Thursday, June 25, 2020

US POLICE OPPRESSION ARCHIVE OF ARTICLES, SEPTEMBER 7, 2016 TO JUNE 25, 2020


POLICE VIOLENCE AND MILITARISM: STEPS TOWARD TOTALITARIANISM ARCHIVE
 June 25, 2020
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology


So many articles have been published on police oppression in popularresistance.org, mronline.org, and other online magazines (plus a few print sources and a film or two) that my selective anthologizing has been overwhelmed.  (I am working on #6.)  You have here instead an archive in reverse chronological order from September 7, 2016, to June 25, 2020, from which all of us can draw for our own resistance.

(2nd installment from June 27 to July 28)

NEXT 10 FROM Popular Resistance.org (6-25-20)
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Arrest Of Activist Leads To Protests; At Least Four Vehicles Strike Protesters

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhiDd03Cj6DOyOAZU-JV8HFyfHlcj_rfeWvlKw70vfAgz6qL3bR0wStUz1xXLNn8uaEowdfDVajKM0wCsexdtddk2q-vNouPH0ZI2Qami0mq2XZDlHTkG7gyXVmt_zoVMAw4Itd3vwrKTkddBbkHHsrZWZm0oq3ekAVqcSMRQv_I1CtGuRDIcxfC5SY20sjjrwP3tveAju-wcA5VxshpcwMQsd2=s0-d-e1-ftBy Robert Chappell, Madison365. Hundreds of people are protesting in downtown Madison after the arrest of activist Yeshua Musa. Videos of the arrest posted to social media show as many as five police officers wrestling Musa, also known as Devonere Johnson, to the ground and carrying him to the back seat of a police cruiser, while he asks what he’s being arrested for. After officers get him into the car, he can be seen jumping out of the opposite car door before being tackled again and taken into custody. In one of the videos, witnesses can be heard asking why Musa is being arrested and saying he had only been speaking in a megaphone... -more-
 

NYPD Enforcement Of Low-Level Offenses Accounts For Huge Department Expenditures, Racial Disparities

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhmmySfF49beH80lvBe409uiCT3DXPIYDdDB1j1Bdjh0d_uvWpYML9-C7vA2ufpev6iNBwhCCyIqco92oOQJ5yG4stV5L1OpO66qkU9dMDmDz4Fo1I7WUsPw9lGDydGYmS4V_LE-8V0osrLzqjXd8iHgBsGa0COZTZF9372ylBQhz50C_eDxSV0jeg9wS8nsriV6eh_5GJPPLcZ56ljRRZzlDEGlTFO_FFpQu7zbuzLv-DrJxncvDvN0h7ewK6AJw=s0-d-e1-ftBy Drug Policy Alliance. New York City criminalizes drugs and low-level broken windows offenses at a startling rate, with enforcement in these areas accounting for a vast proportion of the NYPD’s policing activities and the city’s budget, according to a new brief from Drug Policy Alliance. DPA released the brief in support of the Communities United for Police Reform coalition call for Mayor de Blasio and the NYC Council to cut the FY21 NYPD expense budget by $1 billion and redirect savings to core needs in Black, Latinx and other NYC communities of color that have long been the target of the drug war and racist policing.   -more-
 

There’s No Predicting When Movements Will Erupt

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjC66R4Ud-CrW5r-JkzD1fjETsJNmr7M5ycviUrp0lbPUg4rV-gok6chVUM6QFmQPuBCTiONCya5rY4uj169cH9e_evXLk64PraookeHNiJTW5cfjExGzPbWkgqfRwShDkql3xLNjLK1RB2vTEz-T0kiOjkDdVG9Mq5P7sbboK4i7odS_hyphenhypheng3HfqUf8YqX3U1Pi=s0-d-e1-ftBy Arnie Alpert, Waging Nonviolence. When Claudette Colvin, a Black teenager from Montgomery, Alabama, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus, few people paid attention. A few months later, when Rosa Parks was arrested for the same act, it touched off a yearlong bus boycott and ignited a movement. When Seymour Hersh revealed the details of the My Lai Massacre in 1969, it touched off Congressional investigations but not mass action. When President Nixon announced that U.S. troops had invaded Cambodia the following spring, college campuses, including Kent State, erupted in protest.  -more- 

Mapping Police Violence Across The USA

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjyODxJNuaUngUD0NfytdkFoIZracSkC2knDJrxwh0b4iEPuKQ6g-lHhHBJ_4qudfCECVUXySgYeEdkLTNphyphenhyphenHm5ShCqFvlOLsZ6b_I_gtaRkHMBYPSOsEFbUcLcSj_vnadoWpki_MHG55MJem1qlxxFpowICR7Cu9_u6vyyAraopvPMFue-Qe2pF7HXECZ1vEb3BCkyqzOdqM1bBZDlY37id4DPrxvpWHP3qpAQmJgx63C6u6Qaz7kAbwZjQXF0sKoQdy7lZpqpGr28dFZCZO6r7xVtrIhb8Jh3FWWew=s0-d-e1-ftBy Amnesty International. Police forces across the United States have committed widespread and egregious human rights violations in response to largely peaceful assemblies protesting systemic racism and police violence, including the killing of Black people. Amnesty International has documented 125 separate incidents of police violence against protesters in 40 states and the District of Columbia between 26 May and 5 June 2020. These acts of excessive force were committed by members of state and local police departments, as well as by National Guard troops and security force personnel from several federal agencies.  -more-
 

What Elinor Ostrom’s Work Tells Us About Defunding The Police
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEj10ICgg-_2w3Erh-Nrb_5J71jDcvLXLVFAMuPCfO2XXuCoCaXEwRzH77nug4vexJ3aj6uNey6QrZKJXkkHHtixalen_tUwfemn58VDQ6SnUlUNriH-mzCKnyF-iRBlIcD2mapKrZqFm0OFGOdwR_CBgbVwpT_PFu9vhtsfSdz92ehMsVHspy9rMEM2jXi5CcB0PbKSStXLNg_jhi72s717zGYPqakH3FphXxqTsQutlyE1gbxz4A=s0-d-e1-ftBy Aaron Vansintjan, Shareable. In the past weeks, I’ve watched the news about the explosion of protests against police brutality and racism in the United States and around the world, and the resulting conversations on police defunding, reform or abolition. As I scrolled through social media and obsessively scanned and rescanned the headlines, a small thought tugged at me.  It was the story of how one of my heroes, Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009, had arrived at the research that made her famous. Ostrom has become celebrated as the person who introduced the world...  -more-
 

Police Lessons From Cuba

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEiCnTB4b11G8i9v2cwYnXVm7A20IjWPBCiqotFcj6ofOPJ9wqgvt8Q0om9IVVsVPR0a6qOLxQebnKiB12S-kQhr3frAoBr4FyaxeEDZhO2YBiuWYNRoQmEoq2xhepaywWdihivLIAV9d12JqTjqKvxtTGkQ1myVURp10obu3wc-r3dHUsJ8frTYeYZgVZPS39DBtK_CJhHnnCiOdajHmH-e7gcPhUGn5A4cCcpl2aLoGbQX6dH6tXo8KZ1bkgKHt6G3N4mk5w=s0-d-e1-ftBy Reese Erlich, The Progressive. Contrary to the image of brutal and repressive communists, police in Cuba offer an instructive example for activists in the United States. Police live in the cities they patrol. They generally treat citizens with respect. As I documented in my book Dateline Havana, police beatings of criminals are rare and police murders are nonexistent. Cuba has one of the lowest crime rates in Latin America. The ongoing protests for Black lives in the United States have forced an unprecedented national debate about the role of policing. Should police departments be defunded and that money be diverted to help poor communities?  -more-
 

Class And Racial Inequalities In Police Killings

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhpeynTuF9TS59xCMrpcfk7OBhJRwjGU2MjHdHM5jyaSFF_hG_BPl0kFVOSwbnqLAcTiaM7oELSMhyphenhyphenUJvKKbt3M7TWrfoQgEkmolK5JTyjCPeIlD9Y144bswSBLAEOnbkYiXAbUDLfBhV_harYNfQ_e_m1NSpNljovI8yo6qojBqCW8EW7zMgLkvXqejmGmQDtkC4tahne8fLgycDHQfJEqhVQIBoT1p4gjZJnBUawq509SK_UWlbJZw8qot7E-THCd9g99HT86uDMZRatgVtzED8r32GpCDZ-BCRSbcIg3HcoyyTM6rmRp_orIJNDCw5CZVAY=s0-d-e1-ftBy Justin Feldman, People's Policy Project. “Police Killings in the US: Inequalities by Race/Ethnicity and Socioeconomic Position" examines the databases of police killings contain important demographic information like race, gender, and age. But they do not contain socioeconomic information like education and income. This analysis shows that socioeconomic position plays a big role in police killings. The highest-poverty areas have a police killing rate of 6.4 per million while the lowest-poverty areas have a police killing rate of 1.8 per million, a 3.5-fold difference. A similar class skew exists within each racial group as well.  -more-
 

Report: White Supremacy Is A Pre-Existing Condition

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjxyOLP_EJAjEfp7WXiseoJXIASFyhHIAjW8UVRyDgwLb3fM5Su_LGXkDg6hENhq9UtRJWGPnsLGeJD0V08X9rUGKgE7yQBJF_HVQQafw31Y15vsHK4b1OZI1_WLEDHyM7qNawEmo6si9JF-aM_N2xL7kmdRVczSdGKRXoRDsd2qqYd5GKHgzFqy7uirwmeCJmpmC0IvhSTlUJCRWtTVoe-oFWJfBxry19s=s0-d-e1-ftBy Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Chuck Collins, and Omar Ocampo, Institute for Policy Studies.  For months now, a deadly pandemic and deep recession have pummeled the U.S. economy. Yet even as tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs, U.S. billionaires saw their collective wealth increase by leaps and bounds.  At the same time, the Movement for Black Lives has drawn attention not just to police brutality against Black Americans, but to systemic racism more broadly. A huge cause and consequence of that systemic injustice is the underlying racial wealth divide — the financial legacy of centuries of white supremacy.  -more-
 

Occupation Of New York City Hall To Defund The Police

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjnpdeGFwozlOSRlqB2w7TuHTYahZEesVyXj8vHanpC3wYTAnk6vFHuO_d6DCQZLmiI5WUw8e4Jokwy4xkgy_7vEksoEaqHuZ4mfpYLzeG8vUAsInJezxpRy4PtiEUyKQtvHfEm5T68GBMuyfW4s_a4BnrKI_VbdciSHITQFaTMaVklvaYzT-X29YNLrG2q1C4UNE0o80dtY8CcfizIxAiTvw=s0-d-e1-ftBy Change the NYPD. New York City - More than 170 local & national organizations, brought together by Communities United for Police Reform (CPR), released a follow-up to their April letter calling on New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson to cut at least $1 billion directly from the NYPD expense budget by the June 30th deadline and redirect resources for FY21 to core social programs that are essential for Black, Latinx and other communities hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic.  In the letter released today, CPR and the #NYCBudgetJustice coalition make it clear that the call “to cut at... -more-
 

Juneteenth #BlueLeaks: Millions Of Police And FBI Documents Made Public

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhGB06tFQ4ckd5MWTagM4-1SA28Ik1Mb4zUxGjXu6TEo09BGwNVQHu-oOHinjDMX_MaCIGpThDLeuyFssBkEHRNRcs3zNO3bwUd_Qs3UPXoQGLClaQXWj5yh8L-0Nz7X4En-_W5vcZn2ey4h6exbrklYwjiuu50Fn_-lgKaQQsc6k6gwh0CWiElXQlhCNwf7tbm4zdoIYnBXHgz50c5iJAPqUbiHwML2i-bZOMPJA=s0-d-e1-ftBy Andy Greenberg, Wired. It's been the better part of a decade since the hacktivist group Anonymous rampaged across the internet, stealing and leaking millions of secret files from dozens of US organizations. Now, amid the global protests following the killing of George Floyd, Anonymous is back—and it's returned with a dump of hundreds of gigabytes of law enforcement files and internal communications. On Friday of last week, the Juneteenth holiday, a leak-focused activist group known as Distributed Denial of Secrets published a 269-gigabyte collection of police data that includes emails, audio, video, and intelligence documents, with more than... -more-

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Mronline.org (6-25-20)  (NEXT 3)
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhdpNjIPtVzNsZ3D-QqJ0RLdpkPw10R0Y31CtXunMRIMoXrss9EzAOMErnuZiZYP3rGThPlHXA56Mb4pssHSORi0IUZmDo_UNmQQzkxjfwjootgzgzxgsrWsZeDy29LHu-SpuqChloiWnL546wueJZnMyLnte_z6Lf7mtxU=s0-d-e1-ft
Why have the powers of the police expanded over decades, while funding for vital social services shrinks? Laissez-faire capitalism goes hand-in-hand with brutal coercion.  | more…
share on Twitter Like Coercive capitalism: why neoliberalism loves police on Facebook

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Companies that say they stand with protesters have been funding police foundations for years.  | more…
share on Twitter Like Corporate backers of the Blue: How corporations bankroll U.S. police foundations on Facebook


As politicians and activists across the country try to reenvision law enforcement, Black revolutionary Angela Davis says reform can only go so far in addressing the inherent racism in policing.  | more…
share on Twitter Like ‘An Extraordinary Moment’: Angela Davis says protests recognize long overdue anti-racist work on Facebook








Popular Resistance.org (6-21-20)
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Oakland: Restraining Order Restricts Teargas, Flashbangs And Projectiles

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjJ332VF463T90nXKLP_d3bMyhfpluvUFNIGZYN1HGxmgtxMDfU4vy2oo49vXG1PHTdL_mw58Wjb6D2PtgvoOkoaen9oaF7mI_jhttEBL9BbhsNkouWbJS9TJI9SntWkJhUoZDZix5xahCaZDXp2lqB5tQRmPg4L822wr6jzvKGJ57OknkoJ3BkErq0IRR5LaDSs6bDLGUfDInhT-kkrMYzs2_2=s0-d-e1-ftBy IndyBay.org. Popular Resistance.org (6-21-20)
On June 18, 2020, at 1 pm, an Oakland judge issued a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) and Order to Show Cause against the Oakland Police Department. The order was filed by civil rights attorneys Dan Siegel and Walter Riley and National Lawyers Guild - San Francisco Bay Area attorney James Burch. This initial victory is part of a larger lawsuit by the attorneys on behalf of two organizational plaintiffs, Anti Police-Terror Project and Community Ready Corps, and individual plaintiffs, Oakland Tech student Akil Riley and protestors Ian Mcdonnell, Nico Nada, Azize Ngo, and Jennifer Li on behalf of themselves and... -more-
 

Churchill, Columbus And Leopold Fall Down

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEj9DERW_tBF7EBy9XS_CVDmZhzzVvRCek6VxWXLCPU0Ww4GZRmWPHQeDW9_K8jxletuTzIgOX6XcfHlRfpMGnk4GABkvCdBqvmkIdrbxVq58gr-gEyHOKZjEMKbt7FFm1azWmjOFRTRWuIsyIZH0c25okFfUoJjkk1mBDl_LcxkVDzR0uUE6CD-9BNfmPqi83-7AUc8L6xi=s0-d-e1-ftBy Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. The perpetrators of crimes against humanity are often elevated to positions of respect and admiration. It all depends on who did the killing, and who was killed. Now the murderers are being called to account. The new movement in the United States against police and other state violence has inspired this welcome change taking place all over the world. The criminals are being exposed decades and even centuries after their atrocities took place. There is no statute of limitations for murder nor should there be for calling out people who have the blood of millions on their hands.  -more-
 

Policing Is Irrelevant For Public Safety

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjpAw-nO1tHg_WcT8xZl4Jdoj3CO_lVChs0S07pYCcLinDENzIDVv5Q1oRtRmx_SSnH0lWm819w-sl9MP1A-f3V7SKcTpmQJf8GyQ1ooLdJ4NNYj0OzM-28jWzBRJkXtVYVYBF2Jo9niacquV7GkJkasMkoiT6NJD6jVwe9gggNx-CzCV6D_XedwlEZqK7QwE1V3A=s0-d-e1-ftBy Justin Podur, Globetrotter. Recent protests, catalyzed by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, call for an end to racist police violence. With their actions, the protesters have also moved beyond many of the stale policing debates of the recent past. Defund, disband, abolish—people who would never have even heard these words in discussions about the police are now seriously considering them. The breakthroughs in the police debate would not have been possible without the protesters, who have remained steadfast despite being beaten and abused by police everywhere in the United States. -more-
 

How Corporations Bankroll US Police Foundations

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEgrj5Os9fCWVe0U1bj_lj_HT7DbJBHC5KN2gYCtY29PovxjWhxxOgnLv8fyDsyPaAxpgolc-_fPxnEA1C4ySot-EKBermq-XcSK_ww_ZCDcf0eyYAU3OzxJhzSCQEeEm_0qz47gbbfHrXtouDrI8KMSl7BCwD2hfyJWzJgi_Xtpceo_XEi22upbaUCOYrDa9Dmv7diLplfIUoA0vuAuQts6nds=s0-d-e1-ftBy Gin Armstrong and Derek Seidman, Eyes on the Ties. As calls to defund the police gain traction, bloated police budgets are coming under scrutiny for siphoning public resources away from black and brown communities. While police budgets are typically public documents that must be approved by elected officials, there are other institutions in place with the sole purpose of funneling even more resources toward law enforcement.  Police foundations across the country are partnering with corporations to raise money to supplement police budgets by funding programs and purchasing tech and weaponry for law enforcement with... -more-
 

