From Chris Hedges

By Chris Hedges

ELIZABETH, N.J.—JaQuan LaPierre, 22, was riding a bicycle down a sidewalk Sept. 5 when he noticed a squad car pulling up beside him. It was 8:30 on a hot Thursday night at the intersection of Bond Street and Jackson Avenue here in Elizabeth, N.J. LaPierre had 10 glass vials of crack cocaine—probably what the cops were hoping to find—and he hastily swallowed them. He halted and faced the two officers who emerged from the cruiser.

“We are tired of you niggers,” he remembers one of the officers saying. “We’re tired of all this shooting and robberies and violence. And we are going to make you an example.”

He was thrown spread-eagle onto the patrol car.

“What I bein’ arrested for?” LaPierre asked.

A small crowd gathered.

“Why you harassin’ him?” someone asked the cops. “He ain’t resisting. Why you doin’ this?”

One of the officers went though LaPierre’s pockets and took his keys and $246 in cash. LaPierre kept asking why he was being arrested. He was pepper-sprayed in the face. One officer threw him onto the street, and, while he was handcuffed, the two cops kicked and beat him.

“What you beatin’ my nephew for?” his uncle, Antoine, said to the cops.

Click here to see a video that an onlooker recorded as members of the Elizabeth, N.J., Police Department assaulted JaQuan LaPierre early this month.

“It was so hot on my face,” LaPierre said of the pepper spray when we met a few days ago. “I was gasping for air.”

More police arrived. They pushed back onlookers, including the uncle. LaPierre was gagging and choking. He was dragged across the asphalt. By the time the beating was over, blood was coming out of his mouth. He was unconscious. The assault was caught on a camera, even though when the police saw they were being recorded they pointed a flashlight beam into the lens.

The only visible crimes LaPierre had committed was riding a bicycle on a sidewalk and failing to wear a safety helmet.

Police abuse is routine in Elizabeth, as it is in poor urban areas across the country. This incident did not make news. But it illustrated that if you are a poor person of color in the United States you know what most us are about to find out—we have no civil liberties left. Police, who arrest some 13 million people a year, 1.6 million on drug charges—half of those for marijuana counts—carry out random searches and sweeps with no probable cause. They take DNA samples from many of those they arrest, even some eventually found to be innocent, to build a nationwide database. They confiscate cash, cars, homes and other possessions based on allegations of illegal drug activity and direct the proceeds into police budgets. And in the last three decades the United States has constructed the world’s largest prison system, populated with 2.2 million inmates.

As in most police states, cops serve as judge and jury on city streets—“a long step down the totalitarian path,” in the words that U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote in 1968 when he decried expanding police powers. And police departments are bolstered by an internal surveillance and security apparatus that has eradicated privacy and dwarfed the intrusion into personal lives by police states of the past, including East Germany.

Under a series of Supreme Court rulings we have lost the rights to protect ourselves from random searches, home invasions, warrantless wiretapping and eavesdropping and physical abuse. Police units in poor neighborhoods function as armed gangs. The pressure to meet departmental arrest quotas—the prerequisite for lavish federal aid in the “war on drugs”—results in police routinely seizing people at will and charging them with a laundry list of crimes, often without just cause. Because many of these crimes carry long mandatory sentences it is easy to intimidate defendants into “pleading out” on lesser offenses. The police and the defendants know that the collapsed court system, in which the poor get only a few minutes with a public attorney, means there is little chance the abused can challenge the system. And there is also a large pool of willing informants who, to reduce their own sentences, will tell a court anything demanded of them by the police.

The tyranny of law enforcement in poor communities is a window into our emerging police state. These thuggish tactics are now being used against activists and dissidents. And as the nation unravels, as social unrest spreads, the naked face of police repression will become commonplace. Totalitarian systems always seek license to engage in this kind of behavior by first targeting a demonized minority. Such systems demand that the police, to combat the “lawlessness” of the demonized minority, be, in essence, emancipated from the constraints of the law. The unrestricted and arbitrary subjugation of one despised group, stripped of equality before the law, conditions the police to employ these tactics against the wider society. “Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” “The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.” 

Once you are branded a felon, as Michelle Alexander points out in her book “The New Jim Crow,” you are “barred from public housing by law, discriminated against by private landlords, ineligible for food stamps, forced to ‘check the box’ indicating a felony conviction on employment applications for nearly every job, and denied licenses for a wide range of professions.” And this is for people who might have had only a small quantity of drugs, perhaps a few ounces of marijuana. There are 6 million people who because of felony convictions are permanently shut out from mainstream society. They are second-class citizens, outcasts. The war on drugs—aided by hundreds of millions of federal dollars along with federal donations of high-velocity weapons, helicopters, command vehicles and SWAT team military training—has become the template for future social control. Poor people of color know the truth. They were the first victims. The rest of us are about to find it out. 

