Organized Chaos in South Central, Los Angeles
BY DANIEL NUCCIO | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | OCTOBER 19, 2022
The LAPD’s 77th Division in South Central serves what some officers consider “pretty much the most violent area of the entire city and county of Los Angeles,” explained Officer Charles Simmering in a phone interview. “You’re just running and gunning all night. You’re just running. There’s never a dull moment. You’re just going from one call to the next to the next. ‘Organized chaos’ is the best way we describe it.”
Each night, he explained, the 77th Division puts out a minimum of 12 cars, usually two officers per car, all 24 officers feeling “beyond overwhelmed.” The 77th Division can’t afford to lose people, Simmering said. But, he continued, that’s exactly what’s happening.
“Last year at my division alone I think we lost roughly 40 officers – and that’s putting a hurt, putting a strain on everybody,” said Simmering.
“People are leaving,” he stated. “They’re tired. They’re fed up.” Their reasons vary according to Simmering’s account. Lack of support. Lack of trust on the part of the city. Frustrations over not being allowed to make their own decisions out on the job. Nonetheless, the departure of these officers only exacerbates some of the problems that drove them to leave.
“If you need a particular day off for something family-related, your mother’s birthday or kid’s birthday, or something important,” Simmering explained, “They deny you and say, ‘No, you can’t have the day off. Sorry. We’re undermanned. We need people here.’”
That is, they need people, assuming they are vaccinated for Covid-19 because to the city bureaucracy Covid-19 remains the greatest threat to the citizens of South Central, as well as the rest of Los Angeles. Hence, officers such as Simmering, who remain unvaccinated for Covid-19, are considered dispensable.
The Parallel Reality of LA’s City Workers
Announced in July of 2021 and later passed and approved that August at the height of the Pandemic Era’s mandate madness, Los Angeles’ vaccine mandate for city employees still remains in effect. Predicated on the continued threat of Covid-19 to public health, the effectiveness of Covid vaccines, and the danger posed by the unvaccinated, the mandate comes off as a relic from a bygone era, as do the protracted Byzantine processes to which employees seeking exemptions must submit and the testing protocols such employees must agree to follow.
According to the anti-mandate organization Roll Call 4 Freedom, the ordinance and the system it established are illegal. According to the unvaccinated employees living under the ordinance, the system often seems random and arbitrary. Yet, in October of 2022, when there appears to be little doubt that Covid vaccines do little to stop the spread of Covid and that the vaccinated can spread the disease as easily as the unvaccinated, vaccine mandates are alive and well in the city of LA.
By the account of James Greenfield, a manager in the sanitation department, “It’s like we’re living in a parallel universe… [we’re] just in a parallel reality.”
Looking back on the past year, Greenfield, who is unvaccinated for Covid due to religious reasons, described life under the ordinance in a phone interview, saying requirements for compliance are always changing, “the goal post is always moving.”
“It was originally, you know, submit an exemption…” he stated. “It later developed into like this four-page, unconstitutional questionnaire on your religious beliefs.”
The city also wanted employees to “have a pastor answer questions.” Greenfield added. “I mean it [was] just over the top on violating your, you know, your religious freedom.”
Greenfield said he filed for a religious exemption, but refused to fill out the four-page form.
As a condition of remaining employed while working through the exemption process, Greenfield said, he and other unvaccinated city employees were initially required to test twice per week, but that was later reduced to once per week. The city, he said, also threatened to deduct the cost of the tests from people’s paychecks. However, before the city could charge anyone’s paycheck, they first needed them to fill out paperwork giving them permission to charge their paychecks.
“I didn’t fill out the paperwork,” Greenfield said. “I’m not going to give [the city] permission to take money out of my paycheck.”
But, he noted, he believes “a lot of people were coerced” and the city managed to bill at least a couple of people before they had to stop.
More recently, said Greenfield, they tried to bill the tests to the insurance of unvaccinated employees but backed off from those attempts within a couple of weeks.
Yvette Smith, an animal control officer at the City of Los Angeles’ Harbor Animal Shelter in the San Pedro neighborhood, stated, “We just didn’t give our insurance information and then [the city] pulled away.”
Like Greenfield, Smith has been required to test for Covid for nearly a year as she works her way through the exemption process. During the past year, Smith said, she had submitted a request for a religious exemption, was informed that it was denied, and appealed the decision. Now, in October of 2022, she awaits a decision regarding her appeal.