US Racism’s $13 Trillion Legacy Is Just The Start

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhcGWab2DZK_3OxCXU8YjDE78OKixlhr0SSHANI1ZTFIPiOnN2PkGQwj6a3nMN6ldFEk5rj_1Cmg_7yug74J2zWU1yLXqg1cR6po1r0q6ImkxGYnYRcEGcYmSUwgryjE0fDvD8OKCyem7piqnakGJlalfG2q08nxUZLRLzhrxIV1sq3VhQFSkdcaAxNWF9IHCZdgMBMmA=s0-d-e1-ftBy Anna Szymanski, Reuters. New York - Around the time the United States formally abolished slavery in 1865, African Americans owned 0.5% of the United States’ wealth. Today they own under 3%, even though around 13% of the population is defined by the U.S. census as “black or African American.” This isn’t an accident of history – it’s a result of government policies and institutional bias. The interest keeps compounding. The value of income lost during slavery is staggering. The U.S. practice lasted for nearly 250 years – almost equivalent to the time from the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 until today.  -more-
 


Glasgow’s Far-Right Violence Is A Warning To Anti-Fascists

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEilcEJJRR5PFyU0tMuQc7l_vwG0P3iUP8onhwi8q03W1rICwY5QFKvBnmFInDzI7fzzqmawEtKWR8ilzECabvrLVWFMiHzn-HVWIzl22RuETupbrXX7JPNgFx8KAkExYrb8dQ1OD3fHSZes0bLFAmN4scli2pnwTauvWnvL5es9-jfvjya3vWCpepbMNIDQ2gvEVWCEabGqjS4BH-Cxy021Z7tAQarpGI8KG-cxlOsXBgseLjVN=s0-d-e1-ftBy Matt Kerr, TribuneMag. Many of those who organised around the exemplary “no evictions” campaign over the last couple of years gathered to show solidarity and support for people with no vote, no opportunity to work, no money, and living in a new country having fled conditions which were often the stuff of nightmares. Sadly, this was met with a “counter-protest.” Quite how anyone could protest against people being given decent food to eat should be beyond comprehension – but for the far-right, this seemed too much like treating people from other places and races with dignity. -more-
 

Online And Independent: The Future Of Journalism Is Already Here

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEg7cEynT9LMHUqDY7-dkq2pqgwEtULjKl2sW4XPmeEkIexd9APclG_a5nVsEAzP_pz7Bpvna8oTw30QpDK3ZXgnVNS8SYmmEfbIA0qwpX08W-TE32aaLMoxO53psrjcUFX-TxDd7T4p8DSr5T7nj5gyue-60DciamIcz-G_kOw-EVKaFxVL_9W8YdcPwCnjSCFCcDb_HdnFluGQ3yS_CwDdk50=s0-d-e1-ftBy Andrew Tarantola, Engadget. The modern news industry is in crisis. For years, formerly stalwart publications have been bought up, hollowed out, and sold for scrap by predatory (and often utterly incompetent) venture capital firms. The recent global outbreak of COVID-19 has further shattered the business as reporters and editors have been furloughed, or outright laid off, en masse. Now, as demonstrations across the country protesting George Floyd’s death at the knees of a Minneapolis cop grow in both scope and intensity, traditional newsrooms are finding their resources to cover these events spread thin.  -more-
 

Why And How To Defund The Police

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEgaYWCx5fJIQdN0uYMlf6RG_hhrcLAjUKWuT2inv7Ln2uv0FNzfTzlmimvuhX52GMcV1iNHUyNPor2G3umKUFVYL0x3-ZsLuK9T8nGpGfhqPckYTXO_ahRROyZluHg9JK7Wpv2YxtXaEKoGbu-uNa8vyZu-0lzOuCQWfs5gqVFX8AA8kfVxyCZUsxZW3bxMS18cVh0E0KcjRM99rzw5kHMYrxHc2y1N8EhTxOtrcnbMjWSKTA=s0-d-e1-ftBy Jason Kirkpatrick, Counterpunch. The vague and easily misinterpreted call to Defund the Police has been spreading quickly across the USA. Some may have a knee-jerk reaction to “just say no” to this call, but polls show a vast majority of Americans are concerned about improving the lives of people of color across the country. Reforms such as teaching police to de-escalate conflicts and enforcement of body camera use have support of about 90% of Americans. So, what could solutions to the current situation look like, how could they be paid for, and should relative costs realistically be coming out of police budgets? -more-
 

 

 

 

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How Our Bloated Military Strengthens The Police State

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhlQvc0R023Rij_aY9NVI70g6K-_ld08CYwQVWpe_r-AKFf0kxd5a-SLVMyEk0M5HIxWdT-pu9xV-svLo16MC-Hp06-ErlQsLBCMY8YJ7rjbFQ-LUes6iA_3yTN-t8hFAQrPQiPl747Prr1B14RmEkl1pUGXXqkvULaITJ1Bi6GEcjCT1lD5Ntp-UrUE4irLfWE8xMT97zmsnXNYkqe6pQsX3CxuNP3KInM2_uElWzgdw_o80jwdbbXkg=s0-d-e1-ftBy Shireen Adeimi and Sarah Lazare, In These Times. Nationwide uprisings over the police killing of George Floyd have forced a long overdue discussion about the injustices of U.S. policing—an institution that has consistently harassed and terrorized and, in the words of organizer, writer and educator Mariame Kaba, remains a consistent “force of violence against Black people.” As demands to abolish the police are thrust into mainstream discourse, promising—if uncertain and mixed—political changes are being debated and implemented every day. We are seeing a rigorous interrogation of the systems that uphold and compound... -more-
 

Abolishing The Police: A Radical Idea That's Been around For Over A Century

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhCMZ9GR1f_f_gkpBmMVS1yjcxKcfYTkkB0RGL57fMIXQPaVTVnPO7Fk9yKplJMRT3NFxCaBl6ZzntQccltYdaGBPX8mViSYHqgJcGxVhzNEPpmyugNrlJbkGbBjFchJK0g0-gOLsoZj8kQoZKEc7CuR-UMyOwG7YFXJhniNZtwyg5C8KY2NmrVcOaayd8In2jVs_6dunr27p3CC9cIbRdXlNqjT6uKcNHZTI8ewKf14EDfgT8EUrc=s0-d-e1-ftBy Tayla Zax, Forward. In 1905, Pennsylvania did something unprecedented: It founded America’s first state police force. The new institution, which was more highly militarized than previous law enforcement systems, was created for one reason: The state government wanted a more organized and efficient way to break strikes. The new force approached that mission with zeal — and violence. In 1909, members of the Pennsylvania State Police killed several strikers during the Pressed Steel Car Strike, a strike by workers who built railroad cars; after a crowd broke one state trooper’s leg, police were given orders to shoot to kill. -more-

mronline.org (6-19-20)


The U.S. military’s budget, like so many police department budgets, is bloated, and diverts our tax dollars into forces of domination and violence. Now is the time to question our spending priorities at the local and federal level.  | more…
share on Twitter Like If we’re going to defund militarized police departments, why not add the Pentagon? on Facebook




Sonny San Juan
Thu, Jun 18, 9:37 AM (1 day ago)
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Date: Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 7:12 AM
Subject:
An alternative to calling police already exists
To:


There’s already an alternative to calling the police
Taking law enforcement out of the equation in this 31-year-old program in Eugene, Oregon.



Popular Resistance.org (8-18-20).

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Barack Obama has offered some advice to the protesters flooding streets across the United States. Not that anyone asked him, mind you. But he was the First Black President™, so people better shut up and listen.  | more…
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There was police brutality and there was atrocity, and the press was just as atrocious as the police. Because they helped the police to cover it up by propagating a false image across the country, that there was a blazing gun battle which involved Muslims and police shooting at each other.  | more…
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News covering the UN and the world
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UN wire, 6-16-20, TOP STORY

The United Nations Human Rights Council has agreed to an urgent debate on Wednesday about systemic racism, violence toward peaceful protesters and police brutality, following worldwide protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd. "[I]t is a moment to really discuss this issue, as you have seen with the demonstrations all over Europe, including here in Geneva," says president of the UN Human Rights Council Elisabeth Tichy-Fisslberger.
 Full Story: Anadolu Agency (Turkey) (6/15),  Reuters (6/15),  Deutsche Welle (Germany) (6/12) 



 JUSTICE INITIATIVE
One of the U.S. Activist Demands Should Be 
NO MORE U.S. POLICE TRAINING
IN ISRAEL
____
The knee-on-neck, long a staple of Israel's occupation of Palestine

30 MAY 2020
TRT WORLD

Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation have long dealt with the kind of brutality being enacted by some US police officers against African-Americans.


Israeli police officers detain a Palestinian protestor during scuffles outside the compound housing al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem's Old City March 12, 2019. (Reuters)

A now infamous image of a white police officer kneeling on the neck of an African-American man, who would later die, has caused global outrage and violent unrest across the US.

Caught on video, George Floyd's death was seemingly the straw that broke the camel's back in that it came after several other high profile killings of several other African-Americans either by police or suspects who did not face immediate legal consequences.
For one community, the disproportionate violence faced by black people at the hands of US police forces has special resonance as it reflects their own experiences with the authorities.

For Palestinians living under military occupation in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank, the worst excesses of the kind seen in the US recently, are a near everyday occurrence.

In the aftermath of Floyd's killing, Palestinians were quick to draw parallels between the final images of the man suffering under the knee of the officer, and similar choke holds used by Israel occupation forces.

"Crazy how the same thing happens in Palestine but the world chooses to ignore it," Palestinian athlete Mohammad Alqadi wrote on his Twitter above four separate images of Israeli soldiers pinning Palestinians to the ground with their knees on their necks or head.

Killings of Palestinians by Israeli forces are also a regular occurrence: in 2019, 135 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces with 108 in Gaza and another 27 in the West Bank, according to the UN.

The similarities do not end there, as some activists have drawn parallels between the way US police have handled protests against police brutality in the aftermath of Floyd's death and the way Israel has dealt with protests in Gaza.

Such comparisons come with caveats, as US police officers despite the controversy over their tactics have yet to kill anywhere near the numbers Israel killed in the Gaza right of return protests in 2018, for example. Nevertheless, some of the tactics used are the same, according to pro-Palestinian groups.

On Twitter, the BDS and Palestinian Solidarity working group within the Democratic Socialists of America wrote:  "The police violence happening tonight in Minneapolis is straight out of the IDF playbook. How many times have we seen uprisings in Gaza met w/ a storm of tear gas? How many times are Palestinians in the West Bank doused w/ skunk water during a protest? US cops train in Israel."
Police training in Israel

Amnesty International has warned that hundreds of police departments have been training in Israeli alongside military officers, who "have racked up documented human rights violations for years."

The rights group notes that one of the departments involved in the training, the Baltimore Police Department, had been cited by the US Department of Justice for "widespread constitutional violations, discriminatory enforcement, and culture of retaliation."

Both Amnesty and the US State Department have cited incidences of Israeli security officials engaging in brutality against Palestinians.

The rights group said: "Baltimore and other police departments should find partners that will train on de-escalation techniques, how to handle mentally challenged or ill citizens, on the constitutional rights of citizens concerning filming and how to appropriately respond to those using non-violent protest to express their opinions. Israel is not such a partner."

Palestinian activist Huda Ammori of the Apartheid off Campus group told TRT World that such links between "militarised" US police forces and the Israeli security establishment emphasised the need for unity between African-Americans and Palestinians.

"We're seeing the oppressors united with their training, their same techniques. Between the Black Lives Matter community and the Palestinian community, and other communities across the world, we need to unite to fight against these systems." Ammori said.

"It's the same systems of oppression that are affecting all of these communities...we must fight back to.
Gray & Associates, PO Box 3291, Atlanta, GA 31106



ZIONIST TRAINING OF U.S. POLICE & SUPPRESSION OF CIVILIAN PROTESTS

-------
Date: Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 9:30 PM
Subject: Israelification of U.S policing
To:

The Israelification of American domestic security

By Max Blumenthal
(Editor’s note: The eruption of national protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd have shed new light on Israel’s training of local police officers across the country.
100 members of the 800-strong Minneapolis police department were trained at a conference in Israel in 2012. That means at least one of every eight members the city’s force has been influenced by the methods of an occupying apartheid entity.)
June 15, 2020
 In October, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department turned parts of the campus of the University of California in Berkeley into an urban battlefield. The occasion was Urban Shield 2011, an annual SWAT team exposition organized to promote “mutual response,” collaboration and competition between heavily militarized police strike forces representing law enforcement departments across the United States and foreign nations.
At the time, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department was preparing for an imminent confrontation with the nascent “Occupy” movement that had set up camp in downtown Oakland, and would demonstrate the brunt of its repressive capacity against the demonstrators a month later when it attacked the encampment with teargas and rubber bullet rounds, leaving an Iraq war veteran in critical condition and dozens injured. According to Police Magazine, a law enforcement trade publication, “Law enforcement agencies responding to…Occupy protesters in northern California credit Urban Shield for their effective teamwork.”
Training alongside the American police departments at Urban Shield was the Yamam, an Israeli Border Police unit that claims to specialize in “counter-terror” operations but is better known for its extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinian militant leaders and long record of repression and abuses in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Urban Shield also featured a unit from the military of Bahrain, which had just crushed a largely non-violent democratic uprising by opening fire on protest camps and arresting wounded demonstrators when they attempted to enter hospitals. While the involvement of Bahraini soldiers in the drills was a novel phenomenon, the presence of quasi-military Israeli police – whose participation in Urban Shield was not reported anywhere in US media – reflected a disturbing but all-too-common feature of the post-9/11 American security landscape.
The Israelification of America’s security apparatus, recently unleashed in full force against the Occupy Wall Street Movement, has taken place at every level of law enforcement, and in areas that have yet to be exposed. The phenomenon has been documented in bits and pieces, through occasional news reports that typically highlight Israel’s national security prowess without examining the problematic nature of working with a country accused of grave human rights abuses. But it has never been the subject of a national discussion. And collaboration between American and Israeli cops is just the tip of the iceberg.
Having been schooled in Israeli tactics perfected during a 63 year experience of controlling, dispossessing, and occupying an indigenous population, local police forces have adapted them to monitor Muslim and immigrant neighborhoods in US cities. Meanwhile, former Israeli military officers have been hired to spearhead security operations at American airports and suburban shopping malls, leading to a wave of disturbing incidents of racial profiling, intimidation, and FBI interrogations of innocent, unsuspecting people. The New York Police Department’s disclosure that it deployed “counter-terror” measures against Occupy protesters encamped in downtown Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park raised serious questions about the extent to which Israeli-inspired tactics have been used to suppress the Occupy movement in general.
The process of Israelification began in the immediate wake of 9/11, when national panic led federal and municipal law enforcement officials to beseech Israeli security honchos for advice and training. America’s Israel lobby exploited the climate of hysteria, providing thousands of top cops with all-expenses paid trips to Israel and stateside training sessions with Israeli military and intelligence officials. By now, police chiefs of major American cities who have not been on junkets to Israel are the exception.
“Israel is the Harvard of antiterrorism,” said former US Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer, who now serves as the US Senate Sergeant-at-Arms. Cathy Lanier, the Chief of the Washington DC Metropolitan Police, remarked, “No experience in my life has had more of an impact on doing my job than going to Israel.” “One would say it is the front line,” Barnett Jones, the police chief of Ann Arbor, Michigan, said of Israel. “We’re in a global war.”
Changing the way we do business
The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) is at the heart of American-Israeli law enforcement collaboration. JINSA is a Jerusalem and Washington DC-based think tank known for stridently neoconservative policy positions on Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians and its brinkmanship with Iran. The group’s board of directors boasts a Who’s Who of neocon ideologues. Two former JINSA advisers who have also consulted for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, went on to serve in the Department of Defense under President George W. Bush, playing influential roles in the push to invade and occupy Iraq.
Through its Law Enforcement Education Program (LEEP), JINSA claims to have arranged Israeli-led training sessions for over 9000 American law enforcement officials at the federal, state and municipal level. “The Israelis changed the way we do business regarding homeland security in New Jersey,” Richard Fuentes, the NJ State Police Superintendent, said after attending a 2004 JINSA-sponsored Israel trip and a subsequent JINSA conference alongside 435 other law enforcement officers.
During a 2004 LEEP trip, JINSA brought 14 senior American law enforcement officials to Israel to receive instruction from their counterparts. The Americans were trained in “how to secure large venues, such as shopping malls, sporting events and concerts,” JINSA’s website reported. Escorted by Brigadier General Simon Perry, an Israeli police attaché and former Mossad official, the group toured the Israeli separation wall, now a mandatory stop for American cops on junkets to Israel. “American officials learned about the mindset of a suicide bomber and how to spot trouble signs,” according to JINSA. And they were schooled in Israeli killing methods. “Although the police are typically told to aim for the chest when shooting because it is the largest target, the Israelis are teaching [American] officers to aim for a suspect’s head so as not to detonate any explosives that might be strapped to his torso,” the New York Times reported.
Cathy Lanier, now the Chief of Washington DC’s Metropolitan Police Department, was among the law enforcement officials junketed to Israel by JINSA. “I was with the bomb units and the SWAT team and all of those high profile specialized [Israeli] units and I learned a tremendous amount,” Lanier reflected. “I took 82 pages of notes while I was there which I later brought back and used to formulate a lot of what I later used to create and formulate the Homeland Security terrorism bureau in the DC Metropolitan Police department.”
Some of the police chiefs who have taken part in JINSA’s LEEP program have done so under the auspices of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), a private non-governmental group with close ties to the Department of Homeland Security. Chuck Wexler, the executive director of PERF, was so enthusiastic about the program that by 2005 he had begun organizing trips to Israel sponsored by PERF, bringing numerous high-level American police officials to receive instruction from their Israeli counterparts.
PERF gained notoriety when Wexler confirmed that his group coordinated police raids in 16 cities across America against “Occupy” protest encampments. As many as 40 cities have sought PERF advice on suppressing the “Occupy” movement and other mass protest activities. Wexler did not respond to my requests for an interview.
Lessons from Israel to Auschwitz
Besides JINSA, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has positioned itself as an important liaison between American police forces and the Israeli security-intelligence apparatus. Though the ADL promotes itself as a Jewish civil rights group, it has provoked controversy by publishing a blacklist of organizations supporting Palestinian rights, and for condemning a proposal to construct an Islamic community center in downtown New York, several blocks from Ground Zero, on the basis that some opponents of the project were entitled to “positions that others would characterize as irrational or bigoted.”
Through the ADL’s Advanced Training School course on Extremist and Terrorist Threats, over 700 law enforcement personnel from 220 federal and local agencies including the FBI and CIA have been trained by Israeli police and intelligence commanders. This year, the ADL brought 15 high-level American police officials to Israel for instruction from the country’s security apparatus. According to the ADL, over 115 federal, state and local law enforcement executives have undergone ADL-organized training sessions in Israel since the program began in 2003. “I can honestly say that the training offered by ADL is by far the most useful and current training course I have ever attended,” Deputy Commissioner Thomas Wright of the Philadelphia Police Department commented after completing an ADL program this year. The ADL’s relationship with the Washington DC Police Department is so cozy its members are invited to accompany DC cops on “ride along” patrols.
The ADL claims to have trained over 45,000 American law enforcement officials through its Law Enforcement and Society program, which “draws on the history of the Holocaust to provide law enforcement professionals with an increased understanding of…their role as protectors of the Constitution,” the group’s website stated. All new FBI agents and intelligence analysts are required to attend the ADL program, which is incorporated into three FBI training programs. According to officialFBI recruitment material, “all new special agents must visit the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to see firsthand what can happen when law enforcement fails to protect individuals.”
Fighting “crimiterror”
Among the most prominent Israeli government figure to have influenced the practices of American law enforcement officials is Avi Dichter, a former head of Israel’s Shin Bet internal security service and current member of Knesset who recently introduced legislation widely criticized as anti-democratic. During the Second Intifada, Dichter ordered several bombings on densely populated Palestinian civilian areas, including one on the al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza that resulted in the death of 15 innocent people, including 8 children, and 150 injuries. “After each success, the only thought is, ‘Okay, who’s next?’” Dichter said of the “targeted” assassinations he has ordered.
Despite his dubious human rights record and apparently dim view of democratic values, or perhaps because of them, Dichter has been a key figure in fostering cooperation between Israeli security forces and American law enforcement. In 2006, while Dichter was serving as Israel’s Minister of Public Security, he spoke in Boston, Massachusetts before the annual convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Seated beside FBI Director Robert Mueller and then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, Dichter told the 10,000 police officers in the crowd that there was an “intimate connection between fighting criminals and fighting terrorists.” Dichter declared that American cops were actually “fighting crimiterrorists.” The Jerusalem Post reported that Dichter was “greeted by a hail of applause, as he was hugged by Mueller, who described Dichter as his mentor in anti-terror tactics.”
A year after Dichter’s speech, he and then-Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff signed a joint memorandum pledging security collaboration between America and Israel on issues ranging from airport security to emergency planning. In 2010, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano authorized a new joint memorandum with Israeli Transport and Road Safety Minister Israel Katz shoring up cooperation between the US Transportation Security Agency – the agency in charge of day-to-day airport security – and Israel’s Security Department. The recent joint memorandum also consolidated the presence of US Homeland Security law enforcement personnel on Israeli soil. “The bond between the United States and Israel has never been stronger,” Napolitano remarked at a recent summit of AIPAC, the leading outfit of America’s Israel lobby, in Scottsdale, Arizona.
The Demographic Unit
For the New York Police Department, collaboration with Israel’s security and intelligence apparatus became a top priority after 9/11. Just months after the attacks on New York City, the NYPD assigned a permanent, taxpayer-funded liaison officer to Tel Aviv. Under the leadership of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, ties between the NYPD and Israel have deepened by the day. Kelly embarked on his first trip to Israel in early 2009 to demonstrate his support for Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip, a one-sided attack that left over 1400 Gaza residents dead in three weeks and led a United Nations fact-finding mission to conclude that Israeli military and government officials had committed war crimes.
Kelly returned to Israel the following year to speak at the Herziliya Conference, an annual gathering of neoconservative security and government officials who obsess over supposed “demographic threats.” After Kelly appeared on stage, the Herziliya crowd was addressed by the pro-Israel academic Martin Kramer, who claimed that Israel’s blockade of Gaza was helping to reduce the numbers of “superfluous young men of fighting age.” Kramer added, “If a state can’t control these young men, then someone else will.”
Back in New York, the NYPD set up a secret “Demographics Unit” designed to spy on and monitor Muslim communities around the city. The unit was developed with input and intensive involvement by the CIA, which still refuses to name the former Middle East station chief it has posted in the senior ranks of the NYPD’s intelligence division. Since 2002, the NYPD has dispatched undercover agents known as “rakers” and “mosque crawlers” into Pakistani-American bookstores and restaurants to gauge community anger over US drone strikes inside Pakistan, and into Palestinian hookah bars and mosques to search out signs of terror recruitment and clandestine funding. “If a raker noticed a customer looking at radical literature, he might chat up the store owner and see what he could learn,” the Associated Press reported. “The bookstore, or even the customer, might get further scrutiny.”
The Israeli imprimatur on the NYPD’s Demographics Unit is unmistakable. As a former police official told the Associated Press, the Demographics Unit has attempted to “map the city’s human terrain” through a program “modeled in part on how Israeli authorities operate in the West Bank.”
Shop ‘til you’re stopped
At Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport, security personnel target non-Jewish and non-white passengers, especially Arabs, as a matter of policy. The most routinely harassed passengers are Palestinian citizens of Israel, who must brace themselves for five-hour interrogation sessions and strip searches before flying. Those singled out for extra screening by Shin Bet officers are sent to what many Palestinians from Israel call the “Arab room,” where they are subjected to humiliating questioning sessions (former White House Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala encountered such mistreatment during a visit to Israel last year). Some Palestinians are forbidden from speaking to anyone until takeoff, and may be menaced by Israeli flight attendants during the flight. In one documented case, a six-month-old was awoken for a strip search by Israeli Shin Bet personnel. Instances of discrimination against Arabs at Ben Gurion International are too numerous to detail – several incidents occur each day – but a few of the more egregious instances were outlined in a 2007 petition the Association for Civil Rights in Israel filed with the country’s Supreme Court.
Though the Israeli system of airline security contains dubious benefits and clearly deleterious implications for civil liberties, it is quietly and rapidly migrating into major American airports. Security personnel at Boston’s Logan International Airport have undergone extensive training from Israeli intelligence personnel, learning to apply profiling and behavioral assessment techniques against American citizens that were initially tested on Palestinians. The new procedures began in August, when so-called Behavior Detection Officers were placed in security queues at Logan’s heavily trafficked Terminal A. Though the procedures have added to traveler stress while netting exactly zero terrorists, they are likely to spread to other cities. “I would like to see a lot more profiling” in American airports, said Yossi Sheffi, an Israeli-born risk analyst at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Transportation and Logistics.
Israeli techniques now dictate security procedures at the Mall of America, a gargantuan shopping mall in Bloomington, Minnesota that has become a major tourist attraction. The new methods took hold in 2005 when the mall hired a former Israeli army sergeant named Mike Rozin to lead a special new security unit. Rozin, who once worked with a canine unit at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel, instructed his employees at the Mall of America to visually profile every shopper, examining their expressions for suspicious signs. His security team accosts and interrogates an average of 1200 shoppers a year, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting.
One of the thousands who fell into Rozin’s dragnet was Najam Qureshi, a Pakistani-American mall vendor whose father accidentally left his cell phone on a table in the mall food court. A day after the incident, FBI agents appeared at Qureshi’s doorstep to ask if he knew anyone seeking to harm the United States. An army veteran interrogated for two hours by Rozin’s men for taking video inside the mall sobbed openly about his experience to reporters. Meanwhile, another man, Emile Khalil, was visited by FBI agents after mall security stopped him for taking photographs of the dazzling consumer haven.
“I think that the threat of terrorism in the United States is going to become an unfortunate part of American life,” Rozin remarked to American Jewish World. And as long as the threat persists in the public’s mind, Israeli securitocrats like Rozin will never have to worry about the next paycheck.
“Occupy” meets the occupation
When a riot squad from the New York Police Department destroyed and evicted the “Occupy Wall Street” protest encampment at Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, department leadership drew on the anti-terror tactics they had refined since the 9/11 attacks. According to the New York Times, the NYPD deployed “counterterrorism measures” to mobilize large numbers of cops for the lightning raid on Zuccotti. The use of anti-terror techniques to suppress a civilian protest complemented harsh police measures demonstrated across the country against the nationwide “Occupy” movement, from firing tear gas canisters and rubber bullets into unarmed crowds to blasting demonstrators with the LRAD sound cannon.
Given the amount of training the NYPD and so many other police forces have received from Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus, and the profuse levels of gratitude American police chiefs have expressed to their Israeli mentors, it is worth asking how much Israeli instruction has influenced the way the police have attempted to suppress the Occupy movement, and how much they will inform police repression of future examples of street protest. What can be said for certain is that the Israelification of American law enforcement has intensified police fear and hostility towards the civilian population, blurring the lines between protesters, criminals, and terrorists. As Dichter said, they are all just “crimiterrorists.”
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery.

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https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjHi0hLRSxXPM1kt7-nF47Xp7VOD9kkUnF1_1-5ScDJCPJLFoF0Sv2UeZPpmunPTdgJWr_GL4-EVVbNd5rrzzzp_LsO7831MLSp_k7YMHwRb5bAhQ_s06AvE4GlzQKs26K5LT4hVxyeA3Isb5IIoGp51A8y-Jh3z7HXMobF7a3vhH4zPCyWDJ1VFl2om_Io0CHQs8CEiVfqaozDqryxkm6q1F9-muKn0hdiQScwru2ll6w=s0-d-e1-ftBy Nick Turse, Tom Dispatch. If you had told me that, in the span of a few months, a novel coronavirus that dates back only to last year and systemic American racism that dates back to 1619 would somehow intersect, I wouldn’t have believed it. If you had told me that a man named George Floyd would survive Covid-19 only to be murdered by the police and that his brutal death would spark a worldwide movement, leading the council members of a major American city to announce their intent to defund the police and Europeans halfway across the planet to deface monuments to a murderous nineteenth-century monarch who... -more-
 

Chris Hedges: Gaslighted By The Ruling Class

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhiPANwuPwm2KEfjhkoPoB2mPvr1nt4Pl9u7tIsK-B4cOR0X66AunK6VHhftykEikWlgzS81YZqxUmzURmYLKsaGRmZQtPRLqaC4NQF2JJGz52qAwjkxtxVZVmMpTs9SgL5FR3alfWfhxNHX5cgHs3Dt0Uj28j6hMGLImFxVLjyE-vZ01zJl6RriC9P7dwfGX7Dt6PQevQQZxRELEUlc-GRtvFVMHP3crQAkAd4zBsR_6-PYc80lton7mNEDQ=s0-d-e1-ftBy Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. The elites have no intention of instituting anything more than cosmetic changes. They refuse to ask the questions that matter because they do not want to hear the answers. They are systems managers. They use these symbolic gestures to gaslight the public and leave our failed democracy, from which they and their corporate benefactors benefit, untouched. The crisis we face is not, as the ruling elites want us to believe, limited to police violence. It is a class and generational revolt. It will not be solved with new police reforms. The problem is an economic and political system that has by design created a nation of... -more-



Members Of Congress Receive COVID-19 Small Business Loans

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEiphCCbDDXqoyFp4NooA4YfdJFtaDQpLfZVNR0-mRGyx9JOScxrdyhKwRU8eelfWHlo6v7TKtGYxA8zzcg4S40ZW0BiKTsTCNMW8TkYVblHTcvZVnoMjPS1Khlt3vzbbK1PMHVSsIyRzeLKo_EtbPQQBAbbHpLL-KDZ4Ud1-5eom7JZh2BpqILA9Eg_zZGWbTgW64On8AV9t490PuSilNV4miW6sNIUqg=s0-d-e1-ftBy Jessica Buxbaum, Shadowproof. Members of Congress obtained disaster loans for their businesses through the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). The program has been embroiled in controversy since it launched in March. Large corporations received multimillion-dollar loans. Minority-owned businesses were shut out of aid. Seventy-four members of Congress own businesses or have relatives or spouses who own businesses. Of this number, only 14 of them responded to repeated inquiries stating that they did not apply for federal loans, including those with... -more-
 

Unfinished Revolution: Where Do The George Floyd Protests Go From Here?

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEiN2lE_JvMd6Y9E0uzhRA1kh2GtrgsPUIhbCyMt1pwJMXZ2zKOIdH-F_jPFnMG9WBvKC6KCGotUq3-EmwIugiL6vG5Xvllrk5TQzbsV5xJO8vKhzdPYUT1D8iRVC0JWmzOqPyGbN1-uuxBehXVAMV_DASWzprM_3dPDlOZeobmj4qYah1Y8pMphqBSvExdKbG9cXUtXKi6q_CEV3O9jihckDA7UrfC092brmRLVyxCPebWCE7hpNNNdrguJOkRCCFwx8g2K-Ezzd_bL69z607yv97CP4g2QnVhMI1Ue7xHAcnMcasi759k=s0-d-e1-ftBy Tosh Anderson, Josephine Lee, Zishun Ning, The Indypendent. Will we release some steam for a few days, be satisfied with the prosecution and (if we’re lucky) conviction of a few cops, accept a few reforms of a police system that will never be accountable to anyone else but their maker — the ruling class? Will we settle for mere survival, be content not to be killed, so that we can live under the peace of everyday violence and robbery forced upon our communities, our health, and our lives? Will we hang onto illusions that equate equal opportunity with being as exploited as a vanishing group of white, middle-class workers are or as a few... -more-
 


mronline.org (6-16-20)

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Odetta – Another Man gone Done  | more…
share on Twitter Like Odetta – ‘Another Man gone Done’ on Facebook

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“This is not the first time a black man has been killed for sleeping,” said Rev. James Woodall, state president of the Georgia NAACP.  | more…
share on Twitter Like Atlanta Police shoot and kill Rayshard Brooks as protests demanding racial justice continue worldwide on Facebook

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Between 1963 and 1972, there were more than 750 Black-led urban revolts in the United States in 525 cities. How did sociologists react?  | more…
share on Twitter Like Statement of Support for Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police on Facebook





Popular Resistance.org (6-14-20).
 

Power Over The Police

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhiTL_ymfcY0n5D6Yg-4NhA6SrD8ruUTbAe2PI3bb1lrCvdLQ_plXl-51LqgYpRsWP3_y6ht5JbcThboX9NuxC5qsT8NE2KhZsii2pmq9XE6B4a7cTrNaonaG7rCPkc3ff9s4D9AXdUpN5FP2qG4obS3XklVq1tgEQrpSbTxLOtUz9mSdfiEptFhuRHjBT8OR9HavZgI-iGvbMrBRfdwZn-Z4XM=s0-d-e1-ftBy Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Dissent Magazine. The clashes between police and protesters in response to the recent police killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tony McDade, and others throughout the country expose the violence inherent to the U.S. system of policing. Social media has been inundated with hundreds of videos chronicling police aggression and brutality. Cities nationwide, particularly in the nation’s capital of Washington, D.C., have faced unprecedented militarization of their streets. Police have wielded weapons typically used only by special forces in overseas military campaigns, even going as far as to use a... -more-
 

Seattle: The Demands Of Collective Black Voices At The CHAZ

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEg-tB1TIM-0yiwIXwuSM2jLBt7hr1knIL26HIkoD0nf8Vdu_WEun1x8oD5bxP-P3Gx2XffpmbOuc0r1QfamZB3yRCyX51DQ4CbisVJpdZniGrboYMfMspHoRJbpdqFLSpKqlRvDJVut_RIgnHcx5KEckcv5S9-qkSGIupuhp7hyphenhyphenVjsh7rZe7ZQ8RCG3PMv8EOS3uj2ACOfPr-2ANQ-J3qLWgcM0Ovj94urd7g6Bp1UCtuq0mC3hHPI=s0-d-e1-ftBy Free Capitol Hill, Medium. In credit to the people who freed Capitol Hill, this list of demands is neither brief nor simplistic. This is no simple request to end police brutality. We demand that the City Council and the Mayor, whoever that may be, implement these policy changes for the cultural and historic advancement of the City of Seattle, and to ease the struggles of its people. This document is to represent the black voices who spoke in victory at the top of 12th & Pine after 9 days of peaceful protest while under constant nightly attack from the Seattle Police Department. These are words from that night, June 8th, 2020.  -more-
 

Minneapolis Organizers Are Building The Tools For Safety Without Police

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEg7bwkJghylKDQoxbNm2zB0zxa8fcK5TSOmZgYCcZx7xf5NIVURPHh8fQBt4meJmym1gKvtpu8XxuTuNK4n4zcjME-5BXXif1xQl4RYCQNi7tXCoBlF5DxjjQzsRa8BwB1VdM-oeg0sBQKI0hqrJjm74ZAhI7NJ-2RZDaHxQVgLrL7vKmfgUgejq5WrHg-3zD0ZrUn_Q7Y=s0-d-e1-ftBy Jae Hyun Shum, Truthout. In 2018, members of the Minnesota grassroots groups Reclaim the Block and Black Visions Collective dropped a banner at Minneapolis City Hall. On it were two lists: on the left, three budget items on the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) budget, totaling $9 million. The right side was significantly longer, listing programs and organizations where the city could invest those $9 million to promote community safety — like domestic violence programs, housing and harm reduction. We were calling on the city to move our community’s dollars out of the violent, untrustworthy MPD, and into programs that actually keep us... -more-
 