LaPierre was taken unconscious to a hospital. He woke up with both hands handcuffed to a gurney. He was vomiting blood. Two of the glass vials, each worth $10 on the street, came up with his vomit. The police, ecstatic, had the drugs they had hoped to find when they stopped him.

“It’s over for you,” he heard an officer say. “You’re goin’ down.”

“You spittin’ at an officer?” one of the cops said laughingly. “Your boys are not here to protect you now, are they?”

  LaPierre could not see. He heard the officers discussing the charges and making sure the official story was coherent. One officer, inexplicably, yanked out some of LaPierre’s hair, braided in cornrows, and stuffed the hair into the handcuffed man’s pants “on my private parts.”

“Trying to disarm an officer,” he heard one say as they tallied the charges. “Possession. Resisting arrest. Starting a riot.” By the time he was transferred out of the hospital five days later there would be nine charges and a $35,000 bail.

“During the last couple of days the police have been telling people in the neighborhood that if they go to court to testify about the beating of JaQuan they will be arrested and go to jail too,” Myrtice Bell, LaPierre’s grandmother, told me.

LaPierre, who was on probation for allegedly resisting arrest during another routine stop, a charge he says was false, and who has a pending charge of being in a vehicle with other men in which an illegal weapon was found by police, appears destined to be swallowed into the vast prison system. He will become, if he is railroaded into prison, one more person among the more than 2 million behind bars in the U.S. His experience, and the experience of others in poverty-stricken communities, should terrify us. Our failure to defend the rights of the poor in the name of law and order, our demonization of young black men, our acceptance that they can be stripped of the power to protect themselves from police abuse or find equality before the law, mean that their fate will soon become ours.

They are ALL thieves (of their pay and our liberty) and stupid, too

9/16/2013

Florida Police Jail Man For Protesting Red Light Cameras
Man arrested for petitioning the Apopka, Florida city government to end red light cameras.Police in Apopka, Florida arrested a man on Saturday morning for distributing a petition that would put the issue of ending red light camera use to a public vote. Mark E. Schmidter, a 66-year-old commercial roofing contractor, stood on the side of the road waiting for the light to turn red at the corner of East Main Street and South Park Avenue. Once traffic came to a stop, he would walk in between cars and distribute a double-sided sheet of paper. One side had a petition form that residents could fill out and a message urging participation in Wednesday's city council meeting. The other side provided information on why cameras should not be used (view flyer).

"Red light cameras are all about money -- not safety," the flyer said in large type. "Governments choose tax money over safety of motorists."

Officer Robert Campbell watched what was going on and used the public address system on his squad car to order Schmidter to stop. Schmidter says he was not able to understand what was said on the loudspeaker. Officer Campbell described the scene in his arrest report.

"As I was approaching him, I read 'BAN CAMS' on the sign he was wearing," Officer Campbell wrote. "He was holding a large stack of papers... I asked him if he had a permit to protest the red light cameras, and he said no."

At this point, Officer Campbell asked for Schmidter's identification. Since he was not driving, the man explained he was not carrying any. The officer then asked for his name and date of birth. Schmidter declined to do so unless the officer could show him what law he had violated. Officer Campbell said he did not have to do that. After asking one more time he grabbed Schmidter's wrist, handcuffed him, and placed him under arrest.

During the commotion, a man came out of Chuck's Wagon restaurant and identified himself as a former county judge to one of the other officers on the scene. He recognized Schmidter from a previous incident where Schmidter was jailed for handing out flyers on the courthouse steps outside of a designated free speech zone.

"That's the last person you need to mess with," the judge warned.

Schmidter's previous flyer case made it to the state's second highest court which in December found unconstitutional one of the county court administrative orders under which Schmidter had been arrested, but it upheld the other. The state Supreme Court declined to intervene, and Schmidter is considering an appeal to the US Supreme Court. On Saturday, judges were not the only supporters of Schmidter, according to the police report.

"Other protestors across the street began heckling me for making a bad arrest," Officer Campbell wrote. "This information was added to show the demeanor of the group the arrested male was with."

Schmidter says most of the motorists he spoke with that morning supported what he and his group were doing.

"Eighty percent thought we were sent from heaven," Schmidter told TheNewspaper in an interview. "They're so frustrated. The other twenty percent weren't interested."