In some ways, although frustrated and inconvenienced, she believes people in her department (or at least her corner of her department), have gotten lucky. “As long as you have submitted a religious exemption that [the city has] denied and it’s in some imaginary nebulous area and you agree to test, they’re pretty much leaving us alone. So I’m grateful for that.”
However, Smith noted, “Every department is treating [the ordinance] differently.”
The Autumn Purge
Currently, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation appears to be one of the departments in which a purge of the unvaccinated is in full swing.
Navy veteran and former wildland firefighter, Rene Ochoa, has been a traffic officer with the Los Angeles Department of Transportation for the past 19 years. “I’ve been grateful for my job,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s helped me to have a lifestyle [I wanted], permitted me to have my home and provide for my wife and my children.”
Last year, he said, he filed a request for a religious exemption due to concerns about potential side effects and the use of aborted fetal cell lines in the development of the Covid vaccines. After his request was denied in May 2022, Ochoa said he appealed the denial. That appeal, he explained, was denied in July.
“Then, September 13 of this year…” he said, “I was walked off the job, locked out of my station in front of all my fellow coworkers…”
“I am currently on administrative leave,” stated Ochoa. “I have a Skelly hearing scheduled for Friday November 4 at 10:00 am.”
Amongst city employees working their way through the process of attaining a religious exemption from the Covid vaccine mandate, Skelly hearings are generally seen as the final step prior to termination.
Reflecting on the strong likelihood that he will lose his job on November 4, Ochoa said, “I’m in a much better position than a lot of other people I know that are younger than me and with maybe say half the time [in a city job].”
Because of his time working other positions with the city and with LA County, Ochoa is eligible for retirement, although with an early retirement penalty if he takes it before he turns 55; Ochoa is currently 53.
Smith expressed similar sentiments, commenting on the possibility she might be terminated. “I’m in a different position than most people. I’m pretty close to retirement [in June 2023] and kind of don’t give a shit at this point. So, you know, I’ll just keep jumping through the hoops until it bothers me too much and then I just won’t do it any more.”
If the City of Los Angeles does try to proceed with her termination, Smith is optimistic that she can work within the system to delay its finalization through a strategic use of vacation time, family leave, and possibly agreeing to unpaid leave until she can retire at least sort of on her terms. She admitted she is morally conflicted about having to resort to these kinds of tactics, but will do what she needs to do.
Yet, most Los Angeles city employees do not find themselves in positions where they can retire early or maneuver their way through the system until they can run out the clock and retire on terms they find acceptable.
Pearl Pantoja, for example, an employee with the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, who was interviewed previously for an article published by Brownstone Institute about the troubles faced by LA city workers, has five children, one of whom has special needs. She also serves as the caregiver for her disabled mother. She and her family depend on her paycheck and the benefits that come with her job.
However, she said, “Friday, September 16, I was in effect placed on, my supervisor used the word suspension. I know the city’s calling it administrative leave without pay.”
“They gave me a notice with an appointment…” she stated. “It says you’re being placed off for non-compliance.”
But, Pantoja holds, “I was compliant, except they refused to accept my religious exemption.”
“They also did not… attempt to see if there were any reasonable accommodations that could be made so that I could continue to work.” Pantoja claims these are “parts of the process [that were] just simply ignored.”
Currently, Pantoja, like her colleague, Ochoa, awaits her Skelly hearing. Based on what she has seen happen to other unvaccinated colleagues, she is not optimistic about the future. “I have a colleague who lost his job and he is now homeless…I have another colleague who is expecting his first child and he’s now out of work and [has] no healthcare.”
“I’m really worried,” she said. “I almost know with certainty that I’m going to lose my job.”
What Lies Behind the Curtain
Perhaps the City of Los Angeles’ mandate, exemption process, and the personal and professional devastation they wrought can best be described as a form of organized chaos.
Part of what makes this all so frustrating and demoralizing, according to Greenfield, is the way the whole system is set up. No one is really accountable for any of the decisions made regarding exemptions, testing, appeals, or terminations. Everything is done through third parties and anonymous emails.
“You’ll get an email… with no name,” he explained. “Nobody attached to it. Nobody personally to talk to about it.”
“It’s like they’re just hiding,” he said. “They’re hiding behind a shroud. You know, supposedly there’s this committee that’s reviewing and coming up with these policies except who would know who’s on this committee. Who the names are? When they meet? It’s just a blind process like the wizard behind the curtain. The Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. You know, and that’s the process.”