USA: Hate And Fury

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhsyHRBYnsRLG63n1kZw1CbWH4JHA5lCRMzflkZXP0GBvmrScPQeAtokCh8ROrIQtaNM13xt1RArshJeUFIugd3Vyvhb8YMb7rmsCZ6L2p4z_6v9_x49kwZG3sEas42UjYUpwgP21NOwFhs_bBPVbtudg-BUw3F0DLTGBFXF4vPcLxS6Pk1qsahbE1lQQBrD88uW25Hi_J6P016X09Bl3fFTqPA29JySSInbulORFmH6-YtzE5iEvkdRvVpAtE=s0-d-e1-ftBy Arantxa Tirado, Resumen English. The streets of the US are burning. Demonstrations by armed Trump supporters pressing for the opening of the economy amid the coronavirus pandemic have been replaced by protests for the umpteenth police murder of an African American citizen, in this case George Floyd. The reaction is reminiscent of the days of hate and fury that broke out in Los Angeles in 1992 after the acquittal of the police officers who had beaten Rodney King a year earlier. Just two examples of the many that could be used, both recent and old, that demonstrates that American democracy has great difficulties applying... -more-



To Police Of Good Conscience: These Protests Are For You Too

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEiWw01H78BIrdu0WZF8Xp5KwxqIim-90w-zVVqc1zHTrXPCLEFxShjaMRy4X-Bc8S7LWBHL61phcBRthAM-qoVkSymusSYncW_sqLCijVsX-hayHhZ5vHJTroYAe1ob7XBJprxa1UFNiwmNAtEUV13roMEZ0e-ctLKI84GaXLqZooHmT9zEOzTEAGaFtmO6Hx3UVyYZyaxNaZvqmsy1MOat7xOyT1DPL5-UQvmYFL_P-ixHzSz7PR8VpLEXenA=s0-d-e1-ft By Lucas Johnson, Waging Nonviolence. To the police of good conscience. What if all this demonstrating was also for you? What if the pain you are feeling right now — the pain of feeling misunderstood and mischaracterized — is connected to the same pain expressed by protesters in the streets of Minneapolis, Atlanta, Louisville and hundreds of other cities steeped in grief? You understand that suspicion of theft or fraud doesn’t justify murder and whatever legal battles will unfold won’t change the morality of that fact. I know the protest chants and the opinion articles don’t cover it all. It’s a hard job and the criticism doesn’t always speak to the...  -more-
 

Group Behind Confederate Monuments Also Built A Memorial To The Klan

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhRuN44ByZhmR4PXbsjDot1ePc7h42hRz9vOf37d_rmSr7zuL4422Op3TJiQRykZBHovKJKcsuEX7uyLmkQ9QkkRy-X4rmKLCjTjPx4Ned3dLRu0KtTdRw_VcqRhR-fBd4IkLVh7raj8ayUzk60Zn817Fp_xTTeYz1LdbWQJrv-a23Pnnjr9DJ8PYvXQKBwkbIMi-7xAdLnhbYdNVRoNilCt7qUeOs=s0-d-e1-ftBy Greg Huffman, Facing South. It was a Saturday. The mailman never comes to my door, but there was his knock. A couple days earlier I had ordered a book on Amazon that I had seen before only in a library. "Sorry to bother you," he said, "but I had to have you sign for this one." The return address on the padded manila envelope was a post office box in Charlotte, North Carolina. No name. I cut the shipping tape and carefully pulled out the contents, wrapped inside a grocery bag. The worn 1941 first edition of Mrs. S.L. Smith's "North Carolina's Confederate Monuments and Memorials" — one of the only compilations by the United Daughters of... -more-
 

Cops Out Of Our Unions And Hospitals

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEj2XUo9wXs4oYvFmy9zLddb9aCACJaPyMNzNTbSOdpDU6QtDIO51JbDQ6YQu-DRep9nnQ1LjWyPJm1WDFkUYKCNioDAoCb0lubTbnP8mlTuyF5A-b13txyD5G7nQZj0n5ozlAvFW-ust6n3dDpoMv4J3AazUwa_z67EqVZ3wuO19WJquk-E3x2p0lVdAasB5yUatjznYuldq_k8Hjk=s0-d-e1-ftBy Socialist Healthcare Workers, Left Voice.  Over the last few weeks, thousands have spilled onto the streets, joining Black youth who rose up in response to the savage murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and countless other Black people at the hands of police. Healthcare workers who are on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic are taking part, painting protests across the country with green and blue scrubs, white coats and surgical masks. This condemnation of the police and systemic racism has been expressed through the lens of health care with the words, “Police are a threat to public health.”  -more-
 

Global Solidarity With US Anti-Racist Rebellion

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEiDjc500eCCeSnrPbeNWADBSdqKu83RUtU0gp6dTHzgNGGAtELMUhYJkRSHh20V2G3pHgyoTi_3dTGbA_bzp5m-0tQKi4Vf5qgZNk0fjhGKNv0AlvKUwIOm_uHTU32m9HuFaM9wAzqZ1OHbClHEtJ-33MwqybfaN3R6bfTMJJPV07rBciISgoyFtFHkW6EVO_M7Vji_O0DNGuRA4WmWVyvo2Skr=s0-d-e1-ftBy People's Movements and Organizations, Anti-Imperialist Week. We firmly denounce the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police Department and demand full and uncompromising justice for his family. We join the call and demand for justice of thousands of families across the United States who have lost someone to police violence. We express our resounding support to the people of the United States who, throughout their history, have resisted racism. We stand in solidarity with the hundreds of thousands who are currently protesting and repudiate the narratives being shaped by corporate media labeling protestors “terrorists” and... -more-
 

ILWU To Shut Down Ports For Juneteenth

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhMlAFshyphenhyphenBZ1L_7ZLZy_fCdXAJiGWbgrmUoVbeHvXXBBScstWMP77ZIGp9fHs0i7mB69eFLdM2YaJjRrLJwJnes7c2Kop8d7srnHYnx-zk_2b-IykxTTP78rR2hOriINnPo4kvsZyDUmavv68c0jOtiR1guXK1h8ZJ25dgRwX4n6RsFM82XfBzu5W2B8asGa_nubYQ9LAx1rOIooPM_CPHmpyw=s0-d-e1-ftBy NBC San Diego. On June 19, union members who work at the Port of San Diego will stop operations for eight hours in honor of Juneteenth, the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation being first enforced in Texas. The members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union at 29 ports from San Diego to Washington State will halt work from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. On June 19, 1865, Black slaves in Texas -- the most isolated rebel state in the South during the Civil War -- were told about their emancipation from slavery two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Abraham Lincoln, which was immediately changed... -more-


mronline.org (6-14-20)

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Defunding the police might end the armed and uniformed force as we know it, but the ruling class will then hire mercenaries to protect their wealth and enforce their will.  | more…
share on Twitter Like Community control Vs. defunding the police: A critical analysis on Facebook

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The media described the uprising as a “riot” involved in violence and property destruction but the movement responded by using videos to show black organizers trying to stop people, some of whom seemed to be undercover police or white supremacists.  | more…
share on Twitter Like A mass uprising is here, protect if from the ruling class on Facebook



 Following   7 items from Popular resistance.org (6-13-20)

Calls To Eliminate School Police Intensify Amid Protests

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjqp___4qwwmJz7zn0jv-5AkODjLv5CHc0O0pQWOwNWu4r02nCgg4WgLdzvEFYhQFj704Ck67LpCcBOs4ljjT_ykTPEHsHCWlvNP3MTyRglZmG7gSe88BU-HIDkjNBoSdZAFaEV9bdkwSMTRWAuUVOIX0KtANdnv1Dk7GEyUduk6PO7uS4Z_GSLiaWlHQzkwve_WZcHBmnGr7BgR9t4gLLazoDEbVVAbmERzvSfwMWh5R4mAGl8_9wWiPL-A3REEc_pMAcgnZf8ingmmaWQFTuAevkU7YJcHHI0dpgQCdWcvxMYyRwA=s0-d-e1-ftBy Theresa Harrington and Ali Tadyon, EdSource. Amid calls to defund municipal police in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police, two Oakland Unified school board members are pushing to eliminate the district’s police force.  This is an acceleration of a demand that dates back nine years, when activists began calling on the district to dissolve its police department after a black student was shot and killed by a district police sergeant. The proposal by board members Roseann Torres and Shanthi Gonzales says the district would call on Oakland City Police in emergencies. It has the support of the teachers’ union.  -more-
 

Who Supplied The Weapons Used Against #BLM Protesters?

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjfdn56curBBmf3T24a0spPqB-bug-TJ6kyKYkK4ZzAi1xdwC3k2I97PSqhyISmQbsOP_bTPwFr8MYKGzD5LffjqPxwDa6MuTmOBGvPwcIxcryIUQlCVJMLzYEE-1YCRcRzQwiuwrJlK8Nct5plxAnpIf74sULMBcEwEK8wbN8LO-C7GnDS2FpiupXgiSac08Oxp4qk6NgphVL81HIlpMHsDnoPh9irVw1QGBnU9rLC2-XIf8Nx-jZNqcJPzQBlVpb6vo9TIEE8QS_OoS_n0nnOxwlSKMgBSanPiZt55JfP2w5Kqjqhjwv__6d7DYVn=s0-d-e1-ftBy War Resisters International. In response to the murder of George Floyd by a member of the Minneapolis police department on 25th May, thousands of people across the United States joined protests demanding justice for his killing, radical reform of police forces, and driving home the message that Black Lives Matter. Many of these protests face militarised police responses, including the use of rubber bullets, sting balls, stun grenades, battons, police charges, and chemical weapons like tear gas and pepper spray. Twitter users have photographed a large number of canisters that were fired during the protest.  -more-
 

Scottish Parliament Votes For Immediate Suspension Of 'Weapons Of Oppression' Exports To US

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEgeteoiIY41Ktd8mjcgRF1_oLZmg-fhE7Vh3C_PypkokcSwmzijviZyG4E-G3nf1cVeRu7C6-pL6TR2Mbm1wn4H6qWX1LqkFp0CSO1y9lJGJNdnqL4QzB3H0qFy168Xnk3R-Mq55Ni1-BJeO5R0-RjznHL-s3BpgBmqAC-jThUxh1po7CThUWt_D4-6vavWyW9ARWUHIwgmAlcNMqVcvZLETQ=s0-d-e1-ftBy Jon Stone, Independent. The Scottish Parliament has called for the immediate suspension of exports of riot gear, tear gas and rubber bullets to the United States, in light of the police response to the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests. A successful motion, which was backed by 52 votes to 0 with 11 abstentions, says the parliament "stands in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and considers that the UK government must immediately suspend all export licences for tear gas, rubber bullets and riot gear to the US". Patrick Harvie, the Green MSP who proposed the successful amendment, said the "weapons of oppression", which the... -more-



Martin Gugino – The “Buffalo Protestor” And Our Friend

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhsjJSkOWXuElWTEnOCJXUmJwq431sgljVPLQGBbY6-TinGlDOWKFwPjrQMg5VOBth68e5FKjzQPQItMBPwXhTTeovTnCK1GpPLd8Ed5Nxn3ipQ1pQ0AW_-_fTzXZqKTsFqPatgvF3c8qK83YOuNOG6etmRBn_KDIqKRY9JxSRes4Ccp-Dx4gkRIyakam_Fpd9Llq7-FyhiB09Z9Iatn1yvPAA6fMq5UqS4PJKBrNk=s0-d-e1-ftBy Jeremy Varon, Witness Against Torture. Martin Gugino worked together in Witness Against Torture for years, a close-knit group dedicated to closing the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo and opposing torture. Our community is beside itself. None of us is surprised that it was Martin meeting the police line in a posture of non-violence. Martin is gentle, principled, and undaunted. Allied with the Catholic Worker tradition, he is also deeply committed to a tapestry of causes, from fair housing to immigrant rights. Guiding his activism is belief in the sacred power of non-violent resistance to injustice. If that makes him an “agitator,” as Buffalo’s... -more-
 

The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, Where Seattle Protesters Gather Without Police

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhHUhqn-POXLWHzZt63s5VIZvB2phr-Wf3cm2xkFtJcvUi_5g9elck4sECBa4LFg9_J3sPH3UlX-SpwtTK5ahcAs76jvdf-oOwA8PYkjpbTXG3h4N8NtdgHbLxE2yIWY4XDif2CHlxcDiZuxYURm8o1C9DZ7En8RBti2FPoP81Ag1n0HJuigolt3ZZOgJCMNs8C7yNUlX7j4YU8pEh_O3Wsg6o6Hu6xy84Repb1ao4GYlz_BJOj=s0-d-e1-ftBy Evan Bush, Seattle Times. Welcome to the CHAZ, the newly named Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, where most everything was free Tuesday. Free snacks at the No-Cop Co-op. Free gas masks from some guy’s sedan. Free speech at the speaker’s circle, where anyone could say their piece. A free documentary movie — Ava DuVernay’s “13th” — showing after dark. A Free Capitol Hill, according to no shortage of spray paint on building facades. And perhaps most important to demonstrators, the neighborhood core was free of uniformed police. A new protest society — centered on a handful of blocks in Seattle’s quirky, lefty... -more-
 

A Report From The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone In Seattle

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjETIKhtEYS9zxlnyjtOlDvx0ErpPSx10BvXcqhdrqk666GsT-Kv9ksDZk6QaPb1BfB9k04wCdduQtFhR8YyOnJx90lLbhwAdBS0WnDpnmwdqjGQdupadwoZLX212G3KrLqWhZ5X59EKHN8xaBoBAIVJq033J8cthy5qNQzl8w4wG0DPajShed20xIV5ncZv9eZefA8JI8oXYl-uD-PoeWrAH95yutgrPM-zHQNpXjzjDMrmTQN5knqk45qeZ_e7anFXObCXXWALxW4gyBzf9VI8m2Lbo2zKSSTp05gR8H2XdROgFWcKKfYo3rzdpC99O0gD0btMJ6wPJL8sZ-UJirpu5cpb8Ko-A=s0-d-e1-ftBy It's Going Down. The other day, the police announced that they were gathering their things and leaving their precinct. What do you make of this?  This, to be very honest, is anyone’s guess. There are many theories around why they abandoned the precinct. Some feel that they ran out of resources, some feel that it was a politically expedient move on the Mayor’s part. From my perspective-this was a “good” move on the city’s part. They were getting hammered in the press for the nightly tear gas barrages and street clashes, and the crowds never really got smaller. When an active shooter was on the scene, people rushed to the... -more-
 

From Occupation To ‘Occupy’: The Israelification Of US Domestic Security

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEiecoFI8zOqEIQ8jX4KwhlhYZblynh68EDAYMokOISK2nuopL-mm-VP1wTsCNG50xoD7iFXynoTmcZvPQBLzdtZmMcRmVurpI019h9-SunifEW0UHd2CtOAFsxfSJMoCpNzMSCLzHaBOEywDDzg71yVrIylYcI_JcO1OsmVaU0fF6Cob4p2G4Ocdtsig1EfxYixJ1aPcXbSsH8sr_kXn4yh_Uqolf-PeUcVBLAKGK4q0X-PjoEmHZ10DTsJpbAsjEN5iQ=s0-d-e1-ftBy Max Blumenthal, The Grayzone. The Israelification of America’s security apparatus recently unleashed in full force against the Occupy Wall Street Movement, has taken place at every level of law enforcement, and in areas that have yet to be exposed. The phenomenon has been documented in bits and pieces, through occasional news reports that typically highlight Israel’s national security prowess without examining the problematic nature of working with a country accused of grave human rights abuses. But it has never been the subject of a national discussion. And collaboration between American and Israeli cops is just the tip of the iceberg. -more-

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It takes but a few minutes for the ruling elite to recast collective calls for an end to state violence against black people into images of the criminality of black protesters and to call for an end to looting.  | more…
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As the George Floyd protests against police violence erupted around the nation, a massive amount of evidence of police brutality was widely captured through social media. Unfortunately, very little of it made it to mainstream outlets until much later.  | more…
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“Mayor Downplays Rough Police Treatment of NYC Protesters” (AP, 6/5/20)  | more…
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Power over policing.  Mronline.org (6-11-20)

Reform efforts will fail. Only a power shift to communities can improve public safety.  | more…
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“A Tank By Any Other Name.”  By Seth Kershner,
In These Times, Oct. 2016.
The Pentagon is giving cops as much military gear as ever.


Israel and U.S. Police Training
Joyce Hale
11:04 AM (4 hours ago)
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/images/cleardot.gif
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/images/cleardot.gif
to John, Scott, Haley, E, me, Fran, Denise, David, Nicole, Greg, Mark
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/images/cleardot.gif
I thought you would be interested in this.  It is amazing how many demonstrations there are around the world supporting U.S. protesters demanding police reforms after George Floyd's killing while no massive U.S. protests demand help for the Palestinians.


Be sure to note the Arkansas connection.  While it may be small, it may be an indicator of one thing that needs to change.
"Law enforcement from other U.S. states have participated in the program, including those from Tennessee, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Floria, Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wahsington, D.C., and West Virginia.    

