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Baltimore Police Called Out For Making Up ‘Gang Violence’ Stories To Scare Public

By Reagan Ali and S. Wooten | Counter Current News | June 27, 2015

Remember when the Baltimore Police Department was telling all of these stories about “Bloods” and “Crips” uniting to “destroy” the city and its “heroic” police force?

Now city leaders are coming forward and calling out the police for these claims. Last Thursday several leaders publicly questioned the Baltimore Police Department as to why they issued a public warning the morning of Freddie Gray’s funeral. That warning claimed that police officers were being targeted by a united Blood-Crip alliance that would not rest until every Baltimore officer was dead.

Instead of allowing the community to mourn the untimely death of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore City Police hijacked the attention and painted themselves as the victims.

Now, months later, it is coming out that the whole thing was invented. The police made it all up. They didn’t have a shred of credible evidence to support the claims they were making.

In fact, much the opposite was true. Bloods, Crips and other gangs were uniting to protect the community, to stop looting and violence and pledging to end fighting between their circles.

Instead of praising this cessation of violence between these gangs, the police announced on April 27 that a “credible threat” from the Bloods, Crips and Black Guerrilla Family had made it clear that these “criminal” forces had united to target officers.

According to documentation and supporting interviews obtained by The Baltimore Sun, the police made it all up.

“I knew all along it was a bunch of baloney,” City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young told the Sun. “They owe the council and the public an explanation for why they put this false information out there.”

The Sun reports that “the police warning was circulated in a news release at 11:27 a.m. on the day of Gray’s funeral, two days after protests over his death turned violent.”

As well, police were busy spreading rumors of teenagers engaging in a “purge”. That referred to the widespread, chaotic violence in the movie by the same name.

It was only after police spread these rumors far and wide that the violence actually started, according to the Sun.

“Within hours, the city descended into a night of rioting and looting.”

The police are standing by their claims, saying that there was a real “threat” that was “imminent and consistent with previous threats.” They just don’t have any proof or documentation of the source of these “credible threats.”

City Councilman Brandon Scott told police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts as well as other leaders in the department, that the FBI has discredited these “threats.”

He wrote in an email Thursday that “it is extremely unacceptable and put the lives of citizens, officers and others in danger.”

“Falsifying a threat of this magnitude during a highly tense time should result in the strongest penalty possible,” Scott added. “If we are going to repair our city, this kind of behavior cannot be tolerated.”

Shayne Buchwald, a spokeswoman for the FBI added that agents interviewed their gang sources and they could not come up with a single source that corroborated what the Baltimore police claimed.

City Councilman Nick Mosby said that the Police Department’s warning about this alleged “threat” was “problematic at best.”

“When you put out incendiary statements like that, and you don’t have credible information, that’s a problem,” Mosby explained. “The lack of communication, and communication that was not factual, are really the variables of a disaster.”

Mosby said the police were playing on and manipulating the public’s fears. He said that “police need to come out and communicate why they thought it was a credible threat.”

“Folks in my area, as soon as it came out, they didn’t believe it one bit,” he added. “It’s unfortunate to find it wasn’t credible.”

June 30, 2015 Posted by | Deception | | Leave a comment

Violence in Baltimore: When Did It Really Start?

By NICK ALEXANDROV | CounterPunch | May 2, 2015

Read the New York Times, Washington Post, or Wall Street Journal on Baltimore, and they tell you violence broke out there Monday. You hear an NPR correspondent refer to an “eruption of violence” in the city. The New Republic’s Rebecca Traister disagrees. “Violence broke out and erupted not when students threw stones at police, but when Freddie Gray suffered a spinal cord injury while in police custody, and, eventually, died.”

Maybe. But the Baltimore Sun concluded last September that, in the preceding four years, “more than 100 people [had] won court judgments or settlements related to allegations,” against police, “of brutality and civil rights violations.” Reporter Mark Puente detailed the “head trauma, organ failure, and even death” awaiting victims. This was when violence broke out.

Perhaps—though Christian Parenti, in 1997, explained that “police violence is soaring.” “By mid-August of this year Baltimore Police had already shot more than 70 civilians,” he added. It was the dawn of the “zero tolerance” era. The approach directs cops to “stop, frisk, and arrest vast numbers of young black and Hispanic men for minor offenses,” Jeffrey Rosen clarified. It made a believer of Martin O’Malley, Democrat, Mayor of Baltimore from 1999 to 2007. The city’s population was 640,000 in 2005. There were more than 100,000 arrests that year.

