashed into them with a car and therefore they had to use deadly force to defend themselves.
• In the first half of 2012, police alleged that 38 of the people they executed attempted to run away from them.
• 20 of the people who were murdered allegedly pointed guns at officers and/or attempted to crash into them. Reports often do not mention if the officers were wearing uniforms or if the “suspects had any way of knowing their assailants were not civilians.
7. Regardless of how these encounters begin, whether they involve activity that violates the laws of the state or the laws of basic human decency, no one should be sentenced to death without a trial.In most countries, even with a trial, capital punishment is considered barbaric. So the use of deadly force is always “excessive” (and extrajudicial by international human rights standards) except in certain circumstances.
   • 15 cases in this report or less than 14%, if the facts reported are true, involve situations where the “suspect” shot and wounded and/or killed the police and/or others while the police were on the scene. Although it would have been preferable to stop them with non-lethal force, the use of lethal force in these circumstances can not be considered excessive. But in the remaining 95 cases, killings were extrajudicial, that is, they used lethal force with no legitimate justification and violated peoples’ basic human rights.

Cases of Extrajudicial Killings of Black People (January through June 2012)
8. On gender: In the first half of 2012, only 5 out of the 110 executed people were women. Two were accused “car thieves”, two were “innocent bystanders” and one was beaten and smothered by police because they could not calm her emotional agitation. Please note: the most glaring way that women’s oppression enters the picture is in the high number of deaths (18%) that result from mothers, wives, lovers or other family members who call the police because they are desperate for help with their troubled, often frightening, kids and partners. Grassroots community crisis intervention and mediation would lighten the burdens that single mothers and survivors of domestic violence carry and also build towards more community self-reliance. As one mother whose emotionally troubled son said, “calling the police to calm a mentally ill child is like calling an undertaker to deliver a baby.”
9. The “justice system” gives impunity to murderers. The names of a few of the 110 people on this death roll have become nationally-known rallying cries for justice: like Trayvon Martin and Remarley Graham. Their murders have sparked massive mobilizations, media commentary, calls for government intervention, lawsuits and endless legal wrangling. However, after the initial announcements in local news media, the lives of most of those who were executed are forgotten. The standard procedure in most jurisdictions is for police involved in fatal shootings to be given paid “desk-duty” while the department conducts an investigation of itself. The press applauds their fine records while it screams about the criminal records of the deceased. Almost all killer cops are routinely exonerated and quickly return to the street. Grieving families who invariably ask the modest question, “why did he have to die?” are ignored. If there is some demonstrated community outrage the case may be further investigated. The legal system almost never charges these executioners and even if they do, the killing continues. A number of families seek legal redress through the civil courts and seek financial restitution. After years of litigation a tiny minority may gain some solace from a financial payment. And the executions continue.
   • 37% of the Black people who were executed in the first half of 2012 seem to have been totally forgotten. A careful internet search could not find their names after an initial flurry of news about their killings.
   • 6 security guards and self-appointed law enforcers (including Trayvon Martin’s killer and the Tulsa murderers) have been charged.
   • 3 killer cops have been charged: one for vehicular homicide-DUI, two for manslaughter (Remarley Graham’s killer and Christopher Brown’s killer).
   • That is, in 95 cases of extrajudicial killings, the legal system has only charged 9 people, less than 10%. The outcome of these charges is still pending.
10. A note on the research process:
The data for this report was collected by meticulously combing the internet during the last ten days of June 2012. In addition to searching on “police-involved shootings”, “police killings of Black people”, etc., we also went to the websites of the local press, blogs and police departments in the 100 cities and towns with the largest Black populations and followed wherever the links led. In the course of these searches, we found the names of an additional 14 people killed before March 31, who we hadn’t found during the research for the first quarterly report. Those names appear here. There is, as far as we know, no national database that tracks these killings. Wikipedia has posted a very incomplete list and also detailed the other databases available. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_States
This report covers the deaths of 110 Black people: 54 from January thru March and 56 from April thru June, 2012. In other words, despite the huge mobilizations after the Remarley Graham and Trayvon Martin murders, the killing continued at an even faster pace. We do not believe the 110 deaths listed here are all the Black people killed by police and security guards. There are no doubt more—especially in places that do not have an active internet media presence. We found the names of an additional 15 people killed by police whose race we could not confirm. There were countless others who were in critical condition from police shootings, but the press never reported on whether they survived. With time, we estimate another 30 to 40 cases might emerge. For more information on any given case, you can type “shooting of name, date, place” in your search engine. For more information on this Report or to contribute updated information, please contact arlene_eisen@sbcglobal.net.

“The Report on Black People Executed without Trial by Police, Security Guards and Self-Appointed Law Enforcers January 1 – June 30, 2012”, was produced by Arlene Eisen and Kali Akuno for the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM). Special assistance was given by Ajamu Baraka.

Living In Two Cities: Tarif And Evelyn Warren

May 23, 2012 Gay City News

Tarif and Evelyn Warren at a May 14 press conference. | GAY CITY NEWS

BY SUSIE DAY | On May 14, Evelyn Warren and Michael Tarif Warren, attorneys at law, held a press conference. They stood outside the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse and announced that their case, Warren v. City of New York, had been settled. They had dropped their lawsuit against the city and the NYPD officers who had beaten and arrested them five years before.

Early in the evening of June 21, 2007, the Warrens were driving in Brooklyn when they saw police chasing a young man into a McDonald’s parking lot. The cops tackled the youth, handcuffed him, threw him to the ground, and began kicking him in the head. The Warrens pulled over, got out of their car, and respectfully asked one Sergeant Steven Talvy of the NYPD Street Narcotic Enforcement Unit why he and his officers were battering someone who was obviously helpless.

At the press conference, Tarif Warren, with his usual soft-spoken dignity, described how Sergeant Steven Talvy yelled at them to “get the ‘F’ back in your vehicle, stay the ‘F’ out of our business.” The Warrens got back into their car.

But, said Tarif, “because the police weren’t wearing identification or badges, we started taking down license plate numbers of what we thought were police vehicles. Sergeant Talvy saw us, came over, and began to punch me on the left side of my head, bursting both my lips. When my wife asked why he did that, he punched her in the jaw. Then he yanked me out of the vehicle with such force that he ripped all the buttons off my shirt and ripped the entire left pants leg of my suit. He slammed me up against the vehicle, handcuffed me, and shoved me in a police van, injuring my shoulder and my head. Something that will always be with me is the wild rage I saw in Steven Talvy’s eyes. Evelyn and I knew that if I had made one slight move, we would not be here today.”

Tarif and Evelyn were charged with resisting arrest, obstructing government administration, and disorderly conduct — offenses carrying seriously penalties. But after a year of court dates, prosecutors dismissed the charges, confessing to the judge that they had no evidence.