Thank you for your concerns,
Joyce Hale

Additional Information:




US Veterans, Including Active Duty, Reject Militarization Against Demonstrators

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEgakOMJr0Pz8wfvPK_o6h1kOMRE4LEMU-R1tPDdvPwqpTxLSM4ypcQh5z1DOMkIfWY7DPXJnVST8jR9y3FSfbyYGUz5_d6v4mdrQoSSZHWEz4RfJ8yvnJENUKy2wWN5C2xHKsgQmFz4fsKO9zkBJcQ1orO5r-mLkXe1BF8u4iMghC1gFlyqUF27eNzco6sIS_avRe0DDjh72sGQz3q4PJ7mgfKA=s0-d-e1-ftBy Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, Clearing the FOG. Popular Resistance.org (6-9-20).  The United States is in the midst of a mass uprising against police violence, but also a whole list of grievances such as the lack of jobs, health care, education and more. Sustained protests have been going on for two weeks defying curfews and severe repression by police. The national guard has been deployed to 23 states and President Trump threatened to deploy the military against people expressing their First Amendment rights. We speak with Danny Sjursen, a retired Major and spokesperson for About Face: Veterans Against the War, about how members of the military are... -more-


Mronline.org (6-9-20)
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As protests rage across America against police brutality and systemic racism, Akunna Eneh, an activist from Boston, argues that the movement sparked by the murder of George Floyd has exposed the true face of American society.  | more…
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This weekend, hundreds of thousands of workers and youth will protest the police murder of George Floyd, not only in the United States, but in Australia, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, Spain, Hungary, Brazil, South Korea and many other countries.  | more…
share on Twitter Like The police murder of George Floyd sparks mass protests throughout the world on Facebook



U.S. counties where lynchings were more prevalent from 1877 to 1950 have more officer-involved killings  | more…
share on Twitter Like Black deaths at the hands of law enforcement are linked to historical lynchings on Facebook



mronline.org (6-7-20)


WE ARE WITNESSING a truly unprecedented attack on press freedom in the United States, with journalists are being systematically targeted while covering the nationwide protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.  | more…
share on Twitter Like We crunched the numbers: Police — not protesters — are overwhelmingly responsible for attacking journalists on Facebook

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At the highest of levels of unemployment following the 2007-08 crash, there were 15.3 million jobless Americans.  | more…
share on Twitter Like Chart of the day on Facebook

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Across the country—in city after city—the people have erupted in righteous indignation to George Floyd’s recorded lynching. His extrajudicial murder set off a rebellion that had been primed by the highly publicized white-vigilante murder of Ahmaud Arbery and the botched, “no-knock” police raid that killed Breonna Taylor in her bed.  | more…
share on Twitter Like From George Floyd back to the structural violence of capitalism on Facebook

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When things seem like they’re coming apart, we need to ask: for whom? it may be that things are finally coming together.   | more…
share on Twitter Like The Movement gets BIG–and its enemies reveal themselves on Facebook



mronline.org (6-6-20)

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THE WHITE HOUSE engaged in an extraordinary act of rumor-mongering on Wednesday, releasing a compilation of viral video clips posted on social media recently by people who believed, wrongly, that the piles of bricks they came across had been planted there by anti-fascist activists, known as Antifa, to inspire violence at protests.  | more…
share on Twitter Like White House forced to retract claim viral videos prove Antifa is plotting violence on Facebook


Police all over the world commonly use plants and undercover cops to undermine protests.  | more…
share on Twitter Like Agent provocateurs: Police at protests all over the country caught destroying property on Facebook



More than 50 years ago (on 14 April 1967), Martin Luther King Jr. delivered one of his famous speeches, on “The Other America,” at Stanford University.* King patiently explained to the audience of students and faculty members that, while in his view “riots are socially destructive and self-defeating,” they are “in the final analysis. . […]  | more…
share on Twitter Like “A riot is the language of the unheard” on Facebook



Posse Comitatus Act Google Search 6-4-20
The Posse Comitatus Act outlaws the willful use of any part of the Army or Air Force to execute the law unless expressly authorized by the Constitution or an act of Congress. ... Questions concerning the act's application arise most often in the context of assistance to civilian police.Nov 6, 2018

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Can the US military be used against citizens?

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The Posse Comitatus Act is a United States federal law signed on June 18, 1878, by President ... The act specifically applies only to the United States Army and, as amended in 1956, the United States Air Force. ... pursuant of any state's role of exercising police power and maintaining law and order, whether part of a wider ...

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Military aid to the civil power (MACP) is the use of the armed forces in support of the civil ... State or territory civilian police have primary responsibility for law and order. ... The Posse Comitatus Act, passed in 1878, generally prohibits Federal military personnel (except the United States Coast Guard) and units of the United ...

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us military forbidden to be police from theconversation.com
Dec 6, 2019 - No 'blue wall of silence:' A military lawyer explains why the US ... Yet both soldiers and police officers put their lives on the line for their team every day. ... order to do so was obviously illegal and should have been reported.

2 days ago - ... ready to deploy the military to enforce order inside the United States. ... allows a president to deploy the US military to suppress civil disorder.

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Mar 17, 2020 - This analysis addresses the distinctive roles of U.S. federal military forces and ... passed in 1878 in response to reconstruction of the South, forbade ... the National Guard in this way because soldiers make bad police officers.

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Oct 26, 2016 - The use of the active duty military in a law enforcement role is not unconstitutional but it is prohibited by the posse comitatus act. 18 U.S.C. ...
3 answers

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Dec 6, 2019 - No "blue wall of silence:" A military lawyer explains why the US armed ... order to do so was obviously illegal and should have been reported.

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Sep 23, 2019 - Although the PCA prohibits only the Army and Air Force as from performing domestic law enforcement activities, another statute, 10 USC Section ...

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Aug 16, 2012 - whenever the laws of the United States shall be opposed, or the ... by declaring martial law and forbidding any Armed Forces from entering the territory. It was not ... Eleven hundred troops (mostly military police) and 80 federal ...


FROM POPULAR RESISTANCE 6-4-20

Residents Sheltered Dozens Of Protesters From Police

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEiMpDmjw9DYkjIJHePrI-lGUnl2-9zP2Z6FGre1ar-C9nzhOnba17nunmzBEkynd0vZVcHayoiHGjrj6wjJhXHR1XswOZm8aG3rVKyrq5jK3Q09B89Yo-2ppTslZ3_B5KRHDXHIjyaZMk3ow6X374uvdLyqozAWcyVHF8LbCniod-MoXbiC0rPp2S6RA0SQ2w3kqnZNK7UY48ppSBC_zKMBkjjtpPc=s0-d-e1-ftBy Colleen Grablick, Jason Fenston and Natalie Delgadillo, DCist. Nearly two hours after the 7 p.m. curfew went into effect on Sunday night, dozens of people were corralled by police in a one-way block — Swann Street NW, between 14th and 15th — as they made their way north from downtown. As officers closed in on the group, they began setting off what appeared to be pepper spray and flash bangs, sending the crowd running. “I heard ‘bang bang’ and a lot of thumping and pepper spray everywhere, my eyes started burning, people screaming, and a human tsunami coming down the street, of piles on top of people,” says... -more-
 

Majority Of Americans Support Uprisings, Disagree With Trump

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhckRkWjjjv-NQaXbxohLeh3GhRCQUDHwforMoyy6cQI2M4RluRiBMDqGjyef5b8vwD9gIwVnwycjBH21y-5KJGJxyH2iFAjHXRYiwnkm2FO_ESC5sx-EsXZZK_zknk3kTzy-quiN7wkkGjDsPg7P_c3iBDnO9PqGrr5vfpYI4q8orW2-C6zXnV2jRf-Fp5EGBcHCzSrOvIgbe1Jkd9a2rktXQnwGMlu3SK=s0-d-e1-ftBy Chris Walker, Truthout. As President Donald Trump threatens to invoke the Insurrection Act to use aspects of the U.S. military against Americans involved in the demonstrations in response to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last week, polling so far shows that most people are not happy with how he has handled the situation. Indeed, the data demonstrates that a majority of Americans appear to be in support of the protests in general. A Morning Consult poll conducted on May 31 and June 1 — several days after demonstrations began in protest over Floyd’s killing at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer who held a knee... -more-

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As Attacks On Protesters and Journalists Increase, Coverage Of Communities And Police Need To Change

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjPms3r4S7rETfTzZ2M0IN2y7BRBg9bAbDx8Gt1IOs2i05l1BAaeJ69otvvkuZHvY77Zxjf1U2jZ_sl7qtR9gI_GBocgfrr7e2kjqMlHreAb3LiLHsoiTLWCHDR9iBmAhR8OBAJVUuD8ex0yNBRhRjyeA8kJUfyJNf5PNMqIHRaiv0G3FD6TAkYrxGzsJDciapzM7348JTsByR5vBTpC0F1_9D_I2qXke_-zqXs1FuRFSEyWNyuVjX4eTOwPOMrPeixffL4txm-=s0-d-e1-ftBy Timothy Karr, Free Press. The weekend saw escalating police violence against protesters and reporters at nationwide demonstrations against the police killing of George Floyd and systemic racial injustices. There has been an unprecedented number of attacks against journalists at many of these protests as law-enforcement officers have specifically targeted those engaged in First-Amendment protected newsgathering and reporting. This mirrors the ways police are targeting those engaged in First-Amendment protected protest. President Trump has egged on the police crackdown in a series of recent tweets, including one that labels news outlets... -more-
 

What Will It Take To Stop The Police From Killing?

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjCJEKfPqC8rxzq3qrlbzEH_tAuzmOd3KtD6f2PktOiXLFyZ2jSrn_3epCVmJzze3ScHenPYHktz51jG7kgNTbifYujbboF0COggdYYF5ONqjbUdaTkBpjJAc01Qgqfkv39EPD32HbrJ__ZyL2rN0KtiEs7BibWxF5FHLQ6B2oQzMBXUKhWaJYI1PKVKVBiLFLMFplZT8BP1ZeVO1fRbi6ScY2AZabCAaJLLXbRCYpd7ZL8Fs8Q9xO8mvK1m_amyGCCckW8Z_YupDKxa_TOjRJY2ZJKCY_2qroLnK5at3gakLMr=s0-d-e1-ftBy The Collective, Anarchist News. We’ve reached a breaking point. The murders of George Floyd—and Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and the other Black people whose lives were ended by police just this month—are only the latest in a centuries-long string of tragedies. But in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the state is openly treating Black communities as a surplus population to be culled by the virus, the arrogance and senselessness of the murder carried out by Officer Derek Chauvin crossed a line. Supported by hundreds of thousands across the US and beyond, the people of Minneapolis have made it clear that... -more-
 

David McAtee, Louisville business Owner, Killed By Authorities

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEgvZSgBony_u2DdeDJUEXJ-1NyxYwOlIu4cuIJezPlBh5oD0YCAFz0uB5U4jujokYEWPr7NnyVUmBHcm-HHrNjKoPF2gTrm5CD3p-2-7cBzrlfq1pud_85B_X_SM3uP1Q2tj0uZUfAM1XXQoN8ETlxxqw0MmJKhFCWOIIq28L9z3mZ9zz0bT-QrdFcAnV74aSFnSj5S8Apb8bjVaBFWM_nxLGJ1EFyI73tJ=s0-d-e1-ftBy Phillip M. Bailey and Darcy Costello, Louisville Courier Journal. Louisville, KY - David McAtee, who turned his talent for food into a popular West End eatery, was shot and killed by law enforcement officers early Monday morning, an incident that's now under state, local and federal investigation. McAtee, the owner of YaYa's BBQ in western Louisville, was known as a "community pillar," said his mother, Odessa Riley. "He left a great legend behind. He was a good person. Everybody around him would say that," she said. "My son didn't hurt nobody. He didn't do nothing to nobody." . -more-

Mr. Fish's Catch of the Day: Law and Order

ACLU Demands Congressional Probe Into 'Politically-Motivated' Attack On Peaceful Protest

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhtQ8gG7RXLadTpppSXAx2YeFTdI0hC41d69RZIKvMDY8oPgjXZB_ygFUz2JTo159GwX357UlxNyCv_5Ijk_brOXi_qdbEL-6hQtfSdnBltSNNV1RpTl39MvMgvFOZVa61XsSsLLMgdHuYGDwYw59HtXe_C-8aMqt-TK5A4HBtuSDKbLS9tG5QHnaR8ZneGxOfYLXkwGfAlQmr0dMTzIxl_HuCRqjW5DdWIVBbp1DXKuLirMS8Kk9SKE3eboQyehQ0-0ZDYd5OitgNWJMPnLYOJQuEfwl7-fA0GPw=s0-d-e1-ftBy Jon Queally, Commondreams. Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU's Human Rights Project, denounced both the nature and the timing of the assault on the unsuspecting demonstrators, given that it happened just as Trump delivered a speech from the Rose Garden in which he threatened tougher police tactics—including use of U.S. military forces—to quell protests in cities nationwide. "This appears to be grossly unjustified use of a dangerous chemical weapon on protesters and raises serious human rights concerns under international law," Dakwar said of what transpired in Lafayette Square.  -more-
 

Responding To Protests, Green Groups Reckon With A Racist Past

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjAnQXcKVidiJFrqtMdTrL36d0bd0mV2mZnmNLkWaYoHeIIe55efC7i3W_HBvGnq3I4DFXVCzAsBnOnkoa7tEkALo6g4QX0R6fuMWjHIf5y9QJnFQR1AI30g6XdyZV9rvjKMkfBxlY6qSrCWtRUkcW7eT5DbRLZ1iEUCVQoF2cdjg5-ptz7xbpSzI7HlXEhcaEY4X4FklEzhy9lFQ0avTY-aFXCr2cBPt93v7FDNo5u1h1LSeWNFqGWYxyDQSAFq4oEVq1rF3N84M3W-MyrgNEt9-89w0HSyFa2F0APrElNmtJk65LVJGaA5za25g=s0-d-e1-ftBy Shannon Osaka, Grist. Already stressed by the threat of coronavirus and widespread unemployment, the United States has erupted into protests after the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, by a Minneapolis police officer. Now, prominent groups in the environmental movement — which has long struggled with a dark, racist past — are speaking out against institutional prejudice and calling for the movement to better prioritize social justice. “For too long conservation and environmental movements have not spoken up to address the long-standing challenges that non-white communities face,” Fred Krupp, the president of... -more-
 

Nineteen Facts About American Policing That Will Blow Your Mind

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEg9FdnHIWfGHFCplXRYC99Q1fOe6mrDEsGvdvkapArvmVqT6DqxBMCj2QXyC5bKuER3b6C0hyoDLmhPY_9ze54SwFHrgMyel64xo1EDdq9JY5M5KGGdAr77RmY6OOdOIw4fFUPnu4VqnaV17YanP_ORhAbMwzoT_yif1FH6feKgtovs2E9kjhU0ARKpww0cwK60LWgz3U7g8fw0iugc70nF1NM=s0-d-e1-ftBy Lee Camp, Consortium News. With all the protests and anger and violence across the country, a justified discussion about policing has begun on our corporate media airwaves. (I would say the discussion is overdue, but in fact we’ve had it roughly every three years for the past 40 years.) However, despite all the coverage, a deeper debate sits ignored – A debate about why our American police system exists at all, how it works (or doesn’t), and where it came from.  The following 19 facts about American policing will change everything you think you know. First let’s start with the sheer amount of murder.    -more-
 

An Uprising Was Inevitable

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhJAHKoLgUPd1ePwp-7k-EHzpj2o45YJiy4XW1PVuhMCc_5FmdkjmHbMPsjmG5lgHrzVlJW8oNeMEHsO4fw3L785i08ADbMuW8rXGEnRkNGYi3G-6wCMZRNgOKUQ1W_2Pj5hNDlERMo1_z-jIWEGumn9a6pBpIMa1QuCoKKqzGb3xLitmmKSs1sKD3dTqTnZ7tP5ZPJ97gPbVZGhy5SvWI=s0-d-e1-ftBy Zenobia Jeffries Warfield, Nation of Change. There’s no greater frustration than working every day to build and inspire others to build a more just, compassionate world, only to be so brutally reminded of how far away that world is, as we are bombarded by videos of an atrocity such as the police killing of Minneapolis resident George Floyd. Witnessing someone being killed is terrorizing. I am experiencing episodes of terror after seeing the life leave Floyd’s handcuffed body under the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, while two officers held down Floyd, and another stood idly by. That image will stay with me for a long time, just as... -more-



Pentagon Ready To Send Troops To Minneapolis If State Asks

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEi8s_Ix9HqnsJawU7jb075Jyze4q3aml89wxnPP9UhOvogKxfybM8d0LAtIfUDGGY_8FNRPG9fn-GsqKxKz5JUjspg-4u_xEXQZZu7-Nq11kOer07UO3wiZ2LnifKS4fx1jXeXKMEyDyDN4bwHJW8ZNFaTOoOcbfkhCPJOoQ4L9oyyjGlSpvFZ1SPubOAe0p3xSIjszmPsvzsKjJRLnMtWGtyNQE71N_TkAWtxR2qtutu6q3ZUD-Lkpt-7mpFG-bR3Gbtl-QHRZ1JtRC1s=s0-d-e1-ftBy James LaPorta and Robert Burns, Associated Press.  The Pentagon said Saturday it was ready to provide military help to authorities scrambling to contain unrest in Minneapolis, where George Floyd’s death has sparked widespread protests, but Gov. Tim Walz has not requested federal troops. Jonathan Rath Hoffman, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said several military units have been placed on higher alert “as a prudent planning measure” in case Walz asks for help. The Associated Press first reported on the potential deployments and, citing sources with direct knowledge of the orders, named four locations from which soldiers... -more-
 

It’s A Class War Now Too

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEgKwu_jTtc9rG6M64ZmfNKB5z4MFxiJ-XnyxyRcmKJDFgk96loWy9dt4aDkP16HpY6SkUcF-1rfmtrS8ECalQ6QENHBcvZ-Bkwi6kydvXr_lHHwIXENkGTMhRIDrzTkSjQWG2zpWzMwuNcWWrn4Ghvvokj1jUYHixkmY_wcLSkYMbxRg8AtvZNp7Vf-Gn2kxsU0SVoblmdhauUYruKaN_Ep-RWzE9q4tTVpPvt-bvwgXibtFuthZUAu96x7WWAYsuZkmtEuTd_5fSEC5AwVvEo=s0-d-e1-ftBy Joshua Frank, Counterpunch. The looting of stores is inherently a class issue, whether you look upon it favorably or not (there are always exceptions of course). The act of looting is a long-standing American tradition, dating back to the theft of Native lands and African enslavement. And today, while wealthy people don’t loot strip malls, they are adept at looting natural resources and labor, from the coalfields of West Virginia to Jeff Bezo’s Amazon warehouses. The poor, exerting their nominal power—even in a destructive and violent manner—display an entirely natural reaction to a continually powerless state of being.  -more-

mronline.org (2-12-20)


The Torture Machine, Racism and Police Violence in Chicago, by People’s Law Office and longtime National Lawyers Guild attorney Flint Taylor, is a meticulously detailed and authentic, truly appalling story of shame and disgrace to the city of Chicago, its political and police administration establishments, and numerous judges of the Cook County criminal courts; an […]
Source  share on Twitter Like The Torture Machine, Racism and Violence in Chicago on Facebook


Bruce Western.  Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison.  Russell Sage, 2018.  About the 600,000 released each year, what they face, what changes are needed. 