Moreover, Greenfield noted, he and other unvaccinated city employees live with this feeling that “the hammer can drop anytime.”
“So, you’re just living under this uncertainty,” he said. “When’s the carpet going to get pulled out from beneath you?”
Simmering, who is currently on medical leave due to an injury sustained on the job, said the decision regarding his exemption has been placed on hold until he can return to work, at which point he said he’ll have to “play the Russian roulette with whether not they’re going to approve [his] exemption.”
“It’s like so much of the country is going in a different direction and maybe backtracking,” Greenfield said. “You know, maybe they thought [mandates were] a good decision. But [in LA], there’s no backtracking. It’s like they’re doubling down. [They’re] sticking to [their] guns here even though nobody else is.”
The January 6 Capitol riot was not the real insurrection
America is under attack from within, and it’s not by the DC rioters from 17 months back
By Ian Miles Cheong | Samizdat | June 11, 2022
As members of the House of Representatives gather to attend the hearing of the US House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, one can’t help but wonder about the hypocrisy of the spectacle, especially in light of the Biden administration’s soft touch approach to the George Floyd riots that swept the nation in 2020.
As the pandemic raged during the summer of 2020, thousands of Americans took to the streets to protest, and in some cases riot, over the death of George Floyd, an African-American man who was killed in police custody.
Floyd’s death was a flashpoint in America’s growing racial and cultural divide, exacerbated by social justice activists who maintain that police in America are racist, and that their actions are enabled by systemic racism inherent in America’s culture, history, and its very foundations.
The riots saw over a billion dollars in property damage, according to reporting from Axios, but the true cost of the violence is even higher due to their impact on cities – not to mention the human cost and the destruction of anything that wasn’t properly insured.
Opportunists and looters ran amok in American cities, wreaking havoc on commercial districts – and even residential neighborhoods. Black- and minority-owned businesses in cities like Kenosha and Minneapolis were burned to the ground by rioters chanting ‘Black Lives Matter’ slogans, few of which have recovered.
In Seattle, Antifa and Black Lives Matter activists took over an entire neighborhood. Dubbing it ‘CHAZ’ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) or ‘CHOP’ (Capitol Hill Organized Protest), the protesters sectioned off a portion of the city, turning it into a police no-go zone. It was rife with crime. Several people, including minors, were shot and killed in the so-called ‘autonomous zone’. Several sexual assaults allegedly took place. Only one man was arrested over one of the fatal shootings a year later.
In the US alone, at least 25 people are estimated to have been killed while participating in protests and incidents related to the political violence that occurred throughout that summer. Retired police officer David Dorn was murdered on the streets of St. Louis while trying to protect a pawn shop. His death was a rallying cry for conservatives and supporters of the police who were tired of seeing the men and women in blue vilified for doing their jobs.
The impact of the George Floyd riots cannot be understated. It continues to reverberate throughout America as numerous liberal cities have moved to implement bail reform, defund police forces, and put in place legislation to hinder so-called ‘police brutality’ – effectively neutering law enforcement.
The nation saw a drop in police recruitment and rise in resignations, transfers, and an overall decline in morale. Cities like San Francisco, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis have seen spikes in property crime, violent crime, and carjackings as prosecutors refuse to try cases, letting felons back out onto the street with little more than a slap on the wrist. The shocking examples of victims falling by the wayside as violent criminals with extensive arrest records get away with racially-motivated assaults on whites, Asians, and Jews. Their crimes go unpunished while Joe Biden and members of his administration continue to rail against the threat of ‘white supremacy’ and wave around Transgender Pride flags, giving empty speeches about society’s apparently most marginalized demographic – trans people.
‘Move out of the cities’ has become a common refrain among conservatives who cite the destruction of America’s most prosperous and populous locales as a reason to embrace rural living outside of suburbia.
Cities, once the pinnacle of American culture, and home to monuments honoring the Founding Fathers, have become a sad parody of themselves. Crime goes unpunished, drug addicts litter the streets with needles, and homeless people set up camp right in front of the world’s largest corporations. In Seattle, Amazon was forced to shutter its downtown office due to violent crime.
At the height of the summer, innumerable statues were torn down, damaged, or removed by the cities due the racially-charged protests. Few were ever held responsible for the destruction of these historical monuments.
