The Day Ferguson Cops Were Caught in a Bloody Lie

Nothing about the Communist support? It seems to be a hard fact. Why do you support Communists?

Why Killer Cops Walk Free

Cops kill hundreds of people every year, and hardly ever are brought up on criminal charges. In the wake of Ferguson, it’s time to try and rebuild the trust between police and the communities they’re sworn to protect.

When I was a white, I viewed the police as a friend. But now that I’m a minority, my view has changed.

I know that to many I still look like a white guy. However, since I’m of Arab heritage and Muslim, I morphed into a minority in the post-9/11 world. After all, white people aren’t racially profiled nor called to answer for the worst of their community. Only minorities are. Thus, I’m a minority, and I view the police through that prism.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t consider the police an enemy. I just no longer give them the benefit of the doubt. When I hear their version of the facts, I now require corroborating evidence. And I can just as easily believe the version of events proffered by a defendant or other witnesses.

Being a minority, I have also become much more sensitive to the fact that the police can kill you without good reason. And while exact numbers are hard to come by, recent estimates are that the police have killed about 400 people per year over the last decade. Our police kill more people each year than those killed by gun violence in countries like the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia.

I would predict that few have issues with the police shooting dangerous criminals who are truly threatening them or the public at large. Regardless if we are white or a minority, we want the police to protect us. In fact, we pay them to do just that.

But the problem arises when we see the police kill a person in circumstances that shock our conscience. In these instances, our sense of right and wrong demands that the police officer be held criminally responsible for his actions.

However, this happens very infrequently. Why? In large part, this is due to a 1989 U.S. Supreme Court decision that held a police officer can legally use deadly force if the officer has an “objectively reasonable fear” that someone will be killed or suffer serious bodily injury. This ruling, by design, insulates police officers from criminal liability because of the unique, life-threatening challenges of being in law enforcement.

In fact, many legal experts believe that Darren Wilson, the police officer who reportedly shot Michael Brown, will not be convicted of a crime. Indeed, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon acknowledged that Wilson might not even be charged with one.

The Brown case would be far from the most outrageous incident involving a police officer not being criminally charged for killing an unarmed person. In 2012, for example, Brian Claunch, a wheelchair-bound double amputee living in a group home in Houston, became unruly. After the cops arrived, Claunch, who had a history of mental illness, verbally threatened them from his wheelchair and waved a shiny object—a ballpoint pen. After Claunch refused to drop the pen, one of the officers shot him in the head, killing him.

Is it shocking the officer wasn’t charged? Yes. Unexpected? No. As The Texas Observer noted, between 2007 and 2012, Houston police officers shot and killed 109 people and injured another 111. How many of these shootings were deemed unjustified? Zero.

Claunch was white. I mention his race only because white people should, too, be concerned with being shot by law enforcement. In fact, the police have killed more whites than black people in recent years. But those numbers don’t paint the full picture. On a percentage basis, blacks are being shot and killed by the police in much higher numbers.

For example, as Mother Jones noted, between 2004 and 2008, Oakland police officers shot 37 people. How many were black? All of them. And even though in 40 percent of the cases the suspect was unarmed, not one police officer was charged with a crime. And Oakland is not unique here—similar numbers can be found in other big cities.

Consequently, few will be surprised that a recent poll found blacks and whites view the police differently. While 56 percent of whites had a great deal of confidence in the police, only 37 percent of blacks felt the same way.

Still, Americans overall are apparently viewing the police in more negative terms. A 2009 Gallup poll found that 63 percent of Americans viewed the police as honest and ethical. (The peak being 68 percent in 2001 shortly after 9/11.) But a Gallup poll conducted at the end of 2013 found that number has now fallen to 54 percent, the lowest number since the 1990s.

What may be legal might not always be right. While the police may walk away scot-free, we still remember what they did. And I would predict that if we see more cases like Michael Brown or Eric Garner—the unarmed man killed in July after NYPD officers placed him in an illegal chokehold—the more negatively the police will be viewed by everyone going forward.

This poses a very real policing problem. Police officials will tell you that one of the most important components in combatting crime is building relationships within the community they are policing. How can the police do that if the community views them as dishonest, or even dangerous?