David Correia and Tyler Wall.  Police: A Field Guide.   Verso, 2018.    Radical glossary.

Do Not Resist, POV, PBS, AETN SUNDAY 10 PM, 2-18-18
www.pbs.org/pov/donotresist/
A vital and influential exploration of the rapid militarization of the police in the United States. Do Not Resist puts viewers in the center of the action — from inside a police training seminar that teaches the importance of.
Film Description. The son of a SWAT team member in Detroit ...
A vital and influential exploration of the rapid militarization of the ...
Production credits for the POV documentary Do Not Resist.
Everything you need to host a screening of Do Not Resist.
Find out more about Craig Atkinson, the filmmaker of the ...
Classroom Clip. Ferguson. Clip shows police using military ...


Instead of disaster preparedness and storm relief, resources are being funneled into violent police trainings and arms exchanges.
BY TARA TABASSI

Deadly-force data lacking; shootings by Arkansas police deserve study, officials say

2
This article was published March 12, 2017 at 4:37 a.m.
http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2017/mar/12/deadly-force-data-lacking-20170312-1/
Chris Finley and daughter Caitlyn Finley reminisce outside the house where his son and her brother, Christopher Grant Finley, 31, died in 2015 after being shot by a Jonesboro police officer. About 25 percent of people shot by police in Arkansas in the past six years, including Grant Finley, struggled with mental illness, an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette investigation shows.
Police in Arkansas shot at least 135 people in the past six years. Sixty-seven died.
During the same period, at least three Arkansas police officers were fatally shot by assailants, and 31 reported being shot at when they wounded or killed someone, according to research by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Those numbers come from the Democrat-Gazette's efforts to count all deadly-force encounters -- fatal or not -- between the public and law enforcement from 2011-16.
The newspaper built a database from public records and media reports because reliable, official statistics on police shootings are hard to come by.
The lack of official numbers makes it difficult for police to do their jobs, and breeds mistrust and suspicion among the public, say social scientists, political leaders and law enforcement officials.
And while few deadly police encounters in Arkansas resulted in the protests or public outrage seen elsewhere, that doesn't mean it couldn't happen, Little Rock Police Chief Kenton Buckner said.
"Have you ever heard of Falcon Heights?" Buckner asked, referring to the Minnesota town where a police officer killed school lunchroom worker Philando Castile in July.
"You'd never heard of it, had you?" the chief said. "So, if it can happen in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, it can happen in Little Rock, Arkansas."
The Democrat-Gazette developed this series of articles by analyzing thousands of pages of documents obtained through dozens of public records requests. The newspaper also used media reports to fill in gaps in the official records.
Among the newspaper's findings:
• Black men make up 7.5 percent of the state's population. They accounted for more than 39 percent of people police killed or wounded from 2011 to 2016.
• A quarter of all victims of officer-involved shootings -- at least 35 cases -- struggled with mental disorders. Officers in those encounters often had failed to complete training that would help them interact with the mentally ill.
• Police investigations into deadly-force encounters often lacked impartial oversight and rarely resulted in actions against the officers who fired their weapons.
• The people killed by police included one woman. The rest were men -- black, white and Hispanic, armed and unarmed, ranging in age from 15 to 107.
• Last year, Arkansas police used deadly force 33 times -- a 68 percent increase from the six-year average.
• So far this year, five people have been shot by police, two fatally.
Incomplete or imprecise record-keeping by certain law enforcement agencies and prosecutors means some lethal-force incidents may have been overlooked.
Most prosecutors said they didn't have indexes on deadly-force investigative files and could furnish only the files that they remembered handling.
First Judicial District Prosecuting Attorney Fletcher Long refused to dig up the files the newspaper requested under the state Freedom of Information Act. The 1st Judicial District covers Cross, Woodruff, St. Francis, Monroe, Lee and Phillips counties.
"I would have to go through each and every file maintained in my office to see if they had anything to do with the use of police force," Long emailed in response to the newspaper's request. "I decline to do this."
Andy Riner, 18th-West Judicial District prosecutor, didn't release deadly-force case files when the newspaper first requested them in July; he said he considered them homicide investigations with no statutes of limitation.
"If additional information were to be obtained in these matters, we may reopen the investigative process," Riner said in a letter.
The state public records law exempts details of active investigations from disclosure.
Months later, Riner released some of his files after the newspaper questioned his interpretation of the law. He said he was still searching for other records, which weren't provided before publication of this series. Riner's district covers Polk and Montgomery counties.
Eight of the state's remaining 26 elected prosecutors provided only one- or two-page cover letters rather than complete case files.

Information shortage

Like Arkansas, other states and the federal government fail to effectively track lethal-force cases, making any comparison difficult.
For now, the most complete public data on police shootings have been compiled by media outlets. The British newspaper The Guardian and The Washington Post began compiling comprehensive lists of people killed by police in 2015.
A 2015 investigation by the Post and Courier, a Charleston, S.C.-based newspaper, found that South Carolina police engaged in deadly force 235 times over a 77-month period -- roughly one occurrence every 10 days.
The Democrat-Gazette examined a 72-month period and found 135 cases, almost one every two weeks.
Adjusted for population, police in both states used lethal force at almost identical rates.
The FBI claims to track police-caused deaths and serves as a clearinghouse for crime statistics from all 50 states.
But at a crime summit in September, even FBI Director James Comey admitted the agency's collection methods are flawed and described the lack of data on police-involved shootings as "embarrassing" and "ridiculous."
The FBI's statistics, for example, showed that Arkansas law enforcement officers have killed two people since 2011. The Democrat-Gazette's data show that police in the state killed twice that many people in December alone.
Under former President Barack Obama's administration, the Department of Justice began to "re-design" how it tallies police-caused deaths by scouring media reports before inquiring with individual police departments and coroner's offices for verification and additional details.
In December, the Justice Department released a preliminary report of the redesign -- which counted shootings between 2015 and 2016 -- and estimated that FBI statistics covered only about half of the actual deaths.
That report matched the Democrat-Gazette's count of one officer-involved shooting death in the state from June 1 to Aug. 31, 2015, but it didn't include four other nonfatal shootings by Arkansas police.

'They're humans'

Local police agencies often track use of force within their departments to steer training and policy, but some officials say the absence of large-scale data is problematic.
"I think every modern police agency recognizes the vital importance of transparency," said Hope Police Chief J.R. Wilson, immediate past president of the Arkansas Association of Chiefs of Police.
"Scrutiny does make policing better. Scrutiny ensures that justice remains fair and equitable for all in a dynamic and imperfect environment.
"But, we must be careful," he said. "A vigilante or politically expedient approach to perceived injustice without reasonable understanding of the facts of an incident is unreasonable, unconscionable and not acceptable."
Many officers say that the heightened scrutiny they face has made their jobs harder.
In a nationwide survey released in January, police reported that the attention surrounding high-profile fatal shootings increased tensions between police and blacks, and made officers less willing to stop and question suspicious people.
The findings of the Pew Research Center survey included attitudes and experiences drawn from almost 8,000 police officers belonging to departments of 100 or more officers.
The report shows that police and the public disagree over the causes of police shootings and that police don't always agree with each other on that issue.
Sixty-seven percent of officers surveyed described the killing of black Americans in police encounters as "isolated incidents," while 60 percent of the public reported that these shootings were "signs of a broader problem."
The survey also noted differences in the views of black and white police: 92 percent of white officers said the country has already made the changes "needed to give blacks equal rights," while 69 percent of black officers said more needed to be done to ensure that blacks are afforded "equal rights with whites."
A large majority of officers surveyed also said they thought the public "doesn't understand the risks [police] face."
In many of the cases reviewed by the Democrat-Gazette, police had just seconds to weigh life-or-death decisions.
Since 2011, three officers in the state have been shot dead, two officers were killed in vehicular assaults, and two prison guards were killed by inmates.
"Officers are operating in an environment now that they didn't used to operate when I was just starting," said 23rd Judicial District prosecutor Chuck Graham.
"Officers have been shot for no other reason than they were a police officer. How do they operate in that? They're humans."
Graham was president of the Arkansas Prosecuting Attorneys Association last year and has decades of law enforcement experience with the U.S. Air Force.
"You're not the one that has a gun pointed at you," he said. "You're not the one that's having to make a decision like that."
Arkansas prosecutors charged police with crimes in only two of the 135 cases the newspaper reviewed, but neither officer was convicted at trial.
Prosecutors across the United States have struggled to successfully try cases against police officers -- a trend law experts attribute to juries' predisposed leniency toward police.
Overall, 2016 was different for prosecutors than previous years.
Nationally, at least four officers were convicted by state-court juries for on-duty shootings as compared with 2014 and 2015, when no officers in the United States were found guilty on murder charges, according to Philip Stinson, a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
Stinson worked for police departments in Virginia and New Hampshire before earning advanced degrees in law and criminology. In 2005, he started collecting data on police shootings -- which are frequently cited by researchers and media outlets -- by sifting through media reports, court records and videos.
Thirteen officers were convicted of murder or manslaughter for deadly on-duty shootings between 2005 and 2015, Stinson's research shows.
This does not include cases in which officers faced lesser charges.
In cases reviewed by the Democrat-Gazette, local police officers involved in shootings generally were granted special concessions, such as extra time to prepare their statements to investigators.
Often, the officers who fired their weapons were questioned by their colleagues -- a potential conflict of interest, say survivors and legal experts.
These practices have created a feeling of helplessness in victims' families -- families like the Finleys.

'The last thing'

As he stands in a cold October drizzle, Chris Finley recounts the worst night of his life -- the night his son Grant died at the hands of a Jonesboro cop.
Finley slowly turns a brass shell casing between thumb and forefinger, and points to the spot where his 31-year-old son took his final breath.
The night Grant Finley died, his father cleaned up the pool of his son's blood left behind by crime scene investigators -- and found the .40-caliber shell casing now wheeling in his hand.
"This didn't have to happen," Chris Finley says.
Grant Finley was typical of mentally ill individuals whose interactions with police led to injury or death from officers who had little or no training in calming agitated, confused people.
His family knows he wasn't perfect. His schizophrenia, and use of legal and illegal drugs to deal with his troubles led to several run-ins with police.
And while his father and sister acknowledge that he shouldn't have brandished a machete the night he was killed, they also say the officer shouldn't have shot him. The officer was not charged.
The Finleys and other victims' families feel the system intended to protect them has done the opposite.
"I feel like the last thing you want to do is call the police for help," said Caitlyn Finley, Grant's sister.
"I don't want to deal with them unless I have to, and that's sad. They should be the first person you want to call if you're in trouble."
Some families seek justice through the federal courts.
Thirteen separate federal lawsuits have been filed so far involving the cases reviewed by the Democrat-Gazette. More than a million dollars in settlements have gone to some families, court records show.

'A lot of anecdotes'

Some Arkansas lawmakers are pushing changes this year to alter the way police shootings are tracked.
Their intent is to give lawmakers and police the information needed to have an "educated discussion."
Rep. Vivian Flowers, D-Pine Bluff, filed a shell bill last week "to establish a uniform standard for data collection among law enforcement agencies." In a phone interview, she said that would encompass officer-involved shootings. She added that she is working with the Commission on Law Enforcement Standards and Training to sort out how to effectively record the data.
Some lawmakers, though, worry that their colleagues will be hesitant to support a bill that receives push-back from the law enforcement community.
"When we talk about tracking this, we start moving into corners right away," said Sen. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock.
"Officers feel accused, but it's not accusatory at all. We have a lot of anecdotes. But if we had data, that would tell us if those anecdotes are trends," she said.
Elliott filed a shell bill in the 2015 legislative session that called for creating a statewide "citizen's review board on policing practices" aimed at promoting "positive relationships" between law enforcement and communities, and providing for fair and transparent police practices. The bill did not contain any details and wasn't pushed further.
Legislatures in eight other states have passed laws requiring the collection of data on police use of deadly force. But most of those laws are new and haven't been as effective as intended, according to studies and news reports.
The central problem is that police agencies often fail to report use-of-force encounters and aren't penalized, according to officials in those states.
In Texas, for example, a public database debuted this year, but it was missing several notable instances of use of force. State officials have said it will take time for all agencies in the state to grow accustomed to reporting fatal force encounters.
In Maine, the state's attorney general reviews all deadly force investigations and posts the reviews online. But there is no collective data set that would identify trends, which could then be addressed through policy.
As for Arkansas, James Golden, a criminal justice professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, believes more data would be helpful, but he doubts steps will be taken to collect that information anytime soon.
"More data is always good," said Golden, a former Jonesboro police officer. "However, nobody is ever willing to pony up the money."

A final embrace

At 9 p.m., April 4, 2015, Jonesboro police confronted Grant Finley about an earlier altercation with a woman at his home, but he refused to answer the door.
Chris Finley persuaded officers to allow him to take his son to the police station early the next morning. The officers agreed and left 30 minutes later.
Or so the Finleys thought.
At 10:50 p.m. Chris Finley wrapped his son in a tight hug and whispered good night, unaware it would be their final embrace.
Meanwhile, officer Heath Loggains waited behind bushes across the street. Through the leaves, he saw Chris and Chris' daughter drive away in a white pickup.
Loggains later told investigators that he and several other officers took it upon themselves to stake out Grant Finley's home, believing he would hurt others or himself.
Loggains' statements to detectives tell what happened next:
About 11:40 p.m., Grant Finley stepped onto his front yard, in socks and camouflage pants. A machete sheath hung from his belt.
Loggains jumped from behind the bushes, barking commands.
Grant retreated into his tiny home and shut the metal door.
The officer kicked the door several times trying to get inside.
The door jamb abruptly gave way. The two men pushed against the door from opposing sides.
Losing ground to Loggains, Grant swung the blunt end of the machete through the space between the jamb and the door.
Loggains stepped back and unholstered his gun.
Fourteen bullets punched through the thin metal door.
For two hours, police reports show, a tactical team waited outside, unsure of whether it was safe to enter. Finally, they pushed a pole camera through the front window of the small home.
The camera screen showed Grant, with streaks of blood staining his chest, slumped against the door, dead.
SundayMonday on 03/12/2017
Print Headline: Deadly-force data lacking; Shootings by police deserve study, officials say

DEADLY FORCE: In 6 years, 53 blacks shot by police in Arkansas

3

Is it racial bias or part of a broader issue?

http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2017/mar/13/6-years-53-blacks-shot/
Roseetta Robinson cries at her Memphis home as she describes the death of her father, Cletis Wayne Williams, who was shot by a white Jonesboro police officer on Halloween 2011.
JONESBORO — Roseetta Robinson wept alone on Halloween 2011 after a policeman killed her father.
There were no protests, no riots, no public calls for accountability. No activists or TV cameras showed up in Jonesboro.
Her father, Cletis Williams, was black. Former Jonesboro patrolman Nick Holley is white.
Williams, 57, didn’t have a gun, and he was inside his home.
“If it were to happen now, it probably would have gotten more attention,” Robinson said, noting the added media coverage of police shootings in recent years.
Williams was one of 53 Arkansas black men killed or wounded by police in the past six years, an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette investigation found.
Seventeen of them, like Williams, were unarmed.
Black men accounted for 73.9 percent of the unarmed suspects shot by police in the years studied by the newspaper. They make up 7.5 percent of the state’s population.
By comparison, police shot five unarmed white men and one Hispanic man from 2011 through last year. White men make up about 37.9 percent of Arkansas’ population; they accounted for 21.7 percent of all unarmed victims shot by police.
Not every police-shooting case reviewed by the Democrat-Gazette involved a white officer shooting an unarmed black man. In a handful of cases, the officers were black.
And in most cases, regardless of the participants’ race, the person shot by police was armed.
Arkansas has not seen the level of outrage and protest that police killings of unarmed black men sparked elsewhere in recent years, but the tension between police and people of color exists here, the Democrat-Gazette’s research shows.
It’s nothing new, said state Sen. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock.
“Everyone is seeing it now because there are cameras everywhere,” she said.
“Black people aren’t surprised because they’ve experienced it for years. It’s taken cameras to validate what we’ve been saying” about police treatment of blacks.
Criminal justice experts caution against drawing sweeping conclusions about race and police shootings from raw statistics.
The outsize share of black men who have been shot by police is disturbing, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s entirely police officers’ fault, those researchers say.
Joseph Rukus, a criminology professor at Arkansas State University, said there’s a disproportionate number of blacks caught up in the criminal justice system.
“What this highlights is it’s an overall problem,” Rukus said. “It doesn’t show racial bias on police per se, but racial bias in the criminal justice system as a whole.”
Civil rights leaders agree with Rukus that blacks are systemically overrepresented, but they aren’t as quick to shift blame away from law enforcement, pointing out that police in Arkansas are far more likely to shoot an unarmed black man than an unarmed white man.
Does that mean police perceive a greater threat when dealing with black suspects?
“That’s a good ground of inquiry,” said Rukus, who conducted research in Ferguson, Mo., last summer. “We have to take it in the context of the neighborhood where it occurred. Is it cause for concern? Yes.”

BEHAVIOR IS TARGET

Law enforcement officials largely dismiss the idea that implicit bias is widespread within their ranks. Instead, they cite high crime rates in areas with predominantly black populations.
Some officers are “bad apples,” or as Little Rock Police Chief Kenton Buckner put it, there are “some that I wouldn’t want making a run to my mother’s house.”
But most cops are fundamentally good guys who want to do the right thing, he said.
Shuffling through a stack of spreadsheets scattered on his desk, Buckner, who is black, recites his department’s arrest statistics — about 70 percent of arrestees are black.
Therefore, he reasons, the majority of suspects shot by Little Rock officers would be black.
The newspaper’s findings bear that out: 78.6 percent of those killed or wounded by Little Rock officers since 2011 were black — the highest rate of any department in Arkansas when adjusted for population.
Buckner said the “socioeconomic cocktail” of single-parent homes, substance abuse, mental illness and lack of education plagues the city’s black youths.
“That’s uncomfortable for people to hear, but it’s a fact,” he said. “The truth is the truth. And in no way, shape or form would anyone be able to say to you that we are targeting African-Americans because of their race or skin color.
“We target people because of their behavior.”