Despite the destruction and ruination of American cities, and the attack on America’s founding values, Democrats have chosen instead to not only ignore the riots’ cost to American lives, but champion the protests as a positive, progressive development.
Approximately $90 million was given to Black Lives Matter, and millions more have been spent on reshaping American culture through diversity initiatives in corporate boardrooms, civilian government, and even the military. The mayors of Portland and Minneapolis endured struggle sessions. Democrats took a knee in a symbolic gesture honoring Black Lives Matter.
When Democrats insist that the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill was one of the worst moments in American history, they’re ignoring the ongoing destruction of America and absolving themselves of their participation in it.
“The insurrection on January 6 was one of the darkest chapters in our nation’s history,” said President Biden at an event on Friday. Describing it as “a brutal assault on our democracy, a brutal attack on law enforcement,” the president insists that “it’s important that the American people understand what truly happened and to understand that the same forces that led to January 6 remain at work today.”
Biden is right about one thing – the forces that led to January 6 remain at work today.
To understand what’s going on, we have to look at how the January 6 riot was caused by a general sense of discontent with America’s downward trajectory. It was staged by a collective of Americans who refer to themselves as patriots, who are unhappy with the continued destruction of America and its values. When they raised their voices, they were mocked, silenced, and disenfranchised as traitors and conspiracy theorists – all this even before the events of that fateful day. And after that day, many were arrested – some of whom were forced into solitary confinement and stripped of their rights even to this day. They have had few defenders, and the legacy media remains unwilling to even speak of their plight.
If there’s an insurrection, it’s ongoing, and it’s seeing through the destruction of America’s core values. When all is said and done, the events of January 6, 2021 will be nothing more than a footnote in the history books.
Ian Miles Cheong is a political and cultural commentator. His work has been featured on The Rebel, Penthouse, Human Events, and The Post Millennial.
The Manson Murders, JFK, 9/11, and the Psychopathy of Power
A Review of CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill
“With Alan Scheflin, a forensic psychologist and law professor who’d written a book on MKULTRA, I laid out a circumstantial case linking (CIA mind control guru Jolly) West to Manson. Was it possible, I asked, that the Manson murders were an MKULTRA experiment gone wrong? ‘No,’ he said, ‘an MKULTRA experiment gone right.’” (CHAOS , p. 369)
By Kevin Barrett • Unz Review • July 29, 2019
I moved out of Southern California in the summer of 1969. I was ten years old, and my parents were fleeing decadence and depravity in favor of the more wholesome Midwest.
Before our move, a story had circulated about some local (Newport Beach) high schoolers who had “gone on an LSD trip” and gotten caught by police. As I understood it, the teenagers had “taken LSD” and started leaping from rooftop to rooftop, “tripping” all over the neighborhood and waking people up to the sound of thundering hoofbeats overhead. At the time I wondered whether LSD conferred a miraculous leaping or flying ability, since the houses in Lido Sands, though rather tightly clustered, were mostly spaced perhaps eight or ten feet apart, which seemed like a long way to jump.
I vaguely recall this “LSD-fueled teenage midnight horsemen of the apocalypse” story having something to do with my parents’ decision to move back to Wisconsin. Southern California circa 1969, a few years after the hippie movement had peaked and turned into a bad trip, didn’t seem like a good place to send your kids to high school. (Little did my parents know that the 60s would hit Wisconsin high schools ten years late, putting me and my siblings directly in the path of the psychedelic hurricane.)
Years later, as an “experienced” (in the Jimi Hendrix sense) subversive teenage wannabe intellectual, I would read about the Manson murders and notice how convenient they had been for the Establishment. From the moment Charlie Manson’s grinning, demonic face started leering from every front page and TV screen in America, the whole hippie-antiwar thing had seemed a whole lot scarier. I read the official version of the Manson myth, Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, and thought: This is too crazy to be true. None of the Wisconsin hippies I know are even remotely like these characters. Maybe it’s something they add to the fluoride in the Southern California water.
By 1975 I had seen Mark Lane’s presentation of the Zapruder film and knew that America had experienced an unspeakably evil coup d’état in 1963. In 1979 I read John Marks’ The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control and discussed it with William S. Burroughs, who told me he had been aware of such activities for many years before they were publicly revealed by the Church and Rockefeller Commissions: “The thing about these secrets is they’re not all that secret.”