Schmidter was charged with obstructing an officer without violence, a misdemeanor. He was also given a $65 ticket for a "pedestrian violation" and held for nearly twelve hours before being released on a $500 bond. Schmidter plans to fight the charges in court before a jury of his peers, saying his First Amendment rights were being trampled.

"It's selective enforcement, and that alone is unconstitutional," Schmidter said. "The homeless are in the street asking for money, and firefighters do it, too. We don't raise money, we let people know about the red light cameras."

Only 500 valid signatures are required to force a referendum on the use of red light cameras onto the ballot in Apopka. Out of thirty such votes around the country, cameras have lost ninety percent of the time (view list).

Worst yet

The Enforcement Caste's War on Women

By William Norman Grigg

September 13, 2013

Under what circumstances, if any, is it appropriate for two large men to throw a small woman face-down into a paved street, shattering her face? Is such an act justified because the woman is drunk and unpleasant? Does the moral nature of the assault change because of the way the assailants are dressed?
If the woman is suspected of a non-violent crime, and wasn’t cooperative when police arrested her, are we permitted to conclude that she “had it coming”? Are police officers entitled to dispense summary punishment, or retaliatory violence, against uncooperative suspects?
On August 10, Christina West of Tallahassee, Florida – who was under the influence of alcohol and painkillers — drove her car off a road and into a house. Officers Christopher Ormerod and Matthew Schmidt arrived to investigate the crash. After West performed poorly on several sobriety tests, she was handcuffed and placed in a police car. The 44-year-old woman was so small that she managed to slip out of the cuffs, and when the officers attempted to shackle her again she refused to cooperate.
This led to an incident that – after being fed through the Regime’s euphemism-generation filter — was described in the media as a “struggle,” rather than an act of gang violence.
As recounted in Ormerod’s official report, “West aggressively resisted by kicking her leg behind her and striking Officer Schmidt in the leg.” That action was violent, but resistance, by strict definition, cannot be “aggressive.”
Ormerod and West then “lifted West off the car so that she could be laid on the ground to prevent her kicking.” While she was being hoisted into the air, West fired a desperate kick behind her that, according to Ormerod, hit him in the genitals.
Since he is a police officer, we can assume that the target was quite small, which means that West’s uncanny aim belied her intoxicated condition. Ormerod explains that he and Schmidt then “pulled” West “to the ground so that she was laying [sic] on her stomach,” an action that somehow resulted in the woman suffering severe contusions and broken bones in her face.
Ormerod’s austere description doesn’t do justice to the actual event, as captured in the dashcam video. The officer can be heard snarling: “Don’t you f***ing touch me!” before slamming West’s face into the side of a police car, and then onto the pavement.
In his daintily-worded report, the officer carefully omitted mention of that outburst, which demonstrated that by face-planting West he was engaged in retaliation or summary punishment, rather than an attempt to control a suspect. He described the victim’s reaction to the assault as “screaming in rage and violently grasping with her hands at me” in what he described as an attempt “to grab for my genital area” – without mentioning that this happenedafter he and Schmidt had gang-tackled the woman and slammed her face into the concrete.
When West complained about the injury to her face, her uniformed assailant dismissively
replied: “You’re fine.”
A total of six officers eventually arrived to deal with the bloodied 5 foot six-inch, 130-pound woman. An examination at a local hospital revealed that West – far from being “fine” — had a broken orbital bone around her right eye.
Despite the fact that West’s face was wrecked, and her assailants were unscathed, the victim was charged with “battery on a law enforcement officer” and “aggravated assault on an officer.” Those charges were dropped, but the Tallahassee PD insists that tag-team face-planting of the partially handcuffed woman was “appropriate.”
It’s worth noting that Ormerod was previously cleared by the department after using a Taser to punish a teenager who had stepped in front of the officer’s patrol vehicle. When the officer yelled at the 15-year-old to be more careful, the teenager fled into his home. Rather than leaving well enough alone, Ormerod – no doubt out of zeal for the youngster’s safety – pursued the teenager into the house, tasered him, and then arrested him for resisting arrest.
This peculiar form of solicitude for citizen “safety” appears to be commonplace within Florida’s law enforcement caste. A similar display of concern by Florida Trooper Dan Cole left a 19-year-old woman in a persistent vegetative state.
Danielle Maudsley was arrested in September 2011 after fleeing from the scene of two accidents. Cole handcuffed Maudsley and took her to an FHP station in Pinellas Park. While the trooper filled out some paperwork, Maudsley – who was handcuffed but not secured – dashed out of the building. Cole gave pursuit for as long as his level of conditioning permitted, which apparently was no longer than two or three seconds. Despite the fact that he was within tackling distance of Maudsley, Cole drew his Taser and shot her in the back.
The Taser strike felled the 19-year-old woman, causing her to spin one hundred eighty degrees,  then fall backwards and hit her head on the concrete sidewalk. A dashcam video captured the entire incident, including the percussive, brittle sound of Maudsley’s head colliding with concrete.
“I can’t get up,” Maudsley gasped – the last words she will ever speak. She immediately lapsed into a coma. The injury left her brain-dead, as insensible as the tax-fattened clod who left her in that condition.
