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…
Media Roots Radio: Cyberculture, NDAA, OWS, GOP
Via Media Roots:
Abby & Robbie Martin discuss the age of information in the 21st century and philosophize what the ability to instantaneously connect with people worldwide has done to modern society; the subjectivity of “truth” as history becomes re-written with every passing generation; Alan Moore v. Frank Miller on Occupy Wall Street; The passing of the new National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that allows the indefinite detention of American citizens; the GOP race as a parody of itself with the candidates running and how voting for Ron Paul would be a fun social experiment if nothing else than to spoil the GOP primary.
Occupy The National Security State
Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:
It seems sadly fitting the USA Patriot Act turned ten years old the day after police in Oakland, California assaulted peaceful demonstrators with tear gas and rubber bullets. While police violence had been already rampant in New York in Zuccotti Park, Oakland marked one of the first major violent confrontations with Occupy demonstrators. Soon after, police in cities across American began raids on Occupy camps, many of which culminated in the use of pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets and sonic weapons. The evidence that such raids were coordinated by city mayors continues to mount, even though they vehemently deny any collusion. Most recently, police at UC Davis in California nonchalantly pepper sprayed peaceful students sitting on a plaza.
For ten years, we’ve watched one of the most draconian laws passed with incredible haste systematically destroy the freedoms that were supposedly under attack by terrorists and the…
Taxi Surveillance Cameras and The Continuing Decay of Privacy
Where to mate? 1984 please.
“You lookin’ at me?” —Travis Bickle (performed by Robert De Niro), Taxi Driver (1976)
The use of surveillance cameras in taxis that record both sound and images hit the headlines last week, when it emerged that the City Council of the historic English city of Oxford was making them compulsory for all local private hire vehicles [1]. Many commentators were shocked by the depths to which the surveillance society had now stooped but few spotted that this phenomenon has been around for over a decade, and not just in the UK.
CCTV in taxis is a worldwide development. The globalised surveillance industrial complex offers one-solution-fits-all products regardless of regional differences or actual need. Wherever taxi cameras have been introduced the measure has courted controversy and time and time again privacy laws around the world have seemingly been unable to restrain this addition to the surveillance panoply. It is through such…
Police State Crackdown on Occupy Oakland (Video)
Abby Martin of Media Roots went to Occupy Oakland at 4:00 a.m. to cover the second police raid and crackdown against the peaceful protesters at Frank Ogawa Plaza.
The footage shows the intensity in the air leading up to the raid and the insane amount of police presence that showed up to destroy the encampment. Mayor Jean Quan’s legal adviser resigned at 2 a.m. in protest to the heavy police response.
German Government Spyware Transforms Citizen’s Computers Into ‘Big Brother’-Type Surveillance Devices
Discovered by the Chaos Computer Club, reports GlobalPost:
The use of so-called “Trojan horse” software by authorities in a number of German states came to light after the Computer Chaos Club, a hacker group, published details of their examination of spyware planted on a laptop in Bavaria.
It found that the software — developed by a private company called DigiTask for the Bavarian police — was capable of much more than just monitoring internet phone calls. It could take screenshots, remotely add files and control a computer’s microphone or webcam to monitor the person’s home. However, the authorities insist that they did not deploy these functions. Investigations are ongoing.
Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant with British computer security firm Sophos, which also analyzed the software, said that the spyware could “automatically update itself over the internet, so new functionality can be added. It can be used to install new software onto the…
Occupy Oakland Police Following Brutal Raid: ‘Just Following Orders’
Abby Martin of Media Roots went out to cover the immediate aftermath of the brutal police raid of Occupy Oakland at 6:20 a.m. on October 25, 2011. 500+ Oakland PD used tear gas, rubber bullets and completely leveled two encampments of peaceful protestors practicing civil disobedience. 90+ protestors were then arrested.
Contact the Mayor Jean Quan here: www.oaklandnet.com/contactmayor.asp
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.
U.S. Government Could Hide Existence of Records Under Proposed Freedom of Information Act Rule
Open government? Jennifer LaFleur writes on ProPublica:
A proposed rule to the Freedom of Information Act would allow federal agencies to tell people requesting certain law-enforcement or national security documents that records don’t exist — even when they do.
Under current FOIA practice, the government may withhold information and issue what’s known as a Glomar denial that says it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of records.
The new proposal — part of a lengthy rule revision by the Department of Justice — would direct government agencies to “respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist.”
Open-government groups object. “We don’t believe the statute allows the government to lie to FOIA requesters,” said Mike German, senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes the provision.
Wall Street Corporations Rent Their Own NYPD Unit From The City Of New York
Did you know that for a measly fee of $37 an hour per officer, you can rent uniformed, on-duty NYC cops as easily as ordering a sandwich? Then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani created the “Paid Detail Unit” in 1998 and Goldman Sachs and the New York Stock Exchange among others have been frequent customers recently. Counterpunch reveals:
The Paid Detail Unit allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order up a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli for a pastrami on rye. The corporations pay an average of $37 an hour for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the ability to arrest.