New York City, while admitting no wrongdoing in the settlement, awarded Evelyn and Tarif $360,000. And so a traumatic event upending the Warrens’ lives is resolved. Life for Evelyn and Tarif can return to normal. Right?

Have I mentioned that the Warrens are African-American? Did I need to? Do you need to ask the race of the youth whose beating they tried to stop?

China Miéville’s book “The City and the City” takes place in two cities occupying the same geographical space. One city is upscale and thriving; the other, in decline. What keeps the cities inviolably separate is the conscious perceptions, sculpted from birth, of their citizens. To travel between cities without a permit is worse than criminal; to be in both at once, unthinkable.
In New York, New York (they had to name it twice), there are also two cities.

On one hand is the city of Normal. Normal residents assume that, though unfairness may exist, their world is basically all right. Normal life allows one to ignore or “unsee” the city of Pogrom.
Pogrom, on the other hand, runs on fear and a paranoiac onslaught of police and the courts against mostly brown and black people. Pogrom operates impersonally, under the cool, reptilian assumption that atrocities are a useful way to manage a dangerous population. Pogrom’s stop-and-frisk practices, its beatings and arrests coexist alongside the hardworking, God-fearing people of Normal, who, given the benefit of the doubt, are simply trying to live their lives.

On June 21, 2007, the Warrens chose to transgress boundaries — they lived in both cities at once, without a permit.

At the press conference, Evelyn and I talked. “To witness Sergeant Talvy beating my husband, who was offering no resistance and doing nothing wrong,” she said, “has taken a mental and emotional toll on me. I’m no longer as open or receptive to people. I don’t nurture my relationships. It’s like I’ve gone into a shell.”

Though relieved the case is officially over, Evelyn described how disheartened she is that the NYPD hasn’t changed; that, after the incident, Sergeant Talvy was even promoted to lieutenant. In fact, Talvy and his officers were in court last week for jury selection, before the case settled.

“It was like they were at a ball game, laughing, kidding around like they had no real concerns. It’ll sound crazy, but the defendants’ table was behind ours, and it was just killing me that if we went to trial, Talvy would be sitting behind me.”

Later, I described this case to a friend. He’d seen a clip of the press conference on TV news; he was clearly upset that these upstanding people were treated unjustly. But when I mentioned two black men, Ramarley Graham and Kenneth Chamberlain — an 18-year-old in the Bronx and a 68-year-old in White Plains — who were recently shot to death in their own homes by police, my friend backed off a little.

“It’s always been this way,” he said, trying to Normalize the situation. “Maybe it’s worse under Kelly and Bloomberg, but things have always been this way.”

Tarif and Evelyn came of age during the era of civil rights and black nationalism. Different as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were tactically, they shared a conviction in an inherent human goodness. They believed things don’t have to be this way.

That’s why Evelyn talks about “remaining vigilant.” “In spite of what’s happened to us,” she said, “I hope, if we were confronted with the same situation, we’d do the same thing.”

The point is, you usually don’t realize which city you live in until something like this happens to you.
“What they want is to frighten people so no one stops and bears witness,” Evelyn added. “If people have the courage to say, ‘No, what you’re doing is wrong and I’m not going to move on,’ then maybe one day, something will change.”

Then maybe one day, we will all live in the same city.

Oakland Police Chief Confronted & Shut Down at Justice 4 Alan Blueford Townhall

  

Alan Blueford murdered by Oakland Police

May 24, 2012 Davey D's Hip Hop Corner

Since the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, there have been closed to 30 Black or Brown people shot and killed by law enforcement or in the case of Trayvon, wannabe law enforcement. Many of these shootings have been highly questionable, meaning the person killed was unarmed or there are strong conflicting statements from either the police or witnesses.

Here in Oakland, California, the shooting death Alan Dwayne Blueford is one such killing.  Oakland police have been very shady with the stories they put forth to the public. It seems like a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters, cast seeds of doubt and cover up their own mistakes.. Initially police said they were in a shoot out and Blueford shot the officer in the stomach.. Later the police said Blueford shot the officer in the leg..Next the police said that it was possible the officer was shot in the leg by another officer in a case of friendly fire..Finally it came out that the officer shot himself. He shot himself in the foot..

Many believe the officer shot himself after he killed Blueford and saw the young man was unarmed.. The police then double back and said a gun was recovered, the community has yet to see any evidence of finger prints , gun residue etc.. Many have concluded it was the officer planting a gun near the scene.. This would not be unsual in a city that in the past 10 years has had to shell out over 58 million dollars in wrongful death shootings and police brutality incidents. This would not be far-fetched in a city that was home to a rogue group of cops known as the Riders who were found to routinely plant drugs and guns on suspects. One of the Oakland Riders is a still a fugitive at large..

 

Adding to all this was the fact that Blueford was left to on the ground for 4 hours to die while the officer who lied and then finally admitted to shooting himself was treated. The public still does not know the name of the officer thanks to California’s Policeman’s Bill of Rights which prevents the public from knowing the name of officers involved in these and other brutality incidents.. Community investigators have revealed the officer who murdered Blueford is Miguel Masso a former military man who lives in Los Banos which is more than 100 miles outside of Oakland..

Blueford’s parents were not aware of their son’s death for more than 6 hours. They went down to the police station were treated like crap and not told for more than 2 hours. Their mistreatment led to the unusual move by Chief Howard Jordan to meet and apologize to the family.

In an attempt to do more damage control, OPD held a town hall meeting at Acts Full Gospel Church. Folks showed up only to discover the police chief would only answer questions that were pre-written. This annoyed folks to no end.. Then he seemed ill prepared or unable to answer basic questions.. He also hawked what many saw as blatant lies.. This led to more than half the room turning their backs on the chief and throwing up fist..

The chief cut the meeting short and left the building with angry residents in tow.. They got at him and let him know that there needs to be accountability and the community would not stand for his lies..The chief was definitely embarrassed.. Later that night we learned Oakland police came after one of the community members shown in the video holding a bullhorn..Chris M They claimed he assaulted an officer at the church… If that was the case when and where did that happen and why not arrest him on the spot?

Here’s a video of last night’s Townhall Meeting and dispersal..Please note I’m trying to re-render this so the quality is better… * quick note.. here’s the better quality video.. of last nights confrontation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCQ9F5hypow

5 ex-cops sentenced in Katrina killings case

By CAIN BURDEAU | Associated Press – April 4, 2012

NEW ORLEANS — Five former New Orleans police officers were sentenced
Wednesday to prison terms ranging from six to 65 years for their roles in
deadly shootings of unarmed residents on a bridge after Hurricane Katrina.

Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius, Anthony Villavaso and Robert Faulcon were
convicted of firearms charges in the shootings. Retired Sgt. Arthur
"Archie" Kaufman, who was assigned to investigate the shootings, was
convicted of helping orchestrate the cover-up.

Faulcon received the stiffest sentence of 65 years. Bowen and Gisevius
each got 40 years while Villavaso was sentenced to 38 years. Kaufman
received the lightest sentence at six years.

A federal jury convicted the officers in August 2011 of civil rights
violations in the shootings on the Danziger Bridge and the cover-up.

Police shot six people, killing two, less than a week after the storm's
landfall on Aug. 29, 2005. To make the shootings appear justified,
officers conspired to plant a gun, fabricate witnesses and falsify
reports.

The case became the centerpiece of the Justice Department's push to clean
up the troubled New Orleans Police Department.

U.S. District Kurt Engelhardt heard hours of testimony earlier in the day
from prosecutors, defense attorneys, relatives of shooting victims and the
officers.

Police torture in Russia causes public outrage

By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV | Associated Press – March 29,2012

MOSCOW — Russia's top investigative agency filed new charges Thursday
against police officers accused of torturing detainees amid growing public
outrage over police brutality.

The Investigative Committee said it had charged four officers in the
Siberian city of Novokuznetsk in the torture death of a detainee. It also
leveled new accusations against a police officer in the Volga River city
of Kazan who is already in custody on charges of torturing a man to death.

Victims and human rights activists say Russian police routinely use
torture to extract false confessions from those they have arbitrarily
rounded up. They say police reforms undertaken by President Dmitry
Medvedev have failed to stop or even contain police crimes and achieved
little beyond changing the force's name.

Kazan resident Sergei Nazarov died earlier this month of injuries suffered
when police officers allegedly sodomized him with a champagne bottle. His
case has caused outrage across Russia and drawn calls for an urgent
overhaul of a force long accused of corruption and brutality.

The four officers charged in Novokuznetsk were accused of causing a
detainee's death by asphyxiation by putting a gas mask on him and cutting
off the access to air — a torture technique popular among Russian police,
according to rights groups.

Police regulations still require officers to report a certain quota of
solved crimes, a practice that encourages police to make arbitrary arrests
and extract false confessions to make their numbers. Police from across
Russia also learned cruel interrogation practices during tours of duty in
Chechnya and other restive provinces in Russia's Caucasus, contributing to
the culture of brutality.

In the Kazan case, officers rounded up the 52-year-old Nazarov on charges
of stealing a cellphone. He died at a local hospital two days later of a
ruptured rectum.

His death sparked street protests in Kazan that attracted nationwide
attention and led to a federal probe. The investigators arrested five
police officers accused of torturing Nazarov, and the entire precinct was
disbanded.

Local residents then began lining up to tell federal investigators their
stories of torture by police officers.

The Investigative Committee said Thursday that Almaz Vasilov, one of the
suspected torturers of Nazarov, has been charged in a separate case when
he and other officers tried to force a 20-year-old man to confess in a
crime by beating him and then pulling down his pants and trying to
sodomize him with a pencil. The committee said the victim managed to avoid
the torture by running out into a corridor.

Many others couldn't run away, according to Russian media, which reported
the stories of several other victims. In one case, a 22-year-old computer
programmer said officers from the same precinct tried to force him to
confess to a theft and then sodomized him, first with a pencil, then with
a champagne bottle.

"Where is the bottle? You always must have a bottle!" Oskar Krylov
recalled a police chief yelling to his subordinates, according to the
Gazeta.ru news website.

The Investigative Committee said it had detained that officer and his
colleague on charges of torturing Krylov.

The scandal over police torture in Kazan followed other cases of police
brutality, some publicized and others previously hushed up or unreported.
They include:

— A local journalist in the Siberian city of Tomsk died of injuries in
2010 after a police officer sodomized him with a broomstick.

— A teenager in St. Petersburg was beaten to death in police custody in
January.

— In another case in the same region of Siberia as Novokuznetsk, two
officers were accused of torturing a detainee to death in a garage and
then throwing his body out on a road.

Activists have urged the Kremlin to change regulations that encourage
police brutality, oust Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev, conduct a
thorough cleansing of the police force and set up a separate independent
body to would investigate police crimes.

Alexei Navalny, a popular anti-corruption blogger and a key organizer of
massive opposition protests in Moscow, said the government should dismiss
all Kazan policemen and recruit new ones as a model of how to conduct a
future nationwide reform of the police.

"It can't get any worse," he wrote on his blog. "And they need to throw
Nurgaliyev out. How long can it go?"

Egypt Police Violence Video

Violent repression in Egypt. You probably don't want to watch this, but it

also shouldn't be suppressed.

http://youtu.be/4iboFV-yeTE

Atl Anti-Police March Nov.21

Nov. 22, 2011 Atlanta indymedia

Tonight, Atlanta's campaign against the police continues.

An ongoing campaign to stop the police, who have been murdering Atlantans at an increasing rate recently, and who have been repressing Occupy Atlanta demonstrators, had a march today to commemorate the 5th year after the murder of 92 year old Kathryn Johnston. Demonstrators also remembered 19 year old Joetavious Stafford, killed by a MARTA cop on his way home from homecoming just last month, and Dwight Person who was executed by police in the service of a fraudulent no-knock warrant just 5 days ago. Demonstrators also cried the names of Oscar Grant and Sean Bell and reminded each other of the ongoing repression in Oakland, Seattle, Chapel Hill, Boston, New York, Cairo, Greece and around the world. The narrative of this growing campaign has been explicityl anti-police, as a mechanism of control. Calls to fight "police brutality" have been marginal as well as calls for "justice" or "accountability" - the marchers and literature have focused almost exclusively on the police as an apparatus and on how much "fuck" them all.

By 8:30, the park was filled with almost 100 people who had shown up for the march. Roughly half of them had shown up en bloc - black hoods, pants, gloves, flags and goggles were seen en masse. Additionally, street kids with red and blue bandanas were out showing colors and ready to throw down (hostility between street gangs has been, for a few, suspended in favor of fighting the police and growing Occupy Atlanta). With over half of the soon-to-be-marchers masked, a group of anarchists began passing out stacks of anti-cop fliers (which totaled 2,000) and insisted that people distribute them however they see fit during the march, whether by tossing them or passing them to bystanders. A large banner was unfurled reading "Cops, Pigs = Murderers" an a bass drum inscribed with a red Circle-A on its side began picking up a beat. Many of these faces were new and many of them were obscured by goggles, tied shirts, bandanas, and ski masks.