Was this when violence broke out? Possibly—but in March 1980, “an off-duty police detective, without warning, shot and paralyzed a 17-year-old black youth,” Associated Press reported. “The officer later said he thought the youth, Ja-Wan McGee, was going to rob a pizza parlor, but young McGee was taking a cigarette lighter out of his pocket.” In August 1978, the Baltimore Afro-American broke a story about a trio of white cops. They issued black teenager Derek Copeland “a green pass giving the youth permission to walk neighborhood streets”—“similar,” the paper observed, “to the one issued by the South African government led by John Vorster.”

Was it then that violence erupted? Or was it early the morning of June 27, 1969, when Helen Smith sat on a stoop with Donald Best? Patrolman Alvin Nachman approached with his dog, and an order: “hold the noise down.” No neighbors had complained. The dog attacked Helen first, and the officer maced her as she tried to fight off the animal. She got 75 stitches, and Donald 32 “to close the dog bite wounds in his side and hip,” the Afro disclosed. “Both Mrs. Smith and Mr. Best were arrested and charged with disturbing the peace. They were both forced to spend the night in jail after treatment for their wounds.”

If not then, violence hit Baltimore five years earlier. Raymond Petty drove there from Halifax, VA, to visit his sister Hazel in June 1964. She was ill and the outlook was not good. Raymond was in a mild car accident after arriving. His brother Louis was at the scene, the cops arrived. The Afro described how policemen bludgeoned Louis “although they had arrested him illegally, and continued to beat him in a patrol wagon while transporting him to the police station.” He was dead two days later. 

But really the violence began before that. It was 1956. There were five police killings in four months. Patrolman Charles Fennell shot Harry Boyd, Jr. in the back on June 25. Patrolman Walter Mina, Jr.’s bullet wounded Robert Harper in the leg on July 7. The blood drained from Harper’s injury until he died. On August 15, Sergeant Albert Heck killed 24-year-old Frank J. Williams. Patrolman Benjamin Ledden opened fire on September 19—in self-defense, he insisted—terminating Donald Jackson’s life at 23. Patrolman Marshall V. Brewer took out 14-year-old Benjamin Brown with a rifle he “didn’t know was loaded.” Of these five policemen, only Brewer was suspended.

Those were just the 1956 shootings. The Afro’s Elizabeth Murphy Oliver wrote of her visit to Northwestern Police Station that September. What she saw shattered her. She “hoped it was a dream.” It wasn’t. She had witnessed “a policeman beat a man and drag him roughly on the floor while the victim writhed and rolled in agony.” Vernon Johnson “was still sobbing and holding his eye” when it ended. “Blood was dripping from somewhere.” Oliver “wondered how an eye could run blood,” watched Johnson’s tears fall, “mixed with blood.” The Afro visited Johnson a week later. “His eye is still closed. He doesn’t sleep much, and his chest hurts when he breathes.” This was when the violence started.

No. In February 1942, Patrolman Edward Bender shot his second black victim, Thomas Broadus, as he fled. His friends rushed over to take him to the hospital. Bender blocked them, and Broadus died in the street before “scores of persons,” according to the Afro. This was when the violence began.

No—it was before that. Officer Charles Harris shot Roland Freeman dead on November 14, 1931. On March 29, 1930, the Afro wrote that “Officer Herman Trautner, white, killed Roosevelt Yates, an unarmed man he was seeking to arrest.” “The trouble is police brutality in Baltimore has gone as far as some people are going to stand,” the paper warned, 85 years ago.

That same year it profiled Rev. E. W. White, pastor of the Provident Baptist Church. “Baptist Minister Says Brutality Surpasses Anything South Has Seen,” ran the headline. Two decades earlier, in 1911, the Afro alerted readers that cops were “shooing colored people out of neighborhoods where a majority of the residents are white.” “It is just this kind of conduct,” a 1906 story on a mass arrest of blacks affirmed, “that often makes well-disposed people do what under other circumstances they would not do.”

“To us,” Baltimore resident D. Watkins explained this week, the city’s “Police Department is a group of terrorists;” major news outlets, on violence in Baltimore, recall the fish in the joke. “How’s the water?” the fisherman asks. “What’s water?” replies the fish, oblivious to what makes its world—like the establishment media, unaware of the violence shaping theirs.

Nick Alexandrov lives in Washington, DC.  He can be reached at: nicholas.alexandrov@gmail.com.