POLICE CULTURE

Buckner may be right, said Cody T. Ross, a University of California-Davis researcher who has studied police shootings across the nation.
His research has flagged Pulaski County and seven other U.S. counties where “racial bias in shooting rates is strongest.”
The other counties were Miami-Dade County, Florida; Cook County, Illinois; Los Angeles County, California; Orleans Parish, Louisiana; Harris County, Texas; Baltimore County, Maryland; and Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.
Police departments in those counties, including Pulaski, “may benefit from [a] review” to determine whether arrest and shooting numbers are a result of racial bias or higher criminal activity among black residents, Ross said.
Matthew DeGarmo, a criminal justice professor at ASU, said crime rates may be higher in Arkansas’ black communities because of a history of systemic racism in the state.
Black families, he said, were isolated into segregated neighborhoods. Those communities became impoverished after jobs moved away, which sowed seeds for increased criminal activity.
“In many places, officers know that African-Americans commit more crime, so when an officer sees a black suspect, that can affect their actions,” he added.
Such a notion frustrates Pulaski County Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen, who instead sees a police culture that allows “incompetent” officers on the streets.
“Why would people who profess to be trained in subduing unarmed people using less than lethal force be killing so many unarmed people and disproportionately doing so when that person is black and male?” he asked.
For example, Carleton Wallace, who was black, was killed by a barely trained officer on Sept. 8, 2012, in Alexander, records show.
Officer Nancy Cummings told detectives she accidentally shot the unarmed 30-year-old in the back while arresting him.
Cummings had worked for the Alexander Police Department for seven months, but had not attended the police academy. Her only firearms training had been target practice, according to trial testimony.
Cummings was charged with manslaughter. A jury acquitted her.
Wallace’s family has a civil suit pending against Cummings and the city of Alexander in federal court.
Allowing untrained cops to patrol the streets leads to preventable police shootings, said Griffen, who is often outspoken on civil rights issues.
“That’s a charitable conclusion,” Griffen said. “The damning conclusion is there is a culture in policing that intends to kill people — two out of three of which are black males — who aren’t a lethal threat.”

‘YOU SHOT ME’

In retrospect, the paths that led officer Nick Holley and Cletis Williams to a confrontation on Oct. 31, 2011, seem clear.
From 2010-12, Holley used excessive force 14 times when arresting suspects, four times more than the average Jonesboro cop, according to federal court records. Of all of the Jonesboro officers, Holley was the only one to resort to force more than 10 times, court records show.
Jonesboro’s population is 18 percent black. Holley patrolled in a predominantly black neighborhood of the city, and 10 of the 14 suspects he used force to arrest were black.
Williams, an Army veteran, started having problems with the law in Jonesboro in 2009 after he was ticketed for excessive noise.
On Oct. 10, 2009, an officer stopped him while he walked along the street and arrested him on a warrant for failing to appear in court on the noise citation.
After that, the warrants began to snowball, Craighead County District Court Clerk Joe Monroe said.
Police stopped Williams every few months for the next two years for infractions like riding his bicycle without a light or driving with a broken tail light.
His daughter believes those minor violations were simply excuses to stop a black man.
When Holley saw Williams riding his bike home that Halloween day in 2011, Williams was named in 16 bench warrants for failure to pay fines and seven for failure to complete public service — all misdemeanors.
He was also due in federal court the next day for a hearing in a pending lawsuit that he had filed against guards at the Craighead County jail for excessive use of force.
So when Holley knocked on Williams’ front door, Williams asked the officer to issue him a citation commanding him to appear in court, instead of arresting him.
When Williams reached out the door to show Holley some papers indicating that he had a federal court hearing in the next few days, the officer grabbed his arm.
A struggle ensued, Holley said. Williams dragged him into the mobile home, he said.
Holley said he tried to subdue Williams with a Taser. It didn’t work, and Williams ripped the device away, the officer told investigators.
Williams then jammed the Taser into Holley’s shoulder, he told detectives. They never found any burn marks from the Taser on Holley’s uniform or his skin, investigative reports say.
Holley said he fell on his back with Williams on top of him.
“That’s when he said, ‘You shot me,’” Holley said in his police interview.
The struggle continued, Holley said, and he fired several more times, striking Williams in both arms and five times in the chest.
“I was scared,” said Holley, whose actions were ruled as justified.

FADING SUNSHINE

Roseetta Robinson, 34, moved to Memphis after her father’s death.
Jonesboro didn’t feel like a place to raise black children anymore, and those drives past the empty lot where her father’s mobile home once stood never got easier, she said.
In October, four of her six children, sat across from her in a dimly lit living room in Memphis as she told the story of what happened to their grandfather five years earlier.
Hearing police sirens on Jonesboro’s Warren Street, Robinson had stepped out her front door and peered through binoculars several blocks to south.
Through the fading sunshine, she could see Jonesboro police cars lined up along the road near her father’s house.
But she didn’t think much of it and returned inside.
That’s when she noticed a TV breaking news alert that someone had been shot.
She grabbed her keys and drove down the street, more curious than concerned.
Her dad’s mobile home was surrounded by crimescene tape.
“They killed your dad,” a neighbor said.
Robinson had planned to take her kids trick-or-treating that night.
Instead, she sat sobbing on the pavement surrounded by police.
Her children learned to hate Halloween that day, she said.

‘NOT THE FIX-ALL’

After a series of high-profile shootings across the country since 2015, police departments everywhere have put more emphasis on socalled community policing.
In the past month, for example, Fayetteville police donated coats to needy children.
In Little Rock, officers talked with residents over coffee.
In Jonesboro, cops threw a block party in one of the city’s high-crime neighborhoods.
Photos from those events are scattered among the mugshots of wanted suspects on the departments’ social media pages.
Those may be great events, but they don’t fix the problem that exists between police and communities of color, said Griffen, the circuit judge.
“You don’t fix the situation by a community night out,” he said. “You don’t fix that situation with a ride-along. You don’t fix that situation by playing basketball with kids at night. You don’t fix that situation with a police chief talking about black-on-black crime.
“It’s an attempt to direct attention away from police who kill unarmed people and are treated like God, like they’re infallible.”
Some civil rights leaders have called for cities to require police to live within the city limits, or even in the neighborhoods they patrol. Little Rock and Pine Bluff rejected such measures in recent years.
Buckner and others have suggested a compromise. Instead of a residency requirement, cities could offer incentives for officers to live in the city.
“It’s not the fix-all, but it’s a start,” said Dale Charles, president of the Little Rock branch of the NAACP.
“If they were in the community, they’d see us for more than eight hours a day on patrol. We still see everything too much on the basis of race. We’ve got to interact, or that’s not going to change.”

‘HE’D BE PROUD’

After Cletis Williams’ death, his daughter says she changed as a parent, becoming more cautious.
Her boys, 14 and 13, will start driving in a few years. They’ll be on their own even more.
She worries that like many other black men, police will pull them over whether they’ve done something wrong or not.
She’s had that talk with them and what they should do if it happens.
“I just tell them to ‘Watch what you say, do what you’re supposed to and make no sudden movements,’” she said.
Elliott, the state senator, gave her son the same talk “over and over again.”
Sylvia Perkins did too. After a Little Rock officer killed her 15-year-old son in 2012, she told her other son and her grandsons to drive to her house if a cop tries to pull them over.
“That way I can watch,” she said.
Robinson still has questions about the death of her father.
Why didn’t Holley call for backup? Why did he shoot so many times? Why did her father have to die?
They’re all in her pleadings in U.S. District Court where she sued Holley and the city of Jonesboro.
U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker denied Holley qualified immunity, writing in an order that “a reasonable juror could find it unreasonable that Officer Holley pulled his gun and shot Mr. Williams.”
The lawsuit was settled shortly after for $22,155.
“Money doesn’t repay someone’s life,” Robinson said.
The settlement helped put Robinson through school. She graduated from Remington College in Memphis in September as a certified medical assistant.
As she told what happened the day her father died, Robinson calmly described how her father was shot seven times, and the sadness, panic and anger that surged through her that day.
But, as she described her father’s personality, her lip quivered and she buried her face in her arms: Strongwilled. Tough. Strict. Happy.
Across the room, her 16-year-old daughter’s cheeks shone with tears.
Robinson looked sideways at her family then raised her head.
“He’d be really proud,” she said.
Some officers are “bad apples,” or as Little Rock Police Chief Kenton Buckner put it, there are “some that I wouldn’t want making a run to my mother’s house.” But most cops are fundamentally good guys who want to do the right thing, he said.
Print Headline: In 6 years, 53 blacks shot


Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter.  Edited by Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton.  2016.
A New York Public Library pick for "A Reading List of America"

Combining firsthand accounts from activists with the research of scholars and reflections from artists, Policing the Planet traces the global spread of the broken-windows policing strategy, first established in New York City under Police Commissioner William Bratton. It’s a doctrine that has vastly broadened police power the world over—to deadly effect.

With contributions from #BlackLivesMatter cofounder Patrisse Cullors, Ferguson activist and Law Professor Justin Hansford, Director of New York–based Communities United for Police Reform Joo-Hyun Kang, poet Martín Espada, and journalist Anjali Kamat, as well as articles from leading scholars Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Robin D. G. Kelley, Naomi Murakawa, Vijay Prashad, and more, Policing the Planet describes ongoing struggles from New York to Baltimore to Los Angeles, London, San Juan, San Salvador, and beyond.
Paperback, 320 pages
Reviews
“A major work…As someone who certainly admires the work of these scholars, I couldn’t think of a more compelling and timely work such as this. I am pleased to not only be in community with these amazing people but to listen and learn from them…Policing the Planet comes at an incredibly important time.”
– Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
“This book is the best analytical and political response we have to the historic rebellions in Ferguson! Don’t miss it.”
– Cornel West, author of Black Prophetic Fire
“We owe Jordan Camp and Christina Heatherton a great expression of gratitude for this brilliant and provocative collection of voices that compels us to see the Black Lives Matter Movement in the larger context of twenty-first-century racial capitalism and the growing carceral state.”
– Barbara Ransby, author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement
“When this series of essays addressing contemporary activism's biggest movement hits stands in May, we'll be ready. A variety of contributors, including anti-police brutality and militarization activists from around the country and world, promise to make Policing the Planet a definitive work for anybody confused about exactly what structural law enforcement powers lead to our current racial justice climate.”
– Colorlines
“Through compiling so many critical voices in one place, Camp and Heatherton have created a much-needed guidebook of resistance to our planet’s police state and the structures of urban governance that feed it.”
– Aaron Cantú, Washington Spectator
“This broad collection of sharp commentar


10 Urban Shields Too Many: Act Now!
War Resisters League 
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Since 2007, Urban Shield has brought police agencies and weapons giants from around the world together in California. This weekend they will be at it again. After a decade, we've had enough: #StopUrbanShield!
Two years ago, the Stop Urban Shield Coalition demanded that the City of Oakland stop hosting the weapons expo and won! Yet Urban Shield - the largest SWAT training in the world - continues to take place in nearby Pleasanton, with participating SWAT teams, emergency respondents, and arms dealers only growing in number and public funding. But our side is getting stronger too, and we've got the momentum!

Join WRL, together with the Stop Urban Shield Coalition and communities across the country, to resist the racism and repression of police militarization. 80,000 SWAT raids a year!? How about livable housing and quality healthcare instead? Join the growing movement against militarization and policing in cities everywhere!  Act now:
SIGN HERE! Sign the 2016 petition against Urban Shield
TAKE ACTION! Join California-wide mobilization against Urban Shield this Friday
LEARN MORE! Check out Stop Urban Shield website & this video to learn more:
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END ARCHIVE OF ARTICLES ON US POLICE OPPRESSION September 7, 2016-June 25, 2020
Here begins the 2nd installment IN REVERSE CHRON ORDER:
Following 6 items from Popular Resistance.org (7-28-20)
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEgfbBYPrryKbFVtTvcJb7tkyaRmqJjIJuCoqd0vPo90z7QxXsSHWcYgt-rWYj-xx5GcCByuTq_3FMYjUt9IIK4mIXT8dJabSr1ZwJtf9yza0qAsH_ZC2MpOj3dDCS558kNiOJdxrKYXgCdHvtWq_CasKCw5pX5jWkRN08WRhWxXBahQJyKDWmdykrefLxhRwihXPCjQA-LtyeEnCwjyio4tkfIKyOoP=s0-d-e1-ftBy Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, Clearing the FOG. The Trump Administration sent federal law enforcement, including the paramilitary squad of Customs and Border Patrol, BORTAC, which has been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, to the streets of Portland, OR to stop the ongoing demonstrations against racist police violence. Federal law enforcement, working with local police, is also being sent to other cities where anti-racist protests are going on. We speak with constitutional lawyer Mara Verheyden-Hilliard about the legality of this and how activists can fight back to protect the rights of everyone and... -more-
 
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEj30sJ0CmICeyVCXFFUoB5Hnjf-UnmciMm8_rfYeiUbaWmbC1Vr61vMSfUhrMnGI_tcfUroEA6HxS8A8hZ8NYtLjlaFSMhjrvByFaG-7Ht4dRJG49-6jgFuG6KGjWhJDzTZeNiEJ2M49Xz7jABoWT5bpUWrG6z9kdaGiYXXjBRpAvd9_hvQhjQ5UBg1guEx4Od5X72uBJqg0yMCFJisYRY7lQ0hFeVVymT-sQ9zUP4=s0-d-e1-ftBy Conrad Wilson and Jonathan Levinson, OPB.  Several dozen additional out-of-town federal law enforcement officers are deploying to Portland as they look to make additional arrests in the coming days, while also shifting tactics from the use of tear gas, according to multiple federal law enforcement sources. The federal response has so far sparked four civil rights lawsuits, a Department of Justice inspector general investigation, proposed legislation in Congress limiting the role of federal law enforcement in American cities, and has injured a number of protesters. Rather than quell the protests as was the intent, it’s served to... -more-
 
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhmmySfF49beH80lvBe409uiCT3DXPIYDdDB1j1Bdjh0d_uvWpYML9-C7vA2ufpev6iNBwhCCyIqco92oOQJ5yG4stV5L1OpO66qkU9dMDmDz4Fo1I7WUsPw9lGDydGYmS4V_LE-8V0osrLzqjXd8iHgBsGa0COZTZF9372ylBQhz50C_eDxSV0jeg9wS8nsriV6eh_5GJPPLcZ56ljRRZzlDEGlTFO_FFpQu7zbuzLv-DrJxncvDvN0h7ewK6AJw=s0-d-e1-ftBy Eric Umansky, Pro Publica. Until last month, New York state prohibited the release of police officers’ disciplinary records. Civilians’ complaints of abuse by officers were a secret. So were investigators’ conclusions. The public couldn’t even know if an officer was punished. Today, we are making this information public and, with it, providing an unprecedented picture of civilians’ complaints of abuse by NYPD officers as well as the limits of the current system that is supposed to hold officers accountable. We’ve published a database that lets you search the police complaints so you can see the information for yourself.  -more-
 

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEiNIal2-M9gP8MQsBCRQkMd7YT1HliWjKUD9vzmovF8spNM-wTXATz6TGaQTtNj3jD7KF5eyGziHvz807qwPnG-XTtS-ME6TYrtb7gINvrtx9-cAzYejh9B_pnCXwfwwgxsY1GdjWC7fScLlm5QZL0sjZKdEgSNh-suOwen5NLyr86Y8oVe84dqm5U0LJAFL1pSJ1tZ8A7DtfBTFCbzply1n_vMa-U97-HhP14A1Y7MTcblpV211NF4mvcnNkDtYSF5CQ=s0-d-e1-ftBy Benjamin G. Davis, Jurist. Remember the protestors with guns walking into statehouses and protesting the stay at home orders? Do you remember a single case where teargas or pepper spray was used against those nearly all white protestors who were protesting in the sense of trying to encourage reopening which is what the Executive has been imprudently pushing? Fast forward to this last week. Were teargas and pepper spray used on looters? No. It was used on peaceful protestors who were protesting after the murder of George Floyd. Now, given teargas and pepper spray have the nefarious quality of causing people to cough... -more-
 

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEgLWBUdCQ0R4Hi2K-9AQ8w4ntIHT_xVaPVxqOBsSF4OalxdGS3CiqDrtw6pSOcYmxBNu5XQOD4J5yGPMkAp11gI-fD9SZLFEXEe1WSC4qFRpDqn-rC7plqHsw_W3Hcj9EF_6qbtVrI21pfRRQf4ucQNRGEt7rrXhceZ15JY-RUhoHRTbAcmBmoOv1jJJHgCZTaBBWDZDaF7xl9gLBKNzszRUjZjSUrxfQ=s0-d-e1-ftBy David Kroman, Crosscut. A federal judge late Friday halted the implementation of a Seattle ban on police use of tear gas, pepper spray and other so-called less lethal weapons used for crowd control. His decision gives more latitude to law enforcement to use the tools ahead of what could be a weekend of protests, as federal agents arrive in Seattle with the stated orders of protecting federal property.   A separate court injunction against use of the crowd control weapons remains in place, although that order allows for their targeted and limited deployment in certain circumstances.  -more-
 