At one point, someone called for the demonstrators to meet by "the big tree" to discuss the route of the march. Immediately following the call to meet-up, I overheard a kid wearing a red bandana yell "Man, fuck!" to his other friend in red. I asked him what the problem was and he looked at me and said, "These people always out here talking 'solidarity-this', 'solidarity-that' but as soon as a cop kills someone all I see are these black masks, red masks, and blue masks." I told him I knew what he meant but that at least he now knew who was down. He agreed.

After a few brief reminders about the details of the murder, which amplified the palpable anger of the march, a man asked if the march was going to remain "non-violent", to which nobody responded at all. This man would later be seen run up to cops with both fingers in the air screaming "fuck the police." I guess everything changes rapidly in the streets.

Marchers began chanting "Our passion for freedom is stronger than their prisons" and made their way to the police station located immediately across the street from the park - we were gonna take the fight right up to their shit. The march spilled across the street and up to the glass doors and windows of the station and demonstrators began chanting into the station at the police officers inside who stood confused and surprised. As fliers rained down on the crowd, the march wound its up up to Peachtree Street, going toward the Five Points MARTA station. Chanting "Cops,Pigs, Murderers" and "No Justice, no peace/fuck the police" the march entered the station. Our voices reverberated off of the walls all around the terminal which quickly filled with police. In response, the demonstrators turned their backs to the police with their hands up chanting "Shot in the back/there's no excuse for that" and "Hey hey/ho ho/ what did you do to Joe?".

"Shot in the back/There's No Excuse for That!"

At this point, fliers were blowing everywhere and several citizen-cops began picking them up off of the ground feverishly. When one kid donning a red bandana asked a peace police officer named Daniel, in a truly inquisitive tone, why he was doing that, he responded that the kid needed to "shut the fuck up, you pussy-bitch." Quite violent rhetoric coming from one of the neo-Gandhians. Coupled with the violence of actively censoring the political outreach of demonstrators, I would say this kid and those who share his intense hatred of freedom are pushing the limits of absurdity.

Rather then wait around for the police, the march wound its way back into the street headed toward Mitchell. At this point, protesters who had at previous demonstrations always remained on the sidewalks spilled into the street. Citizen-cops who had urged us to stop using "violent" language against the police just a few weeks ago began leading chants such as "Fuck the pigs, we don't need 'em all we want is total freedom". Something really is happening in this city.

Turning left onto a one-way, the marchers headed toward the Pryor Street police station. Upon arrival, there was a "mic-check". While blocking traffic, a demonstrator reminded everyone of the magnitude of the struggle and encouraged us to, again, remember Kathryn Johnston, Joetavious Stafford, Dwight Person, and Troy Davis who was unjustly murdered by the state recently for allegedly killing a cop in 1989.

As a few chanted "Atlanta - Oakland - Egypt - France: Fuck the pigs and fucking dance" the march continued to make its rowdy way up the street back toward the park.

Upon arrival to the park, the march decided that it would march up Peacthree Street toward the business district - the "neighborhood of the 1% in this city" as one demonstrator phrased it. Although in retrospect, maybe the march should've ended here, at the time it seemed like a good idea: spirits were high and the march was still ready to roll out.

After several blocks of blocking traffic in all lanes going both ways, and a few minutes of rowdiness in a Suntrust Plaza, the march continued up Baker street and made the first right onto another one-way. After a few blocks in this direction, it was brought to the attention of the march by friends driving around the block that riot police and busses had stationed themselves at Courtland and Auburn, just a few blocks away from our current location and right where we were headed. Following a brief and impromptu assembly, the marchers decided that, rather than face-off with the boys in blue, tonight they would call the march a victory and seize full control over the terms of engagement. With a few welps of joy and advice on how to disperse the march into small groups of friends walking in multiple directions, the march ended on a high note.

No arrests, no injury and an overwhelming presence of masked protesters who maintained the anti-police discourse over the liberal "police brutality" narrative. The masked protesters also maintained an open and impromptu public discourse over the trajectory the march should take, encouraging those who dissented with the majority to go through with their plans anyway autonomously - the element of social management was broken down completely during the march except for the few citizen-police picking up leaflets at the beginning off of the ground.

The march, which was roughly an hour and a half, was larger then any of the other marches that have happened in the last 2 weeks and more broadly participated in. Several people, at different points, even ran off of the sidewalks to enthusiastically join the march.

Afterword, many radicals, including mostly anarchists but also several Marxists, gathered at a local house to celebrate the event (a ritual we agreed to continue going forward) and the birthday of one of the participants. Gathering around a fire (start off tee-pee, transition to log cabin to allow the flames to breath), many discussed their feelings about the march and their surprise at the overwhelming force that we have become at these marches. We also revelled about anti-nazi street battles that we've heard about in other places (particularly in Trenton and Phoenix) and discussed prison revolts and the general state of prisons in Georgia (the jails are run by the guards, the prisons by the prisoners).

The struggle goes on.

Solidarity with our comrades in Chapel Hill who also marched tonight against the police.

The text of the leaflet distributed (2,000 were thrown into the air and passed out to bystanders):

Background:

Fuck

The

Police

Foreground:

Atlanta's Cop Problem

Kathryn Johnston - November 21, 2006

Police murder 92 year old Kathryn Johnston - undercover cops raid the house with a "no-knock" warrant and shoot 39 times.

Atlanta Eagle Bar - September 10, 2009

SWAT raids gay bar with no probably cause - with guns drawn, officers make homophobic/transphobic slurs to club patrons and illegaly detain eveyrone in the club for an excessive period of time.

Brian Kidd and Shawn Venegas - January 2011

Police pull over two men in broad daylight and perform illegal cavity searches by the side of the road and sexually molest the men by groping their genitalia.

Roxanne Taylor - May 27, 2011

58 year old woman shot and killed by APD after allegedly stealing from a drug store.

Minors Molested by APD - September, 2011

Several minors sue City of Atlanta for being illegally strip searched in public and suffering groping and molestation by APD - som claims of anal penetrations with police batons.

Joetavious Stafford - October 15, 2011

19 year old shot by the MARTA police 3 times - twice in the back as he lay face down - as he comes home from a homecoming football game. Initial reports that he was armed are denied by eyewitnesses.

Dwight Person - November 17, 2011

54 year old veteran, and father of 2, is shot to death in his East Point home by APD.

The police, protectors of this social order, security guards of the 1% who control us, are everywhere. Their control, their violence, is everywhere that nothing happens. All adventure, managed;all desire; disarmed: all passion, sated; all fires, extinguished -- but in us is a fire that never goes out.

There can be no dialogue with the terrorists in blue. As they run over our comrades with motorcylces, abduct our friends from the city sidewalks and quarantine our loved-ones inside their prison walls, they fan the flames of our discontent.

