The Police-ification Of Schools
The Guardian reports on the new public education model in Texas, in which police officers patrol school hallways, giving out hundreds of thousands of tickets to children each year and making arrests for criminal behavior such as leaving crumbs in the cafeteria, wearing inappropriate clothing, spraying perfume, and making sarcastic remarks in class. Poor children whose families are unable to pay the fines may be jailed for the nonpayment once they turn 17:
More and more US schools have police patrolling the corridors. Pupils are being arrested for throwing paper planes and failing to pick up crumbs from the canteen floor. Why is the state criminalising normal childhood behaviour?
The charge on the police docket was “disrupting class”. But that’s not how 12-year-old Sarah Bustamantes saw her arrest for spraying two bursts of perfume on her neck in class because other children were bullying her with taunts of “you smell”.
“I’m weird. Other kids…
UK Undercover Police Had Children With Activists They Were Spying On
Bob Lambert. Photo: CSTPV
Paul Lewis and Rob Evans report for the Guardian:
Two undercover police officers secretly fathered children with political campaigners they had been sent to spy on and later disappeared completely from the lives of their offspring, the Guardian can reveal.
In both cases, the children have grown up not knowing that their biological fathers – whom they have not seen in decades – were police officers who had adopted fake identities to infiltrate activist groups. Both men have concealed their true identities from the children’s mothers for many years.
One of the spies was Bob Lambert, who has already admitted that he tricked a second woman into having a long-term relationship with him, as part of an intricate attempt to bolster his credibility as a committed campaigner.
The second police spy followed the progress of his child and the child’s mother by reading confidential police reports which tracked the mother’s political activities and…
NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly Laughs at #OWS Police Brutality Accountability (Video)
Via We Are Change:
We Are Change randomly meets up NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly on the streets on NYC and asks him about the numerous incidents of police brutality during Occupy Wall Street. Recorded 12/16/11:
14-Year-Old Tasered By Police in Allentown, Pennsylvania (Video)
Via the Guardian:
CCTV footage shows a police officer pushing a 14-year-old girl against a parked car and firing a taser at her groin. Shortly before the taser was fired the teenager is seen raising her hands in surrender. She received hospital treatment after the incident in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Undercover Police Spied On Occupy Los Angeles In Search Of ‘Extremists’
No word on how much fun undercover officers did or didn’t have during their infiltration of Occupy Los Angeles in search of terrorists. Reuters reports:
Undercover police officers infiltrated Occupy LA’s tent city last month to spy on people they suspected of stockpiling human waste and crude weapons for resisting an eventual eviction, police and city government sources said.
Authorities also used security cameras mounted outside City Hall, where the camp was located, and monitored publicly available Internet chatter and video on social-networking sites such as Twitter, sources said.
They insisted that covert surveillance of the camp was aimed not at anti-Wall Street activists exercising their constitutional right to freedom of expression but at those they considered anti-government extremists bent on violence. Civil liberties advocates said they were troubled by law enforcement’s infiltration of peaceful demonstrations, although the LAPD’s undercover efforts were not unique.
In the end, nearly 300 Los Angeles demonstrators were arrested the…
Should Pepper Spray Be TIME’s Person of the Year?
Slade Sohmer asks at HyperVocal:
What started out as a joke has become an increasingly real proposition: Even though it’s not a “person,” we must now begin to debate whether Pepper Spray should grace TIME’s most discussed cover.
No person, place or thing has come to define the absurdity of 2011 more than the “food product, essentially,” this suddenly ubiquitous lachrymatory agent/chemical weapon.
Pepper spray, essentially, gave birth to the national media’s recognition of the Occupy Wall Street movement when NYPD Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna cowardly pepper-sprayed some unwitting young women. Without his depraved indifference to the freedom to assemble and the freedom of speech, the national media, and by extension the nation, might never have begun to discuss income inequality in earnest.
The pepper-spraying incidents then moved west: The notoriously corrupt Tulsa police department doused some eyes while evicting the Occupy protesters in that city, then Seattle police sprayed 84-year-old Dorli Rainey as she checked out…
The Wind that Shakes the Parley: Police Voice Concerns about Being Used to Stifle Legitimate Protest
This past week has tacked on more examples of politicians using law enforcement to stifle dissent among unsatisfied constituents. NY’s Mayor Bloomberg, for instance, was quoted referring to the NYPD as his “own army”. “But other facets of this story have been developing behind the scenes. Could Operation SHIELD and Ray Lewis raise the “wind that shakes the parley”? Chris Faraone writes in the Boston Phoenix:
As Occupy camps from coast to coast face evictions — and in many cases have already been pushed out of parks and plazas like so much human trash — it’s clear that the institutional response to the movement is escalating dangerously. Likewise, relations between police and activists seem to be deteriorating, as non-violent protesters continue to be arrested almost daily.
But as tensions build between Occupiers and Big Brother, what’s also true is that individual officers are increasingly concerned about their role in combating Occupy. Even in cities where the…
Occupy Wall Street Electronics Destroyed By NYPD
Via Motherboard, the police apparently took baseball bats to all of the property they confiscated in their Zuccotti Park raid a couple weeks ago. Was the goal to destroy devices that might contain documentation of the protests, or simply to punish the protests by breaking their possessions?