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEiplr6xYOq-tiF3B7L7eFXYLNs32BzDraaWt5WbZ1r3Y2zrSGCrU6IWpmDoTSOQiKLfFXCg3s28uO9n92N6pqN8kGGhWnTTtej0QQBiS3tyM-j2bm66LgsWl4wm5-PrLAmx4QmwJpbGQAb5zNp3dX5MVFI1V1NTqo2TOgzK4JNcd1YKztrKNkbG8fJD2k19-PBN-ZsBexGOOI9uEH2ERKyoaqK0ml8sETBtTr_0kIV9BS5U=s0-d-e1-ftBy Ben Carroll, Workers World. By Workers World. Data are everywhere. In 2020, technology is a ubiquitous part of everyday life for many workers in this country and around the world. We use social media and email to keep in touch with family and friends.  We watch live streams of events and activities that take place across the globe.  We text and stream music on our commutes to work.  The list goes on.  Technology has increased capital’s ability to put workers into direct competition with one another for jobs — and drive their wages downward and worsen their working conditions, irrespective of the country in which they reside.   -more-



Secret police seizing a protester in Portland (image: The Sparrow Project)
(image: Sparrow Project7/15/20)
This week on CounterSpin: Some corporate media appear agog that militarized federal agents—deployed with a mission reflected in Defense Secretary Mark Esper's comment that city streets are a "battlespace," filled with what acting Homeland Security chief Chad Wolf called "violent mobs"—would go ahead and tear gas protesters in Portland, Oregon, even though Portland's Democratic mayor, Tom Wheeler, was among them.  Outrageous, sure, but we're a bit beyond outrage now, aren't we? While we wait to see if corporate media can decide which optic is an optic too far, we talk about the legal, constitutional elements of the fight for our right to protest, including against the very forces that are sent to police the protesting. Our guest is Marjorie Cohn, past president of the National Lawyers Guild, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, and contributor/editor on a number of books, including The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration and Abuse, and Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Trump's executive orders.
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JULY 24, 2020
Marjorie Cohn on Portland Secret Police
Secret police seizing a protester in Portland (image: The Sparrow Project)
CounterSpin Marjorie Cohn Full Show
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Secret police seizing a protester in Portland (image: The Sparrow Project)
(image: Sparrow Project7/15/20)
This week on CounterSpin: Some corporate media appear agog that militarized federal agents—deployed with a mission reflected in Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s comment that city streets are a “battlespace,” filled with what acting Homeland Security chief Chad Wolf called “violent mobs”—would go ahead and tear gas protesters in Portland, Oregon, even though Portland’s Democratic mayor, Tom Wheeler, was among them.  Outrageous, sure, but we’re a bit beyond outrage now, aren’t we? While we wait to see if corporate media can decide which optic is an optic too far, we talk about the legal, constitutional elements of the fight for our right to protest, including against the very forces that are sent to police the protesting. Our guest is Marjorie Cohn, past president of the National Lawyers Guild, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, and contributor/editor on a number of books, including The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration and Abuse, and Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues.
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PORTLAND, OR, AND POLICE STATE TACTICS
ACLU  7-24-20
Dick –
We want to update you on the situation on the ground in Portland, Oregon. Over this past week, militarized federal forces have escalated their violent attacks against the city's people. In response, the ACLU of Oregon immediately sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.S. Marshal Service.
Since June, police have fired tear gas and other munitions into crowds gathered to protest police brutality in Portland. Now, federal agents are occupying the streets – inflicting pain on and silencing people who believe Black Lives Matter. Protesters and members of the press have been shot in the head with kinetic impact munitions, swept away in unmarked cars, and repeatedly tear gassed.
These actions are unconstitutional and inhumane, and they are not going unanswered. On Wednesday, the ACLU of Oregon sued on behalf of a group of medics attacked by unmarked federal agents as they tried to care for injured protesters. This followed our lawsuit last week, which has already succeeded in blocking federal authorities from arresting or attacking journalists and legal observers.
This is likely only the beginning, Dick – so please read more to stay informed. Federal agencies are doubling down on their harsh tactics, stating that they will not leave the streets of Portland and they will take their disturbing practices nationwide. The government is crafting plans to deploy roughly 150 federal agents to Chicago soon.
We cannot accept this as the new normal. That is why we will be watching nationwide, ready to challenge any constitutional abuses.
Our democracy and our safety are on the line right now. We will not stop fighting to protect both.
Thank you for being part of this critical work,
Vera Eidelman
ACLU attorney, fighting for free speech

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mronline.org (7-23-20)

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Unemployment insurance laws were developed prior to the widespread use of contingent faculty, and were designed to prevent K-12 teachers and full-time college professors from collecting unemployment during scheduled term breaks and summer vacations when they weren’t teaching. In nearly all states, these laws are being used to prevent adjuncts, who have since become the […]  | more…
share on Twitter Like Colleges layoff underpaid adjuncts then challenge their unemployment claims on Facebook


The legal right to sexual violence is part and parcel of policing. This will not end until we eliminate police discretion over women’s bodies.  | more…
share on Twitter Like Reform won’t end police sexual violence on Facebook

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In what may come to be viewed as a historic court case, a group of UK Uber drivers from London, Birmingham, Nottingham and Glasgow have launched a legal action against Uber in the Netherlands, supported by the App Drivers and Couriers Union (ADCU), the International Alliance of App-based Transport Workers (IAATW) and Worker Info Exchange.  | more…
share on Twitter Like Crunch time for the Platform Management model on Facebook


The excessive use of force and killings of unarmed Black Americans by police has fueled a popular movement for slashing police budgets, reimagining policing, and directing freed funds to community-based programs that provide medical and mental health care, housing, and employment support to those in need. This is a long overdue development.  | more…
share on Twitter Like Defunding police and challenging militarism, a necessary response to their “battle space” on Facebook


Chanting, “Feds stay clear! Moms are here!,” groups of women congregated at the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse and other locations in Central Portland. They were met with tear gas, flashbangs, and pepper round bullets, injuring many.  | more…
share on Twitter Like Portland: “Wall of Moms” mobilizes to protect protests from police violence on Facebook



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We’ve seen the way that the police responded to nonviolent civil disobedience at Standing Rock or in Ferguson versus the laissez-faire approach they’ve used in a number of these white supremacist riots. They clearly can regulate their behavior. Why they choose not to when it’s groups protesting police violence is what I think local government […]  | more…
share on Twitter Like Leaked documents show police knew far-right extremists were the real threat at protests, not “ANTIFA” on Facebook



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Cutting police budgets without establishing public control over their behavior doesn’t solve the problem, and invites politicians to shuffle budget numbers around like a three-card monte swindle.  | more…
share on Twitter Like Freedom Rider: The police defunding con game on Facebook



The Nation (July 13/20, 2020)
      Five articles examine US police violence, and several other articles comment on violence in general.  The editor D. D. Guttenplan’s editorial, “Disarm the Police,” quickly surveys the history of arming the police, cites London’s mainly unarmed Metropolitan Police, and urges the nation at least to “remove [this] one factor” from “the epidemic of US gun violence.”  In “De Blasio’s Betrayal,” the editors condemn New York Mayor De Blasio for failing to live up to his promises of police reform.  Sociologist Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing, criticizes “procedural justice” and recommends reducing police budgets “in as many dimensions as we can.”  Likewise, in “How to Make ‘Defund the Police’ a Reality,” Bryce Covert would divest from the overfunded police and invest in underfunded social services: homeless, health departments, housing, youth, workforce, etc.  And Destin Jenkins calls on the “divest and invest” movement not to “exchange the violence of the police for the violence of finance capitalism.”
      The Nation is one of my favorite sources of information, print or online.  If you hesitate to subscribe to yet another magazine (or buy another book) because you already purchase more than you can keep up with, remember we won’t have these good sources if we don’t subscribe.   If you ever wonder how you can make a difference, send your check.
     Articles on other subjects are outstanding too : Patricia Williams‘ “Circus Maximus” on T. as “a master of political misdirection “; Katha Pollitt’s “Goodbye, Columbus?” on no longer celebrating monumentally mass murderers, torturers, exploiters, war-makers; and more.  Dick

mronline.org (7-3-20)


The defanging of the George Floyd Uprising was not accidental but was rather a deliberate attempt on the part of the American ruling class to regain social control in the wake of the largest and most militant protests in recent memory. This article examines the dimensions of how this defanging took place: how, within the […]  | more…
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demilitarize the police
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Studies show that militarized police departments are more likely to kill civilians. Despite the data, departments across the country are still militarizing their police forces.

Police often use riot gear, tear gas, a surplus of guns, and even tanks in situations that don't call for it. 

This type of military equipment doesn’t belong on American soil. 

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Following 2 items from mronline.org (6-28-20)

Radical Reviewer and Tristan from Step Back History review The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.  | more…
share on Twitter Like The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander – Review (ft. Step Back History) on Facebook

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Community control of the police means empowering the people to shape and oversee the mechanisms of their own security and end forever the armed occupation of our communities by hostile forces.  | more…
share on Twitter Like Yes, defund the cops–and put them under community control on Facebook

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Forward this email to your friends and share the articles on social media.



Following 7 items from Popular Resistance.org (6-27-20) 

How Racism Is An Essential Tool For Maintaining The Capitalist Order

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEi2hPK71KSwEok1g6avSLdm4c_Q9Syr4uJA4pvTZZrt1WKQvyhOaxznbN9unwZVkbsB1Na3pPTu2gS-nB-G2PruQ4EY65CM1tw2AqOZd67YjgCZgly9QX-MnH44BRnjgNNX7WW4mY5P-05OoblgUDGqZMSOL6a4zc0y1QMgbltCmvAiXzHnCysnh9cAs7cV3urNlLnb_c11qluYn9ISlxiZqaHwxgrS2SieIDgNjTR8QkG6aFl5v2SsnRuLtTcZHN4xyM9743vn=s0-d-e1-ftBy Richard D. Wolff, Economy for All. Capitalism’s cyclical crises could potentially turn their victims against it and make them receptive to the system’s critics. This would more likely happen if everyone in the society were roughly equally vulnerable to cyclical downturns. Most employees would then rightly worry that their jobs would be lost in the next crash. They would periodically face income losses, interrupted educations, lost homes, and so on. Whatever relief employees felt if neighbors, rather than themselves, got fired, they would know that it might well be their turn in the next cycle.  -more-
 

Inside The US’s Largest Maximum-Security Prison, COVID-19 Raged

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjcfEt0cN6EC8Wc9Eit-zDylKqO8n75P1wTvuHZBXZwsjwH4ZFtccz0K652vq_I1hEjmHetNooekEK77Ko5_NQQJVKTUdZQWF3NQsezjvkMMLhbmZUb0E1NpFh-wPqUVO741AlTC3dBA_w0SjJf0PQGeasOzhccSUyyxmiayptH3fG0vwCitiTRUGl8_Snp9Pqe99k_Jfk44107=s0-d-e1-ftBy Anat Rubin, Tim Golden, and Richard A. Webster, ProPublica. While the novel coronavirus burned through Angola, as the country’s largest maximum-security prison is known, officials insisted they were testing all inmates who showed symptoms, isolating those who got sick and transferring more serious cases to the hospital in Baton Rouge, about 60 miles to the south. But from inside Angola’s walls, inmates painted a very different picture — one of widespread illness, dysfunctional care and sometimes inexplicable neglect. They said at least four of the 12 prisoners who have died in the pandemic, including Williams, had been.... -more-

Mr. Fish's Catch of the Day:

The ‘New’ American Mercenary: A Pocket History

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEiGCHCklPwk0a8cyfBpNrRRSXNpQOU1Aa18jlVmAuZURY3r1ueDtpObFGLxXtYWIOEK2NDE-0sO4ELm2qSnaz3SfKkTKyd1P0-QmrgHXKxSt3df1r4yvkPTV3HvEtrszlBdp-tdDj7_qW5_ihaQyguXeUwS-0MrviV3QCzKi_G6498YD5Y33xA1Wr174X1ubrZXi4w_75YafM0YafgF7Dc8giJ5uw=s0-d-e1-ftBy Danny Sjursen, Antiwar.com. Though the bizarre story has been subsumed by other events, last month’s aborted invasion of Venezuela should’ve hardly shocked anyone. The United States has long used mercenaries to do its bidding. They have provided Washington distance and deniability for unsavory operations. During the Cold War, the U.S. hoped this would limit domestic and international protest. Policymakers also discerned mercenary alternatives to bloody, expensive quagmires like the Vietnam or Iraq Wars. Traditionally, most of these hired guns were foreigners – ex-soldiers of declining European empires.  -more-
 

Chicago School Board Votes To Keep Police Contract — For Now

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEgPQRKNKmyWPhpObAeHT4YJ-9I2Tc4RkbLU0R7sei7ezXO0BlCn1OQkNzW48YxA_20LkAtzp_l3GcIQIW_iod3A8FQzAc8_95EjyXd50CeA_PDVyD3Y0aHMyaASKOlAoBe557iGHH7nzARA-IoPL6fkg9zlm1fhpMj1GZgKaeMCVcQIo0f1S0lQiMrZ_cA57u0o1A=s0-d-e1-ftBy Nader Issa, Chicago Sun Times. Chicago’s school board has voted against ending a program that puts police officers in public schools, following the wishes of the mayor and top Chicago Public Schools leadership while rejecting the demands of students and activists who for years have called for police-free schools. While the narrow 4-3 vote, the most suspenseful by the Board of Education in years, keeps intact a scrutinized $33-million contract between the school system and the Chicago Police Department, another vote is likely in the next two months on whether to renew the contract that’s set to expire at the end of August.  -more-
 

The US Military Has A Boogaloo Problem

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEheZO-VfgZZk6TALQjTTfIYygVDMEEDrL_1KRG9FeH7rYYvnbYY6f27Tme2xn3rxEk3BQZfKIgzilozbVANR14eaviyukHM6LXOn5BNkX1wHEGTYfd63MZCTZMKTF8ObJC9vZb5cxQqGt0tu_br5m2fd-5yGDb0huD6maSdsEiz1dTXW9CJt4U71ePLHBpFjYczNKPcyCz-kpAYKhlb_sE001N40M-Jn-YpJgbYwN7vGFQnk1NHOq_48vXUlvQe2fA=s0-d-e1-ftBy Tess Owens, Vice. The U.S. military appears to have a brewing boogaloo problem. Active-duty military are flocking to online networks frequented by the anti-government movement, known for its meme culture and Hawaiian shirt-clad adherents, who are often called Boogaloo Bois. “Boogaloo” is code for civil war, which is the ultimate goal of the movement, and some of its followers trade in memes glorifying violence against federal agents and crack jokes about the impending “Boog.” Recently they’ve become regular fixtures at anti-lockdown and Black Lives Matter protests in states that allow open-carry of military-style firearms.  -more-



Chicago’s Neighborhoods Will Remain “Occupied” Until The City Defunds CPD

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjebb-_uMR6BF0YV7LL3jl4WS_4e4A2Hy7Vbq68RF2sa8XX5ax0JMoheZ5sv4lqAeB6CXDW8a2TCie5Z-mmmRYK7KmJf-n6abFL6FQIOs0IBGyvvqZ0RIDqUjkJ8RehQqxyXI0TCHGx0FgxWPOz5eXLcj5MUMP67r0gWCML7odJWggxxkIUU92Rk2hDjJgV6c6AZ_X-eGTkxy-qI80dFLVd6vAVFUfua9PJGKtg78Awdwk=s0-d-e1-ftBy Bobby Vanecko, Southside Weekly. The book Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power, published last year, details the history of the Chicago Police Department’s quasi-military occupation of the city’s Black communities from the race riots of 1919 through the present day. Author Simon Balto, an assistant professor of African American history at the University of Iowa, demonstrates that “there is not a time in Chicago’s history where the city was home to large percentages of black people, and in which they had a smoothly functioning relationship with the CPD.”   -more-
 

Oakland School Board Votes To Remove Police From School

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEiC9TziQCefR7yKwEwUAguqF3n1s3JeKq0ns38UlsFBeFqTXMQ-dWbB6AYzFc9gA7zi7FQ-8q9AuHROrbSDToa6dYdpPiSkCNikD8XxcD8k1As1ZaqSyKb9W5OaKrbTPVliieZWCNxxclz30yloLb3HnXXIr2ojdmrVWgjOJCeBnn2dgUOf-FDPliuNr-UpGgag8TFDu4-aDy3OLGSbyFLJUJjYM-sRqS56LHLyxfP3dQ=s0-d-e1-ftBy Wilson Walker, CBS San Francisco. After about a two-hour debate the Oakland School Board tonight voted unanimously to eliminate the Oakland Unified School District Police Department from campuses. The “George Floyd Resolution” eliminates the school districts police force of 10 sworn officers and 50 unarmed campus safety officers. The Board also added several amendments to the final proposal. One requires the superintendent to ensure all staff receive training. Citing the disproportionate arrests of Black students by Oakland’s school police, as well as the district’s “obligation to promote the healthy development of each one of its... -more-
 

Journalist Blinded By Cops Speaks Out

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEg052-BrfB76b1Kk2Uaq1agb6y_K6198dFHOYnVW66HrK8SAOeWms2K8jt3S1XOHqw34291rzZbvbqdyeZuhu1v9R-rxgBWg6oZ0k_sb7Frdb7pdv5K2EutzO511TsR_D6dvDJMXRz7-SavDQzvKneHHM-WkMRIb2ulKsB_Fkhi3sq_BnAQnAwt_-BpFTE849MmQA=s0-d-e1-ftBy Alan Macleod, Mintpress News. Journalist and photographer Linda Tirado was standing near a police line in Minneapolis May 29, covering the George Floyd protests engulfing the city. All of a sudden, her face “exploded” in her own words. She had been shot from close range in the eye, permanently blinding her. Her goggles shattered and tear gas entered the wound, causing even more pain. The police had shot her. Protestors pulled her away from her attackers, put her into a vehicle and drove her to the hospital where they were unable to save her eye, but were able to give her a $58,000 bill, likely the first of many.  -more-


"?tHIS ENDS INSTALLMENT #2 IN REVERSE CHRON ORDER = MAINLY JULY 2020

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