In Seattle, Chapel Hill, Greece, Chile, Bahrain, Egypt, Oakland, Denver, Moscow the struggle against the police grows. Inside Pelican Bay, the memory of Attica lives.

Fire to the prisons and the society that created them. (A)

Several hundred other leaflets where distributed as well:

The back: OCCUPY EVERYTHING! DON'T FUCK WITH ATLANTA

The front:

Occupy Everything! (Really)

In a crisis, it does not make sense anymore to beg. Though it is certainly no longer possible, many of us do not year to "go back" to the golden-age of our grandparents generation - a Keynesian control that resulted in the complete flattening out of any adventure, on the one hand, and the real subsumption of product into an every-expanding, ecologically perilous, global factory on the other. The age of austerity, which we face today, is a necessary result of the so-called "responsible capitalism" of the last few decades.

Although we are active in the current "Occupy Together" movement, many of us are distressed by the presence of those for whom the seizure of public parks and plazas represents a forum in which to "voice grievances" to Power - as if anyone was listening anyway.

The point of an occupation is not to "send a message" to Power, nor is it to demand to Power this-or-that resotration of normalcy. The occupation is a commoning, if you will, of resources and tools. The occupation must expand to all other spheres of social life as a necessary consequence of what it is: we must take over more shit so we can share it!; communization of this sort does not need to wait for the proper structures or the "right time" just as we do not need to go to culinary school before planning pot-luck dinners with our friends and neighbors. It is this sense of urgency that brought us into the parks int he first place - when so many in the established "activist" milieu remained skeptical, we came together to act outside of the political script to create something that was frankly unimaginable in scope just a few months ago.

The precedent has been set, and eveyrone already feels it on the tip of their tongues anyway:

To move forward, we have to start taking over buildings.

In Oakland, as well as in Chapel Hill, the landscape of struggle is being questioned altogether - that is to say, the struggle over landscape is being addressed for the first time in a meaningful way: how are we supposed to defend a park from police violence? how are we supposed to stay warm in the winter?

The answer is obvious to many of us.

This question, the question of weathering abuse as well as the question of expansion, is not a new one. Many of us occupiers have spent the last several weeks buildings relationships with houseless people - ask them how they live through the winter. more than likely, there are vacant buildings all over your city and most, if not all, of them can be used in new and exciting ways. Or perhaps the city is littered with buildings begging for a new content - universities come to mind as does city hall.

"Stop taking orders - Start taking over."

Our comrades in Europe have been taking over buildings for decades now. Abandoned buildings everywhere have been transformed in "social centers" that serve as matrices of struggle and activity in the face of global capitalism which would render the buildings lifeless. Perhaps the "Occupy Together" movement can learn some lessons from the autonomous movements of decades past in the European context and expand on it for the American landscape.

-some scheming anarchists.

Police War on the Poor: The Return of the Albuquerque Death Squads

November 23, 2011

32

by DAVID CORREIA counterpunch.org

Albuquerque.

On November 13 of this year the Albuquerque police oversight commission cleared one of its own for the fatal shooting in September of 2010 of 19-year old Chandler Barr. The officer, a bicycle cop on her first day on the job, shot the mentally ill Barr twice in the chest after he threatened her with a butter knife. Barr is one of 20 young men shot by Albuquerque police in the last two years, and one of 14 dead from their injuries. The long list of young men—mostly Hispanic and many of them mentally ill or drug users—incudes also Dominic Robert Smith shot and killed on October 1, 2009 by an officer that, according to Margaret Ann Saiz, Robert’s mother, “said that my soon looked like he was mentally retarded.” Smith was behaving erratically and shoving pills in his mouth when an Albuquerque Police officer, using his favorite hunting rifle, fired a round into the unarmed man’s chest.

In May of this year Mark Gomez found his brother Alan high on drugs and “acting crazy.” Not knowing how to intervene and scared that his brother would hurt himself, he called 911. Alan Gomez became another statistic when an APD officer shot him in the back. Gomez was armed at the time with a plastic spoon.

On February 9, 2011, APD officer Trey Economidy pulled over Jacob Mitschelen on a traffic violation. Economidy claimed Mitschelen ran from the scene with a weapon in his hand. Mitschelen’s mother asked “They had him down with the first shot, why did they have to go up and pump two more shots in him?”

One answer to the question, both the specific question regarding any one of the 14 deaths and the more general question about the spike in Police shootings, may be that APD officers are violent by nature, self-selected to the force because of the opportunity to kill with impunity. The numbers seems to suggest as much. Police killings in Albuquerque are three-times what is found in comparably sized cities and is similar to New York, which has 14-times the population and a police force 34-times larger than APD.

And there’s ample evidence of a frightening blood lust among some APD officers. Trey Economidy, the police shooter in the Mitschelen death, posted his job description on Facebook as “human waste disposal.” He was suspended for four days. Detective Jim Dwyer listed his occupation as “oxygen thief removal technician” on his MySpace page, a page that included alarming posts like “Some people are only alive because killing them is illegal.” Police Chief Ray Schultz called some of his posts “concerning” and “very clearly inappropriate,” but refused to discipline Dwyer.

There exists, however, another possibility. The refusal by APD leadership to discipline officers (none of the officers involved in any of the shootings has been removed from the force), and the refusal of Mayor Richard Berry to seek an independent, outside investigation by the Department of Justice (The Albuquerque City Council voted in August to request the investigation but Berry remains intransigent in his support for the troops), suggests that what’s developing in Albuquerque is a frightening return to the extrajudicial police shootings that turned 1970s Albuquerque into a killing field. Endemic violence in New Mexico against Native Americans and racialized policing patterns focused on young, Chicano men began to shift in the early 1970s in reaction to the rise of Red Power and Chicano Movement groups into efforts to target and kill Chicano and Indigenous activists by the dozens.

In 1969 a Vista volunteer named Bobby Garcia disappeared and was later found in an arroyo with a bullet in the back of his head. The killing marked the moment when activists throughout the state began to see a pattern in the violence. A series of police shootings and the deaths of almost a dozen Chicano activists from Taos to Albuquerque, some unarmed and shot in the back, produced rumors of death squads operating within the Albuquerque Police Department and the New Mexico State Police.

And the evidence began piling up along with the bodies. On February 28, 1972 Rito Canales and Antonio Cordova were killed in a barrage of gunfire while the two were reportedly trying to steal dynamite from a roadside construction bunker. Both men were members of a group known as the Black Berets, a multi-ethnic, community-based social movement organization modeled on the Black Panthers and inspired by Che Guevara. Canales and Cordova were outspoken and prominent community activists, particularly on issues of police brutality, New Mexico prison conditions and the institutional racism facing Chicano communities in New Mexico. Their organization operated a free community health clinic (named in honor of Bobby Garcia), established cultural schools for Chicano preschoolers, organized film nights and offered tutoring sessions for local teenagers, among other things. Members traveled to Cuba on Venceremos Brigades, brought Vietnamese students to Albuquerque to talk about the war in Vietnam, and provided childcare for local union members during strikes.