Well, maybe not, Bill. But if you had proclaimed in 1960 that the CIA’s most heavily funded program aimed at turning people into killer zombies, you would have gotten blank stares at best. Rumors whispered in bohemian demimondes, blown up into dystopian parody in books like Naked Lunch, are hardly threats to national security secrecy.
Looking back, it seems doubtful that America ever recovered from the bad trip of the 1960s. Indeed, one has to wonder whether potential recovery wasn’t intentionally forestalled. The Kennedy assassinations, along with the killings of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and so many others, were a national nightmare. So was the pointless carnage in Vietnam. The protest movement that rose up against the nightmare, seeking to awaken the nation and return it to sanity, collapsed into the drug-fueled promiscuity and bloody chaos whose avatar was none other than Charles Manson. Now, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Manson murders, we must wonder whether Manson was also an avatar another kind of CHAOS: the CIA’s ultra-secret, ultra-illegal domestic counterinsurgency program.
That notion isn’t entirely new. In 1993, while researching my first book, A Guide to Mysterious San Francisco, I heard rumors that Manson was a CIA mind control slave. But since this was just hearsay, unsupported by citable sources, I left it out of the book, and consigned it to the relatively short list of major conspiracy theories that might actually not be true.
That list keeps getting shorter. Tom O’Neill’s CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties makes a convincing, thoroughly documented case that the official Vincent Bugliosi rendition of the Manson murders is as blatantly bogus as Bugliosi’s “Oswald acted alone” version of the JFK assassination. Though O’Neill doesn’t quite come right out and say so, his evidence suggests that CIA mind control maniac Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West and/or his acolytes brainwashed a psychopathic prisoner named Charles Manson, gave him a CIA get-out-of-jail-free card, set him up next door to Jolly’s safe house in the Haight-Ashbury hippie district of San Francisco, and taught him how to control human minds using drugs and hypnosis. The CIA’s Operation CHAOS, it may be plausibly surmised, first weaponized the Manson family for use against the Black Panthers, then finally turned Manson into the ultimate TV commercial against the antiwar counterculture. When Manson and one of his CIA handlers, Reeve Whitson, rearranged the Tate murders crime scene before anyone else got there, they were literally setting the stage for the upcoming theatrical production.
Tom O’Neill’s twenty years’ research definitively demonstrates that a massive cover-up of the truth about the Manson murders is no longer a hypothesis, it is established fact. Federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, as well as the courts and big media, have been effectively corrupted and muzzled. But the truth, or at least enough of it for us to get the picture, is tucked away in the documents they forgot to shred. Though the most important Manson-related documents have either “mysteriously disappeared” from various archives or are being stubbornly withheld for undisclosed reasons, O’Neill—an obsessively persistent journalistic gumshoe—managed to get his hands on enough of them, and to find and interview enough witnesses, to turn the conventional picture of the Manson family upside-down and inside-out.
The whole story, in its multilayered complexity of detail and documentation, is beautifully told in O’Neill’s book. Like many authors with mainstream publishers, O’Neill generally refrains from speculating about the big picture; instead, he lays out the hard facts and invites the reader to connect the dots. So let’s accept his invitation and consider the the CIA’s Operation Manson in historical perspective.
Political Demonization and the Creation and Maintenance of Public Myth
The Manson op was an exercise in demonization. Manson, an ordinary psychologically-disturbed small-time criminal with psychopathic tendencies, became, under the expert tutelage of Jolly West & Co., an avatar of the demonic second only to Hitler in the mass mediated popular imagination. Manson’s long hair and scraggly beard became an icon of pure evil, as Hitler’s mustache had before, and as Bin Laden’s beard would later. In literally demonizing Manson, Jolly and The Company (wasn’t that a ‘60s Bay Area band? No, you’re thinking of Big Brother) figuratively demonized the antiwar counterculture that was giving the Establishment fits.
By demonizing Manson, the CIA “skunked” the antiwar counterculture’s message of “peace, love, freedom” by associating it with an image of violence, hatred, and extreme authoritarianism. After all, the people behind such operations know that the best way to discredit a message is to put it in the mouth of an unpleasant spokesperson. That’s why criticism of the world’s worst crime syndicate, the international bankster cartel, has come to be associated with Hitler’s evil mustache. In like fashion, resistance to Zionism and other Western assaults on the Islamic world has come to be associated with Bin Laden’s big black beard. These associations didn’t just happen by accident. They were engineered.