During the official inquiry, Cole insisted that it was necessary to use a Taser because “she was already outrunning me” and had to be stopped before she could dash into traffic – where, presumably, she could suffer an injury that might leave her brain-dead. This might have been prevented had the officer – who outweighed the slender girl by the better part of two hundred pounds — been willing to break a sweat.
“Tell me that’s not excessive force,” protested Cheryl Maudsley, the victim’s mother. “I’m not saying she was an angel, but she didn’t deserve that. He couldn’t reach out and grab her? He was an arm’s length away.”
Going “hands-on,” however, posed unacceptable risks, Cole protested during an official inquiry by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
“I [couldn't] just jump on her,” Cole maintained. “I’m three times her weight. If we go down, one or both of us is going to get hurt. The Taser is the intermediate weapon of choice.”Although routinely described as a “non-lethal” alternative to firearms, the Taser is regarded as a deadly weapon when it is seized by a criminal suspect and used against a police officer. Assuming that it is properly described as an “intermediate” option in the use-of-force continuum, Cole’s decision to employ it against a tiny, handcuffed, non-violent misdemeanor suspect is an unmistakable violation of the guidelines contained in the Florida Highway Patrol’s policy manual.
Use of a Taser (referred to as a Conducted Electrical Weapon, or CEW) by a trooper, the manual states, is appropriate only in dealing with a suspect who “(a) Has the apparent ability to physically threaten the [officer] or others; or, (b) Is preparing or attempting to flee or escape. (NOTE: Fleeing cannot be the sole reason for deployment of the CEW).” (Emphasis in the original.)
The manual also dictates that “Unless exigent circumstances exist, members shall not use the device in the following situations: (a) In a punitive or coercive manner;(b) On a handcuffed or secured prisoner.”
While Maudsley was obviously not “secured,” she was handcuffed. Cole’s laziness or lack of conditioning did not constitute an “exigent” circumstance. His Taser use was punitive, not defensive. Despite the fatal consequences to a non-violent offender who posed no threat to anybody, Cole – an amalgam of arrogance and adipose tissue — defiantly told the inquiry that he would do exactly the same thing in the future under the same circumstances. After reviewing the incident, both the Florida Highway Patrol and the Florida State Department of Law Enforcement concurred with Cole, ruling that his actions – though a violation of established guidelines — were “justified,” as they almost always are.
Despite the fact that she suffered terribly at the hands of Officers Ormerod and Schmidt, Christina West was spared a life-ending injury of the kind inflicted on Danielle Maudsley – something that could have happened very easily when her unprotected head was driven into the pavement by two large males. Although the injury to West’s right eye was considerable, she’s still able to see.
Monique Hernandez of Beaumont, California wasn’t nearly as fortunate: As a result of her encounter with Police Officer Enoch Clark, will never see her ten-year-old daughter again.
On February 21, 2012, Clark conducted a traffic stop involving Hernandez after receiving a call about a domestic dispute involving two of her relatives. According to witnesses, Hernandez’s sister got into a fight with her boyfriend during a child custody exchange. When the boyfriend attacked the young woman, Hernandez intervened to protect her sister, then fled with the woman and her 2-year-old daughter.
After Officer Clark arrived, he demanded that Hernandez undergo a sobriety test – then claimed that the Breathalyzer unit had malfunctioned. When Hernandez asked about the test results, Clark ordered her to shut up, then he slammed her head against the hood of his car. After yanking one of the uncooperative victim’s arms behind her back, the officer pulled out a “non-lethal” JPX device – a weapon that uses a gunpowder charge to fire a stream of pepper spray at roughly 400 miles an hour – and fired it at her head.The JPX weapon is designed for use at a distance of 6 to 15 feet, and training presentations depict it being used against armed targets. Promotional literature for the JPX weapon – which isn’t categorized as a firearm, because it doesn’t fire a projectile – boasts of “devastating stopping power.”
The payload of weaponized OC spray is propelled over the prescribed distance at less than three one-hundredths of a second, making it “too fast to avoid…. The effect is immediate; there is no chance to resist.”
Clark’s attorney insists that the officer’s attack was justified in order “to gain compliance and in defense of his person.” The JPX is not designed to induce “compliance,” but rather to incapacitate a targeted person at a distance. Clark – who was armed and wearing body armor — fired it into Hernandez’s temple from less than a foot away, blowing apart her right eye and leaving the left with severe, irreparable damage.
Anyone who had undergone rudimentary training with the JPX would understand that the weapon should not be fired directly into the head or face of a non-violent suspect. Clark’s actions demonstrated that his intention was not to gain “compliance,” but rather to inflict summary street punishment for “contempt of cop.”
Hernandez was taken to the hospital and never charged with an offense. Following an investigation by the county Sherriff’s office, a grand jury indicted Clark on four felony charges: Assault under color of authority, assault with a less lethal weapon, use of force causing severe bodily injury, and assault with force likely to cause severe bodily injury.
Clark, who was chairman of the local police union, was initially placed on administrative leave, and then quietly fired by the department. With the help of the most tenacious defense attorneys the police union can afford, Clark has filed a series of dilatory motions and has yet to stand trial.
Neither the presiding judge nor the DA’s office has displayed an abundance of zeal to see Clark prosecuted for a sadistic crime of violence against an innocent woman. But this is to be expected. Any time a woman is left disfigured, disabled, or dead as a result of state-authorized violence, the official view is that the victim must have done something to deserve what she received.