Their killing came the day before both were scheduled to hold a news conference on an investigation into prison violence and police brutality. Police had been harassing the Black Berets for years before the Canales and Cordova shootings. As one former Black Beret leaders recalls it “[The police] would pull out their guns while their vehicle was driving and say ‘Bang, Bang’.” The Berets, it seems, uncovered evidence of a secret interagency group called the Metro Squad, made up of officers from APD and the New Mexico State Police along with Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Deputies and involvement from federal agents. The Metro Squad worked with the John Birch Society, the Minutemen, and other reactionary groups who opposed civil rights.

The killings of Chicano activists should also be understood as part of a much larger pattern of violence that included, and made possible, police violence.

John Harvey and Herrman Benally were murdered on April 21, 1974. After being stripped of their clothes, they were beaten with rocks, castrated with burning sticks and set on fire. The men were found in a ditch along a dusty stretch of highway outside the Navajo nation in Northwest New Mexico. Less than a week later, a third Navajo man was found in a ditch. Like Harvey and Benally, David Ignacio was beaten savagely. His attackers left him to die from suffocation after caving in his chest with rocks.

The April deaths came during a bloody spring as ten violent deaths rocked the Navajo nation and turned the initial horror into an almost weekly event. In the days following the discovery of Ignacio, 60 people called the funeral home wondering if he were a missing relative. When three white Farmington, New Mexico high school students confessed to the murders, stories of constant racial violence in the area came to light. The murders, it turns out, were a consequence of a blood sport among Farmington high school students who for years had made robbing, beating, and mutilating inebriated men outside the scores of liquor stores that ringed the Navajo nation into a weekly Saturday night event. Some white students at Farmington, it seems, displayed the cut-off fingers of their Navajo victims in their lockers. Until the tortures and murders were revealed the cause of death for the dozens of Navajo men found dead in the ditches along lonely highways was said to be “exposure” from passing out following drinking bouts. Meanwhile the police, some remarked at the time, continued to recruit at the local high school for new cadets.

In Albuquerque the Berets went public with their claims of police brutality at a rally that turned into a pitched street battle with police and Anglo provocateurs. In Farmington, young Navajo activists of the Coalition for Navajo Liberation marched in the streets against violence until the Sheriff’s posse showed up. The ensuing melee sent dozens of marchers to the hospital and the rest to jail.

The violence and police killings of the 1970s have returned. But there are differences between the violence of the 1970s and the eruption of this new pattern of police violence. The killings in the 1970s should be placed in the context of liberation movement activism around civil rights issues by groups like the Black Berets and the Coalition for Navajo Liberation. The killings today find another context, namely three decades of a bulldozing neoliberal restructuring that has ground its way through poor communities amid the parallel expansion of a violent and dehumanizing drug economy.

There are, however, similarities. Police violence against civil rights activists in the 1970s was a function of the way in which race and class became a proxy for subversion by the agents of social control such as the police. In the strange logic of the Albuquerque Police Department, poor, urban Chicanos became targets of police violence because of the social chaos that racism and poverty had created. Likewise today, APD is at war with the poor because it has come to equate any expression of poverty or drug addiction not as an effect of structural inequality, but rather as another opportunity to dispose of what its officers call “human waste.” Like elsewhere being poor, suffering from a mentally illness or battling a drug addiction is a crime. Dwyer was wrong, detectives like Enconomidy and Dwyer have thrived at APD because for the Albuquerque Police Department, killing is not an illegal act.

David Correia is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He was inspired to write about Police violence in Albuquerque by the work of an anonymous graffiti artist whose art can be found along the railroad tracks in Albuquerque. He can be reached at dcorreia(at)unm.edu

2nd vet hurt at Occupy Oakland event

Nov. 5, 2011 Associated Press

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — The second Iraq war veteran hospitalized after a
confrontation at an Occupy Oakland protest wasn't participating in the
demonstration when he was injured and arrested, a friend and colleague
said Saturday.

Kayvan Sabeghi, 32, had joined in a march the day before but was only
trying to get home when he was beaten by police early Thursday, said
Esther Goodstal, who co-owns a brewery with Sabeghi in nearby El Cerrito.

"I saw he had bruises all over his body, and that's not right," Goodstal
told The Associated Press in a phone interview. "No one should treat
another human being like this."

An Oakland police spokesman didn't immediately return a call seeking comment.

A Highland Hospital spokesman said Sabeghi was in fair condition Saturday
but released no further details. Goodstal said Sabeghi was in the
intensive care unit and had to undergo surgery for a lacerated spleen. She
said he was mostly in good spirits.

Goodstal said Sabeghi took part in an Occupy Oakland march to the city's
port Wednesday but left when it was over.

"After that, he went out with his friend and had dinner," she said.

When dinner was over, Sabeghi decided to call it a night because he had to
work Thursday. He was walking home in west Oakland sometime late Wednesday
or early Thursday when he encountered a line of police at the protest who
wouldn't let him through, Goodstal said.

"Literally, you (could) see his apartment," she said. "The police for some
reason ... said, 'No, you cannot pass.'"

Goodstal said Sabeghi told her he tried to explain his situation and
officers began hitting him with batons.

Records show Sabeghi was booked on suspicion of resisting arrest. He was
one of more than 100 people arrested by 3 p.m. Thursday.

Goodstal said Sabeghi asked for medical attention several times from a
jail cell and an ambulance came more than three hours after another friend
posted his bail. An official who answered the phone at an Alameda County
Sheriff's Office jail could confirm only that Sabeghi had been arrested
and released on bail.

A week earlier, Marine veteran Scott Olsen, 24, suffered a skull fracture
during clashes between police and Occupy Oakland participants.

Olsen, who also served in Iraq, worked his day job as a security software
engineer Oct. 25. He then joined participants at night at Occupy San
Francisco before traveling across the bay to the Oakland site, where he
was injured.

Wall Street protesters around the country have rallied around Olsen's plight.

Amnesty: Dominican police torture, kill people

By DANICA COTO - Associated Press | oct. 25, 2011

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Police in the Dominican Republic have been
responsible for an alarming number of killings and torture over a
five-year period, Amnesty International said in a report released Tuesday.

The report, titled "Shut up if you don't want to be killed," documents
alleged human rights violations and calls for the police department to
thoroughly investigate them.

"Authorities must ensure those responsible for the killings and torture
face justice," said Javier Zuniga, Amnesty International director for the
Dominican Republic.