May 3, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Man in Police Van With Freddie Gray Speaks Out: Freddie Gray did not Injure Himself

By Jay Syrmopoulos | The Free Thought Project | May 1, 2015

Baltimore, Md. – In a bombshell revelation, Donta Allen, the man that was in the police transport van at the same time as Freddie Gray, spoke out for the first time publicly and directly refuted information leaked by police.

Allen came forward after an internal investigative memo was leaked by police and subsequently published by the Washington Post on Wednesday. The document claimed that Allen had told police Gray “was intentionally trying to injure himself,” which according to Allen was an attempt to spin his words to make it seem as if Gray may have injured himself.

“They trying to make it seem like I told them that, you know what I mean, that Freddie Gray did that to himself,” Allen said. “Why the f*** would he do that to himself?”

Allen’s words are being intentionally distorted in an effort to exonerate the police of any culpability or wrongdoing while seemingly laying the blame on the victim.

When asked whether he heard Gray banging his head while in the van, Allen said,

“When I got in the van, I didn’t hear nothing. It was a smooth ride. We went straight to the police station. All I heard was a little banging for about four seconds. I just heard little banging, just little banging.”

Allen went on to say,

“I told homicide that I don’t work for the police. I did not tell the police nothing.”

This contradicts police assertions, as claimed in a search warrant affidavit, that Allen claimed Gray was “banging against the walls” of the van.

Allen claims that authorities are using him as a scapegoat to provide cover for their actions relating to the incident.

“They waited 30 to 35 minutes to get [Gray] some medical attention because they want to cover their ass,” Allen told WBAL-TV. “So now, since they can’t cover their ass on that, they’re trying to use me to cover their ass.”

Numerous law enforcement sources have told WJLA-TV that Gray suffered a “catastrophic injury” when he smashed his own back into the van and broke his neck. Additionally, a bolt in the van matched his head injury, according to the sources.

The autopsy of Gray showed no evidence that there were any self-inflicted wounds, and that the fatal spinal and neck injuries were consistent with the force and energy presented in a car accident.

What is clear is that the Baltimore Police Department thought they could use the police spin machine to lay the blame for Gray’s death somewhere other than themselves as a means of escaping accountability.

May 1, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Subjugation - Torture | , , | 1 Comment

Beaten for Filming a Beating, Woman Says

By RYAN ABBOTT | Courthouse News | May 10, 2013

BALTIMORE – Baltimore police beat up a woman and smashed her camera for filming them beating up a man, telling her: “You want to film something bitch? Film this!” the woman claims in court.

Makia Smith sued the Baltimore Police Department, Police Commissioner Anthony Batts and police Officers Nathan Church, William Pilkerton, Jr., Nathan Ulmer and Kenneth Campbell in Federal Court.

Smith claims she was stuck in stand-still rush hour traffic in northern Baltimore when she saw the defendant officers beating up and arresting a young man.

She says pulled out her camera, stood on her car’s door sill and filmed the beating.

“Officer Church saw plaintiff filming the beating and ran at her,” the complaint states. “He scared her and she sat back in her vehicle. As he ran at her, he yelled, ‘You want to film something bitch? Film this!’

“Officer Church reached into plaintiff’s car and grabbed her telephone-camera out of her hand, threw it to the ground and destroyed it by smashing it with his foot.

“Officer Church pulled plaintiff out of her car by her hair and beat her. Officers Pilkerton, Ulmer, and Campbell then ran to plaintiff’s car and joined Officer Church in beating plaintiff and arrested her using excessive force. At all times described herein, plaintiff’s two year old daughter witnessed her mother’s beating and arrest by the Officers, as did others.”

Smith claims the cops taunted her and threatened to take her daughter away. She says they refused to call her mother to her toddler.

“The officers, despite the pleas of plaintiff, refused to call plaintiff’s mother. Instead, the officers tormented plaintiff by telling her that her daughter would be taken from her and sent to Social Services. Seeing plaintiff’s distressful reaction to these tormenting threats, they continued,” the complaint states.

Smith says claims she was arrested and taken to jail on bogus charges that she assaulted Church and resisted arrest.

She claims Church failed to appear for her trial – twice, and prosecutors dropped the charges, but she had to hire a lawyer and spend more money recovering her impounded car.

She claims Baltimore police have a history of illegally seizing and destroying recording devices.

She seeks $1.5 million in compensatory and punitive damages for civil rights violations, conversion and infliction of emotional distress.

She is represented by Christopher Lyon, with Astrachan Gunst Thomas.

Police departments around the country have been accused of similar responses to citizens filming them abusing other people.

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May 11, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | 3 Comments