Pepper Spray Is Harmful, Torturously Painful, And Can Be Deadly
To sum up: the burning from so-called “pepper spray” is ten times more intense than that of the hottest peppers in existence, it can cause permanent respiratory, nerve, and eye damage, and in the mid-1990s was linked by the Justice Department to 70 deaths. Via Scientific American:
Aa American pharmacist named Wilbur Scoville developed a scale to measure the intensity of a pepper’s burn. The scale puts sweet bell peppers at the zero mark and the blistering habanero at up to 350,000 Scoville Units. Commercial grade pepper spray leaves even the most painful of natural peppers (the Himalayan ghost pepper) far behind. It’s listed at between 2 million and 5.3 million Scoville units. The lower number refers to the kind of pepper spray that you and I might be able to purchase for self-protective uses. And the higher number? It’s the kind of spray that police use, the super-high dose given…
Fox News On Police Pepper Spraying: ‘It’s A Food Product, Essentially’ (Video)
Bill O’Reilly and Megyn Kelly break down the tumult between police and students at UC Davis: the police sprayed the sit-in protesters with a “food product.” O’Reilly adds, “I don’t think we have the right to Monday-morning quarterback the police, particularly at a place like UC Davis, which is a fairly liberal campus.” Hear that? Violent police crackdowns are basically a big, fun, good-natured food fight!
UC Davis Pepper Spraying Video
The police use of pepper spray on peaceful protesters at the University of California Davis campus on Nov. 18 has seen many column inches devoted to it this weekend, but it’s still shocking to see the video (thanks Miles Jaffe for sharing):
Media Roots: Occupy Oakland Historic Strike & Port Shutdown (Video)
Abby Martin of Media Roots captures some great energy and epic highlights from the day of the historic general strike in Oakland on 11-2-11. Footage includes the strike, the shutdown of the banks around town, the march to the port and the shutdown of the Port of Oakland:
ABC And CBS News Both Cut Away Due To Technical Difficulties At Onset Of Oakland Police Violence
In more on the mainstream media’s bizarre coverage of Tuesday night’s police brutality in Oakland, a number of blogs have commented on this — both ABC and CBS local affiliates had helicopters providing live feeds as events unfolded in front of Oakland’s City Hall. Allegedly, both television channels cut their transmissions when the police began attacking protesters, and both said it was due to their helicopters’ needing refueling. That’s right — both the ABC and CBS helicopters ran out of fuel at the same moment. The moment when the newsworthy events began to occur. One can only say, wow. Oakland Local writes:
OPD gave us 5 minutes to disperse, and then attacked the crowd with tear gas, flash grenades, and rubber bullets. I was there until that point, and I can testify that it was a peaceful march until the police attacked it.
Moreover, they just happened to begin firing tear gas into…
Washington Post’s Coverage Of Oakland Police Rampage: Officer Petting Kitten
Also, protesters are “wearing out their welcome.” Via Wonkette:
Yeah that captures the scene just right! Faced with endless photographic documentation of the insane violence of 500 riot cops against a group of protesters in Oakland, the Washington Post editors proved they are good Kaplan 1% corporate lackeys and choose this picture of…a riot cop petting a kitten.
Providing some historical perspective on the use of gas canisters against dissidents, the news blog adds:
Chicano journalist Rubén Salazar was assassinated by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department with a tear gas canister shot through his skull, back in 1970. He had been told by the cops that his coverage of the anti-war Chicano movement was too sympathetic, and he was killed at point blank range by a sheriff’s deputy who was never prosecuted.
Iraq Veteran In Critical Condition After Being Shot By Police At Occupy Oakland
On Tuesday night, the Oakland police staged a brutal attack on peaceful protesters gathered outside of City Hall. Among the worst injured was Scott Olsen, a 24-year-old ex-Marine who served two tours in Iraq and now works as an IT systems analyst and volunteers in anti-war groups. He is in critical condition with a fractured skull and brain swelling after being shot in the face by an officer with a teargas canister, the Guardian reports. Someone managed to capture this shocking video of police maliciously using a explosive device against a group of people as they attempt to move the gravely wounded Olsen to safety:
Night Of Police Clashes With Occupy Oakland Protestors
Tues
day morning, police forcibly cleared hundreds of people from the public plaza near Oakland’s City Hall. When the protesters tried to reassemble at the plaza last night, officers over loudspeaker ordered people to disperse or risk “chemical agents.” Riot police then attacked with tear gas, smoke bombs, and rubber bullets in a scene that seemed to devolve into chaos. Firsthand accounts and video footage make it pretty clear that this was a case of widespread and unprovoked police brutality, including officers gassing and firing upon children, the elderly, veterans, and the disabled.