Police spokesman Maximo Baez said the department does prosecute officers
accused of crimes including murder and that 156 officers have been charged
since August 2010.

He said police try to minimize side effects while fighting crime, but
added that they face "a very aggressive delinquency."

Last week, Police Chief Jose Armando Polanco said he would not meet with
Amnesty delegates unless they mentioned in the report that 55 police
officers and soldiers were killed while on duty and another 170 injured.
He said at the time that he would not comment further on the report.

At least 154 people were reported killed by police from January to July of
this year, compared with 125 people in the same period last year,
according to the Dominican Republic's Office of the Prosecutor General.

A total of 260 people were killed by police last year, compared with 346
killed in 2009. Local human rights groups say police also have injured
hundreds of others.

Prosecutor Alejandro Moscoso said that between 2008 and 2011, he filed 176
cases in which police officers and soldiers were accused of murder and
other crimes. He did not describe the outcome of those cases.

Human rights activists believe that one of the victims is Juan Almonte
Herreras, a 51-year-old father of three who served as secretary-general of
the Dominican Commission of Human Rights, said Esteban Reyes, the
commission's president in Puerto Rico.

"This is one of the most notorious cases," he said.

Based on its own investigation, the commission concluded that police in
September 2009 had kidnapped Almonte, tortured him and later set his body
on fire. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights accused the Dominican
government of conducting a lax investigation.

In August, the government issued a brief statement saying the
investigation was ongoing.

Almonte's wife, who fled to the U.S., said in a phone interview that she
will keep pursuing answers despite numerous threats against her family.

"We have been looking for answers for two years," Ana Montilla said. "We
know that we are fighting the state. ... I do not believe in Dominican
justice."

Police have said the majority of killings occurred during an exchange of
gunfire, but forensic tests show otherwise, said Pedro Santiago, Amnesty's
director in Puerto Rico.

In its report, Amnesty claims police beat and denied food and water to
prisoners, put plastic bags over their heads or hanged them by their
handcuffs from bars or nails in the wall. The report also claims police
routinely round up hundreds of young men on nights and weekends and shake
them down for bribes.

Santiago said the organization spent nearly two years investigating human
rights allegations and conducting hundreds of interviews, including with
the families of 20 men killed by police and four men who survived a police
shooting.

The police department still has not provided information on how many of
its 30,000 officers are under investigation or have been charged with
human rights violations, Santiago said. He also claimed that the police
department has no guidelines for investigating allegations of human rights
abuses.

The report notes that the department has fought internal corruption and
dismissed roughly 12,000 officers from 2007 to 2010. It also stated that
low salaries has led to widespread corruption, with 45 percent of the
department earning about $140 a month.

______

Associated Press writer Ezequiel Abiu Lopez contributed from Santo
Domingo, Dominican Republic.

Protest over police-involved shooting in Inwood

Sept. 17, 2011

INWOOD (WABC) -- A massive protest on Saturday in Upper Manhattan over the
police-involved shooting of an Inwood man.

Demonstrators are calling for answers in the death of John Collado, 43,
earlier this month.

His family says he was trying to help a neighbor struggling with a
stranger by putting the stranger in a chokehold.

But it turned out that stranger was an undercover police officer
conducting an arrest.

The officer shot Collado in the stomach, killing him.

The NYPD has said it's investigating the shooting.

Bangladesh: Government must act now to stop police unlawful killings

24 August 2011 Amnesty International

The Bangladesh authorities must honour their pledge to stop extrajudicial
executions by a special police force accused of involvement in hundreds of
killings, Amnesty International said today in a new report.

Crimes unseen: Extrajudicial executions in Bangladesh also documents how
the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) justify these killings as accidental or
as a result of officers acting in self-defence, although in reality many
victims are killed following their arrest.

“Hardly a week goes by in Bangladesh without someone being shot by RAB
with the authorities saying they were killed or injured in ‘crossfire’ or
a ‘gun-fight’. However the authorities choose to describe such incidents,
the fact remains that they are suspected unlawful killings,” said Abbas
Faiz, Amnesty International’s Bangladesh Researcher.

The RAB has been implicated in the killing of at least 700 people since
its inception in 2004. Any investigations that have been carried out into
those killed have either been handled by RAB or by a government-appointed
judicial body but the details of their methodology or findings have
remained secret. They have never resulted in judicial prosecution. RAB has
consistently denied responsibility for unlawful killings and the
authorities have accepted RAB claims.

“It is appalling that virtually all alleged instances of illegal RAB
killings have gone unchallenged or unpunished. There can be no justice if
the force is the chief investigator of its own wrong-doings. Such
investigations cannot be impartial. There is nothing to stop the RAB from
destroying the evidence and engineering the outcome,” said Abbas Faiz.

Former detainees also told Amnesty International how they were routinely
tortured in custody, suffering beatings, food and sleep deprivation, and
electric shocks.

At least 200 alleged RAB killings have occurred since January 2009 when
the current Awami League government came to power, despite the Prime
Minister’s pledge to end extrajudicial executions and claims by the
authorities that no extrajudicial executions were carried out in the
country in this period.

In addition, at least 30 people have been killed in other police
operations since early 2010, with the police also portraying them as
deaths in “shoot-outs” or “gun-fights”.

“By failing to take proper judicial action against RAB, successive
Bangladeshi governments have effectively endorsed the force’s claims and
conduct and given it carte blanche to act with impunity. All we have seen
from the current government are broken promises or worse, outright
denial,” said Abbas Faiz.

In many cases the investigations blamed the victims, calling them
criminals and portraying their deaths as justified even though available
public evidence refuted that.

“The Bangladesh authorities must act now and take concrete steps to
protect people from the alleged unlawful killings by their security forces
.The government must ensure independent and impartial investigations into
all suspected cases of extrajudicial executions and bring those
responsible to justice.”

Bangladesh’s police and RAB continue to receive a wide range of military
and police equipment from overseas, including from Austria, Belgium,
China, Czech Republic, Italy, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Turkey and USA. In
addition, diplomatic cables from the US Embassy in Dhaka, obtained and
released by Wikileaks in December 2010 alleged that UK police had been
training RAB officers.

Amnesty International calls upon these countries to refrain from supplying
arms to Bangladesh that will be used by RAB and other security forces to
commit extrajudicial executions and other human rights violations. Any
country that knowingly sends arms or other supplies to equip a force which
systematically violates human rights may itself bear some responsibility
for those violations.

RAB was created in March 2004, to much public acclaim, as the government’s
response to a breakdown in law and order, particularly in western and
central Bangladesh.

In Rajshahi, Khulna and Dhaka districts, armed criminal groups or powerful
mercenary gangs colluded with local politicians to run smuggling rings or
extort money from local people. Within months of its creation, RAB’s
operations were characterized by a pattern of killings portrayed by the
authorities as ‘deaths in crossfire’, many of which had the hallmarks of
extrajudicial executions.