The "chief" position usually goes to the stupidest

Montana Police Dog Attacks Man Working Late At Restaurant . . . Police Chief Declines To Apologize And Says Dog “Did What He Was Supposed To Do”

Published 1, September 4, 2013 Bizarre , Criminal law , Society 37 Comments

Some jurisdictions have curtailed or even eliminated K-9 teams due to liability — reducing the majority of dogs to drug and bomb sniffing units. That is clearly not the case in Livingston, Montana. Mark Demaline, who cooks at the Park Place Tavern, was attacked late at night in his workplace when police found a door unlocked after hours and sent in a police dog named Bobi. What is most astonishing is not just the lack of an apology by police but the insistence of Chief of Police Darren Raney (left) that the dog “did what he was supposed to do.”

After the restaurant closed, Demaline did what he often did after work. He went next door to the Livingston Bar and Grille for a drink and then returned around 2 am to retrieve his laptop to go home. He made himself a quick salad for a late night snack and was heading to the door when he ran into Bobi. At first, he said “Hey, puppy” and tried to greet it. He says the dog attacked and lunged for his thigh. When he tried to grab Bobi’s collar, the dog went for his wrists. The dog bit him deeply in the thigh and brought him to the floor as the officer yelled for him to put his hands above his head — a difficult proposition with a dog clamped on your thigh.
The police forced Demaline to his feet painfully and pushed him out the restaurant in handcuffs. Then left him in handcuffs as they called the owner to confirm that he worked there. He was then taken to the hospital for the deep bites and a laceration on his back from when he fell.
Raney refused to apologized and stated “It’s acceptable for the dog to confront anybody in the business at that hour, . . . When the dog finds somebody in the building, he’s going to secure him, and that’s what happened . . .He did what he was supposed to do.” The Chief could not be stating a better case for a lawsuit. It is hardly unheard of for a person to be working late at a bar or restaurant, particularly with a bar just closing next door. While the police say that they called into the business, sending in a dog off leash is an extreme measure. While these dogs are trained to immobilize a person, there have been many lawsuits showing that many trained animals suddenly attack.
In the absence of an apology, perhaps Demaline will find some solace in a damages award. It is clear that this is a police department badly in need of some legal corrective action in my view. It is hard to believe that this tiny town has such a crime wave as to need this type of extreme enforcement measure. However, the town may now have to face the costs of excessive police action if Demaline sues, as he should, for this severe injury. To paraphrase the Chief, it is necessary for Demaline’s lawyer “to do what he is supposed to do.”
In another recent case out of Utah, a woman says that officers allowed a dog to attack her as she was asleep in front of a high school. She had previously had an encounter with a taxi driver who had refused to take her bike. She was awakened by the dog biting her leg. To make matters worse, the dispatcher praised the K-9 team saying “‘you two rock,’ ‘Wish we had instant photos in here!,’ ‘Severe trauma to the leg?,’ ‘Awesome extra treat for Vortex and you deserve a Slurpee!’”
Source: Livingston Enterprise
Kudos: Michael Blott