MSNBC On Police Brutality At The Occupy Wall Street Protests
It’s a shock to hear this kind of candid criticism and revealing of police misbehavior coming from a mainstream media outlet:
Peaceful Protesters Penned And Maced
The Occupy Wall St. site has footage of the disturbing pattern of police abuse from the protests near New York City’s Wall Street and Union Square, including this example of police entrapping female protesters in net barriers and macing them:
Video: Witness Filmed Miami Police Shooting, Hid Memory Card In Mouth To Save Footage
Pretty incredible — after Narces Benoit and his girlfriend witnessed a deadly police shooting, officers put guns to their heads and smashed their cellphones in an effort to destroy the video he had shot. However, Benoit had managed to slip the memory card out of his phone and kept it hidden in his mouth throughout the ordeal, even while interrogated, CNN reports. Footage below:
Department Of Justice Declares New Orleans Police Force “A Threat To The Safety Of The Public”
“Police in the US now rival criminals, and exceed terrorists as the greatest threat to the American public.”
Yes, there are bad cops everywhere, but the corrupt, racist, and violent New Orleans police department — in which officers engage in rape, arson, kidnapping, bank robberies, and murder, and citizens are arrested for little or no reason, held without charges for months, and routinely brutalized and tortured — is a different matter altogether. It is little exaggeration to say that the NOPD has become a criminal gang terrorizing the city’s residents. The New Statesman reports:
Something terrible lies at the heart of New Orleans – a rampant, widespread and apparently uncontrollable brutality on the part of its police force and its prison service. The horrors of its criminal justice system from decades before Hurricane Katrina and up to now lie somewhere between, with little exaggeration, Candide and Stalin’s Gulags.
Spit on the sidewalk here, and you may…
Video: Brazil Officers Shoot 14 Year-Old Boy Being Questioned
A 14 year-old boy was shot last August by five military officers in Brazil who claimed they were questioning him about a crime. The officers were arrested on Wednesday after a security camera video was found capturing the incident. The boy was hospitalized for ten days and luckily survived after one of the bullets just missed the boy’s lungs. The video is quite shocking. Via the Associated Press:
Police Officer Threatens To Taser Man’s Genitals
Toronto police officer gets aggressive with his Taser against a handcuffed suspect (did he watch The Hangover the night before?):
Oklahoma Police Taze Bedridden 86-Year-Old Grandmother For “Aggressive Posture In Her Bed”
The cops-abusing-their-tasers story to top them all? Maybe not — I am still expecting a “baby-tazing” incident shortly. From the Courthouse News Service:
Police tasered an 86-year-old disabled grandma in her bed and stepped on her oxygen hose until she couldn’t breathe, after her grandson called 911 seeking medical assistance, the woman and her grandson claim in Oklahoma City Federal Court. Though the grandson said, “Don’t Taze my granny!” an El Reno police officer told another cop to “Taser her!” and wrote in his police report that he did so because the old woman “took a more aggressive posture in her bed,” according to the complaint.
Lonnie Tinsley claims that he called 911 after he went to check on his grandmother, whom he found in her bed, “connected to a portable oxygen concentrator with a long hose…to ask for an emergency medical technician to come to her apartment to evaluate her.”
In response,…
California’s Bay-Area Transit Police Stripped Of Tasers
Photo: D.C.Atty (CC)
Have we finally reached the point at which police over-use and abuse of tasers will start resulting in the danged devices being taken away? The Bay Area’s BART police are losing their tasers after a police sergeant attempted to tase a 13-year-old boy on a bicycle whom he was pursuing by car. Oh, and there was last year’s fatal shooting of an unarmed, restrained man on a subway platform after a BART police officer confused his handgun with his taser. California’s KTVU reports:
OAKLAND, Calif. — Following an incident involving a BART police sergeant inappropriately discharging his Taser, transit agency officials have ordered all its officers to hand in the controversial weapons Thursday until further training could be undertaken, KTVU has learned.
The final straw, apparently, came after an April 1st incident when BART police sergeant who was responding to a call about an alleged assault at the Richmond BART station.
Multiple sources…
Video Of Maryland Police Brutally Beating Student
Walking on campus as students celebrated a basketball victory, University of Maryland student John McKenna was suddenly surrounded by a group of police officers, on foot and horseback, who began beating, kicking, and clubbing him. The police claimed that McKenna had attacked them, and he was charged with assaulting an officer. Luckily, the event was caught on tape.
LAPD’s Death Squad
From the Examiner:
My grandfather was a hired gun for a rail road which has long since gone out of business. After returning from World War I, he found employment with the Los Angeles Police Department in the 1920’s.
Hired gun is an accurate description of law enforcement in those days. Most people “learn” their history from movies and television. Hollywood’s historical timeline seems to end with Westerns depicting the era of the great cattle drives of the later 1800s and pick up again with depression era gangster movies and the ubiquitous obligatory Irish cop.
Combine all that with most Hollywood writers being from New York and in the business to entertain and not inform and we have a very uninformed populace.
Contrary to the myth of the Wild West, which was never very wild, there were more gunfights in the twenty year run of the old television series “Gun Smoke” than there were…