They usually occurred in deserted locations after a suspect’s arrest. In
some cases, there were witnesses to the arrests, but RAB authorities
maintained that victims had been killed by ‘crossfire’, or in ‘shoot-outs’
or ‘gunfights’.

Bangladesh’s two main political parties – the Bangladesh Nationalist Party
and the Awami League – have shown no commitment to limiting the powers of
RAB.

In the first couple of months of coming to office, the Prime Minister
spoke of a “zero tolerance” policy toward extrajudicial executions. Other
government authorities repeated her pledge. These hopes were dashed in
late 2009 when the authorities, including the Home Minister, began to
claim that there were no extrajudicial executions in the country.

Cities Pay Millions for First Amendment Violations and Police Violence. Will Chicago Be Next?

Aug. 14, 2011 MR Zine by Stansfield Smith

Cities Pay Millions for First Amendment Violations and Police Violence. Will Chicago Be Next?
by Stansfield Smith

The US court system has found criminal police conduct (beatings, false arrests, other violence and felonies) at anti-war/anti-G8/FTAA/WTO protests to be so flagrant that payouts to the victims of police illegality and violence have cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.

The payouts for unprovoked police violence and illegality, below, do not include what cities have paid their own lawyers to defend the police in court. These payouts do not include cases that are still in litigation, such as the class action suit of some 800 Chicagoans arrested for demonstrating against the start of the war on Iraq in 2003. Some examples:

Seattle paid $1 million to WTO protesters, cleared their arrest records seven years later, and paid another $800,000 to settle police misconduct cases.

Miami paid out $561,000, $180,000, and $17,000 because of the particularly ugly police violence during the protests against the 2003 Free Trade Area of the Americas meeting.

Los Angeles paid over $5 million as a result of 11 lawsuits stemming from police conduct during the 2000 Democratic National Convention.

The Los Angeles City Council agreed to pay $12.85 million to demonstrators and bystanders attacked by police at a 2007 May Day rally.

Washington DC paid $22 million in compensation to 1,000 protesters and bystanders for police mistreatment at two rallies in 2000 and 2002. These involved a $13.7 million settlement following the 2000 IMF/World Bank protests. Protests against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in 2002 resulted in various lawsuits, netting $8.25 million, $1 million, and $200,000 for wrongful arrests. A 2002 detention of eight anti-war protesters also resulted in a settlement of $450,000.

Oakland paid over $2 million for injuries to 58 people from police dowels, bean bags, and rubber pellets during an April 7, 2003 protest against Iraq.

New York City paid out $6.6 million in attorneys' fees and $1.5 million in settlements after the 2004 Republican convention. As typical of police violations of the law in these cases, of the 1,670 cases, over 90 percent ended with the charges dismissed or acquittals.

In 2008, New York City paid $2.7 million to end a lawsuit by 52 people caught in mass arrests during an April 7, 2003 protest against the Iraq war. The $2 million was only part of the bonfire of legal expenses, including the city's five lawyers and appellate teams.

Minneapolis has paid out $175,000 out so far to victims of police violence and illegal behavior at the 2008 Republican National Committee protests.

The total amount these cities paid for police criminality was just over $55 million.

One article states, "prior to the 2008 Republican National Convention, the Republican National Committee offered $10 million in advance to cover lawsuits from police misconduct -- acknowledging that, despite new laws passed specifically for the convention, the desired level of repression would require the authorities to break their own laws to the tune of millions of dollars."

In other words, the RNC offered up to $10 million to the police to violate whatever laws necessary to ensure the legal protests at the RNC were disrupted and repressed.

The $55 million in fines were for what the press defined as "police misconduct." Needless to say, if I commit an armed assault on a person in the street, beat a person with a club, fire rubber bullets or other "nonlethal" material at someone in the street, I would not be considered guilty of "citizen misconduct." Nor would I expect my penalty to be a fine paid for by the government. I would be arrested, tried, and sent to prison for a number of years.

We wonder, in all the cases listed above, if the number of police officers sentenced to prison might have been more than zero.

It seems that, if I am paid by the government to uphold the law, I am for some reason exempt from being charged for my premeditated armed attacks on those whose rights I am sworn to protect. One should expect those enforcing the law to be held to an even higher standard than all others, certainly not to be exempt from those standards.

That the government, not the guilty police officers, pays the fines for their violent assaults amounts to condoning willfully illegal violence by the police. And we taxpayers are put in the position of footing the bill for the fines for the police's willful assault on our constitutional rights.

Now, we in Chicago already face the same police intimidation in organizing protests at the NATO and G8 summits here May 2012. The Chicago Sun-Times declared July 15: "Battle lines between protesters and the police are already being drawn for the NATO and G-8 summits that Chicago will host next spring." Needless to say, the organizers of the protests have no intention of doing battle, only want the right to a -- so far denied -- permit to march.

Joe Iosbaker,^* spokesperson for the United National Antiwar Committee, said "We want our marches and rallies to be things that people can bring their children to. . . We want everybody who wants to say something to these heads of state to be heard. . . We intend on having our rights respected -- our rights to assemble, to speak and to march."

Rather than grant a permit for our constitutional right to assembly, Chicago Police Superintendent Gary McCarthy said, "We have to train for mass arrests. We have to train 13,000 police officers in arrest procedures and containment procedures."

So it seems once again the city police forces will systematically violate people's right to assemble and dissent, only to be found guilty of violent attacks on citizens later, and we will again be footing the bill for police attacks on our democratic rights.

* Hand in hand with city police criminality against anti-war and anti-globalization protesters, the FBI searched Joe Iosbaker's Chicago home last September in an "investigation into activities concerning the material support of terrorism." Seven homes were raided, and 23 were subpoenaed by the FBI to appear before a grand jury in regard to this case. Almost one year after the first subpoenas, over 3 years since police infiltration into their anti-war organization, no charges have been filed against any of the 23, who rightly regard the raids and subpoenas as another effort to stifle opposition to U.S. wars. Immigrant rights activist Carlos Montes is the latest target of these attacks. See StopFBI.net.

For more information see:

• CrimethInc: Ex-Workers' Collective, "Fight Capitalism and Win Millions of Dollars in Prizes!"

• Tom Hayden, "New FBI Raids: Millions More in Taxes, But Where’s the Threat?" (October 6, 2010)

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Stansfield Smith, a long-time anti-war and solidarity activist, belongs to the Chicago Committee to Free the Cuban 5 and is involved in organizing for the Chicago G8 and NATO Summit protests in May 2012. His daughter Sarah Smith is one of the 23 subpoenaed.