Don’t let the media have you fooled. This is what really happened to the protesters property after the OWS raid last week.
The NYPD smashed/broke laptops, camera’s, tents, all electronics, bikes, etc. and took $5,000 of cash from a man’s backpack. That was all the money he had left to get by. The cops are now facing legal charges for violating their own rules and not giving protesters receipts for materials “confiscated”.
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…
Retired Police Captain Ray Lewis Discusses His Arrest at OccupyWallStreet (Video)
A followup to this post, retired Philadelphia police officer Ray Lewis discusses his arrest at Occupy Wall Street with We Are Change:
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):
Occupy Toronto Says “Thank You” to Police?
This letter has been seen circulating amongst protesters at Occupy Toronto. As the camp faces the possibility of eviction, some of the occupiers have been seen toting stacks of letters and handing them out to police on the camp’s perimeter.
Some protesters are irked over the fact that the letter was not passed through any General Assembly while others are pleased to see “the viewpoint of the reasonable” achieve a seat of prominence in the public eye, as some mainstream news media have broadcast the letter on the 6 o’clock news.
The question to be asked is, does this letter help or hurt the movement?
Retired Philadelphia Police Captain Ray Lewis Slammed NYPD Conduct on OccupyWallStreet (Video)
Supreme Court Troubled By Warrantless GPS Tracking
I guess the justices of the highest court in the land (a.k.a. the Supremes) realized that the U.S. government has the power to watch any of them without any legal action … Mark Sherman reports in the AP:
The Supreme Court invoked visions of an all-seeing Big Brother and satellites watching us from above. Then things got personal Tuesday when the justices were told police could slap GPS devices on their cars and track their movements, without asking a judge for advance approval.
The occasion for all the talk about intrusive police actions was a hearing in a case about whether the police must get a search warrant before using GPS technology to track criminal suspects. The outcome could have implications for other high-tech surveillance methods as well.
The justices expressed deep reservations about warrantless GPS tracking. But there also was no clear view about how or whether to regulate police use of…
Smile! Get Ready for Tiny Police Uniform Cameras
Via NPR:
The next time you talk to a police officer, you might find yourself staring into a lens. Companies such as Taser and Vievu are making small, durable cameras designed to be worn on police officer’s uniforms. The idea is to capture video from the officer’s point of view, for use as evidence against suspects, as well as to help monitor officers’ behavior toward the public.
The concept is catching on. The cameras have been adopted by big city police departments, such as Cincinnati and Oakland, Calif., as well as dozens of smaller cities, such as Bainbridge Island, Wash., where the Vievu camera was initially tested by Officer Ben Sias.
“The only thing that really was different about doing business is that I’d tell the person that we’re being recorded,” Sias says. He sees the camera as a kind of insurance policy.
“In this job, we’re frequently accused of things we haven’t done,…
Media Roots: Occupy Oakland — Police Tear Gas, Black Bloc, War in the Streets
Abby Martin of Media Roots was on the front lines of the war in the streets of Oakland during the aftermath of the Occupy Oakland general strike and shutdown of the port on November 2, 2011. Over 10,000 peaceful protesters successfully shut down the Port of Oakland, the fifth largest port in the country at 8 p.m. earlier that night. About two hours later, the anarchist “Black Bloc” came to downtown, smashing windows of banks and setting trash cans on fire. The Oakland PD in full riot gear lined up and marched toward the now out of control rally. They started firing smoke grenades and tear gas into the crowd of people, to which people starting throwing bottles and other objects back to the police. After the crowd scattered, the police lined up and starting to close in and arrest the remaining protesters at the Occupy Oakland camp:
Calling Out The Police For Hiding Their Nameplates
The California Penal Code states that uniformed police officers must wear “a badge, nameplate, or other device which bears clearly…the identification number or name of the officer”. Feel free to remind the police of this when they forget:
Officer Hargraves of the Oakland Police Department is called out by a citizen journalist for covering his name tag with a strip of black electrical tape. Police lieutenant Hu removes the tape while the camera rolls.
The issue of “anonymous police” remains a serious problem. This is especially true for “riot police” who wear dark anonymous uniforms while firing rubber bullets, tear gas canisters and flash-bang grenades into the crowd.
NYPD Commonly Planted Drugs On Innocent People To Meet Arrest Quotas
Ever watch that show Punked on MTV with Ashton Kutcher? The NYPD narcotics squads do something that’s kind of like that. The New York Daily News reports:
A former NYPD narcotics detective snared in a corruption scandal testified it was common practice to fabricate drug charges against innocent people to meet arrest quotas.
The bombshell testimony from Stephen Anderson is the first public account of the twisted culture behind the false arrests in the Brooklyn South and Queens narc squads, which led to the arrests of eight cops and a massive shakeup.
Anderson, testifying under a cooperation agreement with prosecutors, was busted for planting cocaine, a practice known as “flaking,” on four men in a Queens bar in 2008 to help out fellow cop Henry Tavarez, whose buy-and-bust activity had been low.
“Tavarez was…worried about getting sent back [to patrol] and, you know, the supervisors getting on his case,” he recounted at the corruption trial…