A good move toward rebuilding trust would be affixing cameras to police officers so that the public can see the events that lead to the use of deadly force. Police could also do more community relationship building by interacting with minority communities now—not after there is an incident. And if a police officer is clearly at fault, police chiefs should not blindly defend that person.

Ironically, while relations between the police and minority communities might be strained, we now share something in common: Neither of us wants to be defined by our worst examples.

Killer Cops



December 5th, 2014

by Stephen Lendman

Cops in America kill with impunity. On average over once a day. FBI data showed 461 so-called "justifiable homicides" last year.

A euphemism most often for cold-blooded murder. A likely way undercount. Based on voluntary police reports.

No separate federal database exists. No interest in compiling one. No way to check local reports for accuracy.

Including how often white cops kill people of color. Usually unarmed/nonthreatening Black or Latino youths.

Protests against Ferguson, MO injustice still echo. Justifiable anger resonates. In late November, Cleveland police killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice.

In a park. With his sister and friend. Playing with a harmless toy pistol. What kids often do. Including this writer as a young boy.

Expect no indictment to follow. Let alone conviction of murder. Big Lies justify police killings. Claims about being threatened ring hollow.

On July 17, Statin Island, New York policeman Daniel Pantaleo killed 43-year-old African American Eric Garner.

Father of six. Called by friends a "neighborhood peacemaker." A generous, congenial person. In 2013, Pantaleo faced two civil rights lawsuits.

Involving false arrests and abuse. In one case, he and other officers ordered two Black males to strip naked in public.

To be searched. With no authorizing court-ordered warrant. Or other justifiable reason.

On July 17, plainclothes policeman Justin Damico approached Garner. In Statin Island's Tompkinsville neighborhood.

Without just cause. Garner protested justifiably. Verbally. Nonviolently. "Please leave me alone," he reportedly said.

"Don't touch me, please." From behind, officer Pantaleo put him in a headlock. Then a chokehold. Garner saying he couldn't breathe.

Repeating it several times. It didn't matter. Other officers helped Pantaleo subdue him. Bring him down.

Handcuff him. Cellphone video evidence showed Pantaleo pushing his head into the sidewalk. Choking him to death.

At Richmond University Medical Center, he was pronounced dead. Clear video evidence showed officers waited seven minutes before giving Garner cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).

In 1993, New York police authorities banned use of chokeholds. Autopsy findings showed Garner had no drugs or alcohol in his system at time of death. No head trauma.

New York's Medical Examiner pronounced death by neck and body compression. Contributing factors included prone positioning. Asthma. Heart disease. Obesity.

Medical Examiner spokeswoman, Julie Bolcer, called Garner's death homicide. A grand jury investigation followed.

On December 3, absolving Pantaleo of murder. Despite clear video evidence showing otherwise. Seen nationwide. Worldwide.

Plus witness testimonies. Jurors claimed insufficient evidence to indict. Days after Ferguson, MO's officer Darren Wilson got off scot-free.

Despite killing 18-year-old Michael Brown in cold blood. It bears repeating. Cops kill with impunity.

Not just in Ferguson, Cleveland or Statin Island. Nationwide. A national epidemic. A blight on the national conscience.

Targeting mainly Black and Latino male youths. Most often nonthreatening. Unarmed. Having committed no crime.

Courts consider this type behavior legal. Earlier Supreme Court rulings provided wiggle room. Authorizing deadly force. In "objectively reasonable" circumstances.

Impossible to differentiate from unjustifiable homicide. Courts defer to police judgments. Claims of being threatened are accepted. True or false.

Making it virtually impossible to indict cops. It's their word against witnesses. Forensic or other evidence. Objective assessments of what happens.

According to UC Irvine Law School dean Erwin Chemerinsky, recent Supreme Court rulings prevent justice.

Last August, Chemerinsky headlined a New York Times op-ed "How the Supreme Court Protects Bad Cops."

"(Making) it very difficult, and often impossible, to hold police officers and the governments that employ them accountable for civil rights violations," he said.

"This undermines the ability to deter illegal police behavior and leaves victims without compensation."