Philip Zelikow, effectively the sole author of that work of fiction known as the 9/11 Commission Report (which he completed in chapter outline before the Commission even convened) is a history professor and self-styled expert in “the creation and maintenance of public myths.” Zelikow defines public myths as “beliefs (1) thought to be true (although not necessarily known to be true with certainty), and (2) shared in common within the relevant political community.” The public myths he is most interested in are those that most powerfully shape political perception and behavior; the first example he gives is the myth of the dastardly Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, which transformed America from an isolationist republic to an interventionist empire.
Anyone who has studied the alternative literature on such events as Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassinations, and 9/11 knows that any overwhelmingly powerful mythic event that changes public perceptions and, in so doing, changes history, ought to be greeted with profound suspicion and subjected to the most painstaking scrutiny. As Philip Zelikow wrote in a 1998 Foreign Affairs article, a catastrophic terror attack on America, such as the destruction of the World Trade Center, would be a “transforming event,” a “watershed event in American history” that would, “like Pearl Harbor… divide our past and future into a before and after.” The “after” would feature “draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force.” Zelikow’s 2001 false flag operation would achieve all that and more. It succeeded in demonizing opposition to Zionism and empire, and to tyranny in general, by associating resistance with the fearsome image of a scary looking guy sporting an easily-identifiable villain’s beard.
Indeed, bearded heavies like Bin Laden and Manson seem to come straight out of central casting. They remind us of neoconservative guru Leo Strauss’s advice to Machievellian operators: Make your operation like a B-grade Hollywood Western: slap a big white hat on the good guy and a big black hat on the bad guy. And if you don’t have a real enemy to play the villain’s role, invent one.
The official version of the Manson myth is told by its self-aggrandizing, profiteering hero, Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor who put the bad guy behind bars. In somewhat similar fashion, the official version of the 9/11 myth, ventriloquized by Zelikow, seems told by a sort of Greek chorus representing the heroic victims, the American people. But in both cases, the ostensibly heroic narrator is the real villain. In the case of 9/11, Zelikow must be suspected of involvement in writing the script for the 9/11 false flag operation itself, and then plagiarizing that script for his Report. And in the case of Bugliosi, it’s clear that he consciously crafted a big lie for the jury that he later adapted for his bestseller, committing numerous crimes, including subornation of perjury, in the process.
As for the villains, both Manson and Bin Laden were manufactured by the CIA. As O’Neill’s evidence suggests, Manson was Jolly West’s golem, taught by Jolly how to manufacture more golems… preferably 14-year-old female ones. Bin Laden, for his part, was created by the CIA and its Saudi assets as a front man for the CIA-Saudi war to expel the Russians from Afghanistan. Originally assigned the hero role for an audience of Muslims, Osama was later transferred to a different movie in which he played the villain for an audience of Americans.
Though the official Manson narrative demonizes hippies, O’Neill’s revisionist account shows that the worst decadence and depravity was located not at the corner of Haight and Ashbury, but in Hollywood and the entertainment industry; Los Angeles, as Faulkner famously said, is “the plastic asshole of the universe.” The movie and music business, O’Neill shows, was (and presumably remains) infested by gangsters, intelligence agency criminals, and an astonishing variety of perverted human vermin. (There is considerable overlap between those three categories.) The worst part is that these people, the scum of the earth, literally run the show. Real power and authority is invested not in elected officials and the courts, but in supermob gangsters and their intel agency partners in crime. The cops, courts, and media are terrified of such people, and basically do whatever they’re told.
The Manson murders and the JFK assassination, two nightmarish crimes, bookended “the 1960s”: that brief period from 1964 to 1969 that witnessed the meteoric rise and fall of youthful idealism, whose chief expressions were the civil rights and antiwar movements. Like 9/11, the JFK assassination divided time into a more innocent “before” of wholesome family sitcoms and a less innocent “after” of protests, violence, and social breakdown fueled by pills, especially of the psychedelic and birth control varieties. Between JFK and Manson, youthful idealism looked like it might win the day. After Manson, America entered a “whole new world” of extreme disillusionment.