New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per hour paid to the police. The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations…
The New (Northern) Police State
An appropriate post, considering today is Canadian Thanksgiving … Amir Alwani discusses the increasingly hostile politics of dissent and oppression in Canada; proving, we in the north, are not faring much better than our cousins in the South.
“I’m sick of people thinking politics is some sort of hobby, like we can just choose to decide it doesn’t have to do with our life, death, happiness and freedom. Looking at the mechanics that underlie our world is not something I do out of boredom. To me, it seems self-evident that we’re on this earth to learn. Learning and gaining experience seems to be what being human is all about. I don’t like reading words on a page/screen. I’d much rather create music or learn to paint but unfortunately, sometimes missing a week’s worth of news is like missing a month. Missing a month is often missing a year.
Few Canadians are aware of…
Police May Detain Photographers If Their Photographs ‘Have No Aesthetic Value’
How are the police to distinguish between legitimate photographers taking pictures in public and terrorists-in-waiting conducting nefarious schemes? In Long Beach, cops’ duties now include determining what is art, and detaining picture-takers whose photos have “no apparent aesthetic value”. So don’t take an ugly photo like the one at right, unless you want to be carted off as a terror suspect. Via Techdirt:
Apparently the police in Long Beach, California, have a policy that says if a police officer determines that a photographer is taking photos of something with “no apparent esthetic value,” they can detain them. This revelation came after photographer Sander Roscoe Wolff was taking the photo.
The police officer somehow determined that there couldn’t be esthetic value there, and thus, the photographer had to be detained and checked out. The police are defending this policy, saying that while officers don’t have any specific training in what qualifies as “apparent…
1st Circuit Appeals Court Upholds Right To Record Police In Public
A resounding victory for the First Amendment. However, outside of the four-state jurisdiction of the First Circuit, the police state lives on. The Citizen Media Law Project gets giddy:
In the case of Glik v. Cunniffe, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has issued a unanimous opinion in support of the First Amendment right to record the actions of police in public.
For those of you not familiar with Simon Glik’s case, Glik was arrested on October 1, 2007, after openly using his cell phone to record three police officers arresting a suspect on Boston Common. In return for his efforts to record what he suspected might be police brutality — in a pattern that is now all too familiar — Glik was charged with criminal violation of the Massachusetts wiretap act, aiding the escape of a prisoner and disturbing the peace.
Unlike most arrestees, Glik, with the assistance of the ACLU,…
Man Faces 75 Years In Prison For Filming Police In Public
Despite no criminal history, Michael Allison may spend the remainder of his life behind bars as punishment for recording his (unexciting) interactions with officers who stopped by his mother’s home, where he repairs old cars. (The concern was that some of the vehicles were unregistered.) After griping to the local police department about selective enforcement and presenting his recordings as evidence, Allison was charged with five counts of eavesdropping, a class one felony. Why jail him? To send the message that documenting the actions of public officials will not be tolerated.
Entartete Kunst in Long Beach, California
The Prophet by Emil Nolde (1912)
Greggory Moore writes in the Long Beach Post:
Police Chief Jim McDonnell has confirmed that detaining photographers for taking pictures “with no apparent esthetic value” is within Long Beach Police Department policy.
McDonnell spoke for a follow-up story on a June 30 incident in which Sander Roscoe Wolff, a Long Beach resident and regular contributor to Long Beach Post, was detained by Officer Asif Kahn for taking pictures of a North Long Beach refinery.
“If an officer sees someone taking pictures of something like a refinery,” says McDonnell, “it is incumbent upon the officer to make contact with the individual.” McDonnell went on to say that whether said contact becomes detainment depends on the circumstances the officer encounters.
McDonnell says that while there is no police training specific to determining whether a photographer’s subject has “apparent esthetic value,” officers make such judgments “based on their overall training and experience” and…
Our Hypocritical Surveillance State
David Sirota writes at Salon.com:
With the Obama administration considering federal civil-rights investigations into police brutality, some local police departments have reacted not by cleaning up their act, but instead by intensifying their ongoing efforts to stop citizens from even documenting police misconduct in the first place.
Earlier this summer, Rochester authorities arrested Emily Good for videotaping police while on her own property — and then later used parking tickets to try to punish and intimidate those protesting Good’s arrest. In Las Vegas, it was even worse — the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Friday reported that a police not only arrested Mitchell Crooks but then beat him to a pulp — all for the “crime” of innocently videotaping them from his own driveway. Importantly, Crooks may have been specifically marked for police revenge after he had made headlines in 2002 by documenting Inglewood, California police beating a 16-year-old boy.
The hypocrisy of police trying to stop citizens…