"When the police kill or injure innocent people, the victims rarely have recourse."

"The court has also weakened accountability by ruling that a local government can be held liable only if it is proved that the city's or county's own policy violated the Constitution."

"In almost every other area of law, an employer can be held liable if its employees, in the scope of their duties, injure others, even negligently."

"This encourages employers to control the conduct of their employees and ensures that those injured will be compensated."

Courts protecting killer cops deny justice. "How many more deaths and how many more riots will it take before the Supreme Court changes course," Chemerisky asked?

His new book is titled "The Case Against the Supreme Court." Discussing over 200 years of High Court injustice.

A previous article explained how prosecutors manipulate grand juries. Gaming the system. Getting verdicts they want. Denying justice.

Outrage followed Pantaleo's acquittal. Hundreds protested peacefully. Dozens of arrests followed.

Garner's father asked "(w)ho can control the police department? We had a damn video tape." Clear evidence of cold-blooded murder.

Not enough to indict. Not when cops are charged. More dangerous than ever. Militarized with combat weapons. Recklessly used.

Mostly in minority communities. Against defenseless victims. Unarmed. Nonthreatening. Guilty of being Black or Latino. In the wrong place at the wrong time.

America's so-called war on terror is state terror writ large. At home like abroad. Operating lawlessly. Unaccountably.

Free to kill with impunity. Targeting America's most disadvantaged. Blacks. Latinos. Muslims. Immigrants of color. Activists for justice.

With full support and encouragement from Washington. Obama demagoguery rings hollow. Saying one thing. Backing another. Consistently on the wrong side of justice.

ACLU executive director Anthony Romero commented on Pantaleo's acquittal, saying:

"I can’t breathe!" Eric Garner screamed repeatedly before he died. This was captured in a viral video of his arrest, which showed NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo with his arm wrapped around Garner's neck."

"Why was Eric Garner strangled? Chokeholds are dangerous. They can be lethal. And they're prohibited by the NYPD for good reason. The medical examiner ruled Garner’s death a homicide on July 17th."

"There needs to be a shift in the culture of policing in America. A good start would be for our national leaders to come out strongly against excessive force and racial profiling."

"Urge the Department of Justice to ban racial profiling by law enforcement officers and require racial bias training against the use of force."

"Four months after Garner's death, the grand jury in Staten Island decided not to indict Officer Pantaleo. This decision follows an appalling national pattern where police officers use excessive and sometimes fatal force against people of color and are frequently not held responsible."

"Eric Garner's story is sadly all too common. Police officers disproportionately stop people because of their race or engage in aggressive enforcement of nonviolent infractions in communities of color."

"We cannot ignore the systemic use of excessive force and discriminatory policing. Law enforcement often does not treat communities of color as equal partners in a shared, collaborative effort to ensure public safety."

"It's become 'us' versus 'them' where communities of color are often treated like the enemy."

"Trust between communities and law enforcement is deeply eroded. Police can no longer cast a broad blanket of suspicion over entire communities under the guise of preventing crime."

"We need greater accountability - where police are held responsible for their actions by the community. And we need police forces that truly protect and serve all communities."

What's entirely absent in America. Cops serving monied interests. Targeting people of color. Brutalizing them.

Killing with impunity. Hundreds of times annually. Nationwide. Justice systematically denied.

Revolutionary activism needed to change things. Impossible any other way. For sure not from cops or politicians.

Complicit against ordinary people. Especially America's most disadvantaged. Targeted like enemies of the state. Lawlessly. Ruthlessly.

Center for Constitutional Rights executive director Vincent Warren issued the following statement. Following Pantaleo's acquittal. Asking:

"How can anyone in the community have faith in the system now?"

"First Ferguson, now Staten Island. The Grand Jury's failure to indict sends the clear message that Black lives don’t matter. But they do."

"It's bad enough that broken windows policing over something as harmless as selling untaxed cigarettes led to this tragic killing; it's even worse when the officer responsible - who was caught on tape using a prohibited choke hold, no less - is not held accountable."

"The problem isn't one officer, though: it's systemic. We need real reform of discredited broken windows policing and of the NYPD more than ever."

"With the court-ordered joint reform process in our class action stop-and-frisk case Floyd v. City of New York finally getting underway, we have that opportunity."

Sweeping reform across the board is needed nationwide. Not as long as monied interests control thing. Complicit with bipartisan criminality.

At federal, state and local levels. Protecting America's privileged from beneficial social change.

The only solution is nonviolent revolution. Total change. Scattered reforms won't work. America's system is too corrupted to fix.

Replacing it with an entirely new one is needed. More than ever now.

-###-

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at [email protected].

His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks World War III".

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.
Tags: cops

This tweet nailed it about the NYPD.....
Delonte @mettawordlife83
Follow
#NYPD officers if you really wanna make a statement, don't turn your backs to the Mayor, turn in your guns and badges and resign in protest.

9:01 AM - 4 Jan 2015


http://theobamadiary.com/

Ferguson bob. I don't disagree there are cops who do bad things. Just as much can be said about ANY group. I was defending the officer who shot mike brown. And asking why no one got THAT on camera.

It's Not the Law - but Prosecutors - That Give Immunity to Killer Cops
Monday, 15 December 2014 09:20 By Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report | Op-Ed


Robert McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecutor, announces the grand jury's decision not to indict officer Darren Wilson, in Clayton, Mo., Nov. 24, 2014. (Photo: Cristina Fletes-Boutte / Pool via The New York Times) Robert McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecutor, announces the grand jury's decision not to indict officer Darren Wilson, in Clayton, Missouri, November 24, 2014. (Photo: Cristina Fletes-Boutte / Pool via The New York Times)

Black Americans know all about “law and order”: the term, itself, is code for the state-wielded hammer that is relentlessly deployed against us. No people on earth are more conditioned to concentrated bludgeoning under “color of law” than African Americans, who account for one out of out eight of the world’s prison inmates. Black males are 21 times more likely than their white peers to be killed by U.S. lawmen, and make up a clear majority of young police shooting victims under the most draconian law and order regime on the planet. Of all the world’s peoples, none have been so unremittingly inculcated with the lessons of crime and punishment – especially punishment, whether merited or not.

For a people so acculturated, justice demands retribution – even for Pharaoh and his army. Thus, the simple and near-universal Black American demand that President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder prosecute killer cops.

But, this they will not do.

The Obama administration has no intention of pursuing prosecution of Darren Wilson, or Trayvon Martin’s vigilante killer George Zimmerman, or the whole crew of New York City homicidal and/or depravedly indifferent first-responders in the Eric Garner case. Obama and Holder have nothing worthwhile to say to the nine grieving Black mothers now visiting Washington demanding justice for their murdered loved ones, other than empty assurances that they feel the families’ pain.

The U.S. Justice Department, which marshals unlimited resources to pursue long and sometimes fruitless prosecutions of whistleblowers and other “national security” targets, claims it is helpless to confront police impunity in the murder of Black Americans. The law, Holder and his apologists claim, requires that federal criminal prosecutions under the civil rights statute must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the officers “acted willfully” for the specific purpose of violating the victim’s 4th Amendment constitutional right to life. Making that case, they say, is near-impossible, requiring that prosecutors “get inside the officer’s head” to divine his intentions at the moment the trigger was pulled. Therefore, despite Holder and Obama’s public statements of concern, no good faith attempt is made to mount prosecutions.

The Michigan branch of the American Civil Liberties Union doesn’t buy that argument. In an article in this issue of BAR, ACLU lawyer Mark Fancher, a counsel in the case of the police “circular firing squad” killing of Milton Hall, in Saginaw, Michigan, contends that the law fully supports charges of “open defiance” or “reckless disregard” for the constitutional rights of the victims in such case. Although prosecutions of police are more difficult than trying civilians, the ACLU cites U.S. Supreme Court and federal appellate rulings from 1945, 1972, 1993 and 1997, that continue to sustain the vitality of the original, Reconstruction era federal statue forbidding deprivation of constitutional rights, including the right to life, “under cover of law” – that is, by police. “It is enough...if it can be proved – by circumstantial evidence or otherwise – that a defendant exhibited reckless disregard for a constitutional or federal right,” according to U.S. v. Johnstone, 1997.

That’s not nearly as high a bar to a good faith prosecution as federal officials contend, and an easy argument for any federal prosecutor to make before malleable grand juries. Whether an actual trial jury convicts the cop is a different story, but the prosecutor has an obligation to pursue justice to the full extent of the law. It is not “the law” that stands like a brick wall of impunity for police, but the interpretation of the law by attorneys general and their subordinates who view prosecutions of police as akin to unnatural acts that cannot be performed in public view.

As Atty. Fancher writes, it is “hard to imagine why charges cannot be brought when police officers fire dozens of bullets at a homeless man armed only with a pen knife; or when police use a choke hold to put a submissive man on the ground because he was alleged to be engaged in unauthorized cigarette sales. By almost anyone’s reckoning, such conduct should be regarded as ‘open defiance’ or ‘reckless disregard’ for the constitutional rights of the victims.”

In refusing to prosecute, Obama and Holder demonstrate their own profound disregard for the collective rights of Black Americans as a people. Police immunity from prosecution begins with the prosecutors. If the Obama regime were serious about establishing “trust” between Black America and the authorities, as they claim, they would begin with a campaign of police prosecutions for “reckless disregard” and “open defiance” of Black people’s constitutional rights. There is no lack of actionable cases. As BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley writes: “There is no need for more task forces or advisory commissions. The police must stop killing black people with impunity and nothing will make that less likely to happen than the sight of Wilson and his partners in crime sitting in federal prisons.”

The penalty for “reckless disregard” of people’s constitutional rights, involving violence, is ten years in prison and a stiff fine.

Of course, the feds and their state and local counterparts will not break their pact with the police – not until a people in angry, righteous motion create conditions of ungovernability in America’s cities that allows no other choice. Police impunity is the domestic counterpart of the legal immunity that U.S. military personnel enjoy overseas. The U.S. deploys troops in the majority of countries in the world, but does not station soldiers anywhere in the absence of Status of Forces Agreements (SOFA) granting them immunity from prosecution under the host country’s laws. Failure to secure an extension of the SOFA agreement with Iraq required the withdrawal of U.S. troops, in 2010. The United States claims it has not joined the International Criminal Court because, among other reasons, compliance with the treaty could lead to “foreign” prosecution of its military personnel.

Essentially, prosecutors in the United States maintain an informal kind of Status of Forces Agreement, immunizing the police from prosecution in the deaths of Black and brown “natives” in the areas they occupy. At home and abroad, the armed forces of the racist, imperial State are beyond the law. As such, their very presence is an affront to human dignity. That’s just as true in Ferguson and Oakland and New York City, as it is in Kabul and Ouagadougou and Bogota.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Glen Ford

Glen Ford is executive editor of Black Agenda Report.

That cop got away with murder. He decided he had had enough and he killed that kid. Period. End of discussion.

I told you he was a ******* idiot. (Actually I might not have, but I have called him a ******* idiot before now, and I think you'll find I'm right.)

I seriously doubt it...I think he's too stupid to care that he looks stupid! At any rate I leraned 2 important things as a young rookie...never argue with a drunk or an idiot...BOOB could be both but I confident he's at least one.

Kettle calling the pot black...I'm a hater? Well, if you are talking about idiots and dumb asses, it is true I dont suffer fools well. But I think it is well established that YOU hate the police after you were busted and got your ass beat.

Could someone show us what part of this video is racist??? I mean it should take anyone with only a half a brain to answers this...obviouslyBOOB cant do it.

He thinks ANY time a white cop arrests a black for resisting it he has to be a rcsist...whos the hater????? BOOBS the hater and the baiter

Can someone show me in this vid the woman getting punced?


MORE LIES FROM THE BOOB

OMG YOU DISENGENUOUS POS. You and your buddy BOOB would ahve been the fist to claim coverup and demand to know why it wasnt brought to thr Grand Jury.

No you got it wrong Alice...I hate baiters like you and BOOB...Dumb ass.

There goes that limited vocabulary of yours. You are such a bell end.