The JFK and Manson murders aren’t just linked in the American mythic imagination; they also intersect by way of a certain already-mentioned CIA mind-control psychopath, Dr. Jolly West. O’Neill’s Chaos presents evidence that Jolly West brainwashed and rendered mad two key figures in the respective dramas, Charles Manson and Jack Rubenstein a.k.a. Ruby. We have already seen how West made a madman of Manson. As for Ruby, it seems he was very likely programmed to kill Lee Harvey Oswald, just as Sirhan Sirhan was later programmed to fire in the general direction of Robert Kennedy. And though there is no hard-and-fast documentation proving West mind-controlled Ruby, O’Neill does document West’s suspiciously quick and intense post-assassination interest in Ruby, which culminated in West getting a private audience with the gun-smuggling cop-bribing Mickey Cohen organization hit man. Prior to West’s closed-door no-witnesses one-on-one with Ruby, the latter had been perfectly sane, though puzzled about being accused of a crime he had no memory of committing. From the moment West stepped out the door of Ruby’s cell, Ruby was stark, raving nuts.
America has real enemies, people like Jolly West and his bosses, psychopathic vermin who have infested the highest echelons of power. In the wake of their murder of JFK, they understandably feared exposure. The biggest threat was coming from honest, idealistic, politically-engaged citizens, most of whom leaned toward the political left in general, and the civil rights and antiwar movements in particular. To neutralize that threat, they flooded the civil rights and antiwar communities with LSD and amphetamines (as well as Cointelpro and CHAOS agents provocateurs). After several years of this, they administered the coup de grace by immortalizing the iconic evil hippie, Charles Manson, in a mass mind-control operation that sounded the death knell of the 1960s and set the stage for the age of dystopian neoliberal authoritarianism that followed.
The takeaway is that our real enemies conceal themselves by fabricating ersatz enemies and elevating them to mythic, iconic status. Their controlled mainstream media summon us daily to engage in the obligatory Orwellian two minutes of hate. When will we wake up and learn to hate not the cartoon figure on the screen, but the psychopath behind the curtain?
Homeless Man Owes Government Over $110,000 In Fines For Being Homeless
By John Vibes | TrueActivist | March 4, 2016
The recent case of a homeless man racking up massive fines has exposed the widespread police practice of fining homeless people for being homeless.
Émilie Guimond-Bélanger, a social worker at the Droits Devant legal clinic in Montreal spoke to the media about a case that she worked on where a homeless man racked up over $110,000 in tickets.
“It was shocking. We’ve never seen someone with so many tickets,” Émilie told CBC.
The man had over 500 tickets, which amounted to over $110,000 in fines. The fines were mostly for things that homeless people can’t control, such as sleeping in the subway or asking people for money.
“He had received around 500 of them [tickets]. I could see that most of the time he would receive many in the same week, sometimes by the same officers as well,” she said.
“It’s very common, to a point where I would say it’s a systematic experience for homeless people,” she added.
On a daily basis, Émilie deals with at least two cases where people owe at least $10,000 for the crime of being homeless.
According to a study published in 2012, the homeless population of Montreal owe over $15 million in fines.
“It’s a huge amount of money that would stress out anyone who has that as a burden. So you can just imagine how it’s difficult for a person to then think about rehabilitation in society when they have such a heavy debt,” she said, “it affects them a lot. Some of them feel like there are good citizens in society — and then there’s them,” Émilie said.
It was recently reported that politicians in Los Angeles are seeking to ban homeless people from sleeping in their cars, and even RV’s.
As we reported late last year, Florida police arrested a group of charity workers for breaking a newly-imposed law against feeding the homeless. Among those charged was a 90-year-old homeless advocate.
LAPD Holds Pregnant Woman at Gunpoint in Case of Mistaken Identity
By Carlos Miller | PINAC | August 15, 2015
In another case of mistaken identity that could have turned deadly, Los Angeles police held a pregnant woman at gunpoint while ordering her out of her pickup truck, making her walk to the middle of street with her hands in the air and yelling at her to get down on her knees.
LAPD said they were in fear for their lives because the woman, who is due to give birth next week, was driving a truck matching the description of a truck driven by a murder suspect.
They said that because the woman’s truck had dark, tinted windows, they were unable to determine if it was being driven by the man they were seeking or if it just happened to be one of almost six million registered vehicles in Los Angeles County that were not connected to the suspect.
The incident, which took place Thursday, was captured on video from an NBC L.A. news helicopter hovering overhead.
The video shows about a dozen cops training their guns on the woman as well as another female passenger who was also ordered out while they all remained behind their patrol cars in the name of “officer safety.”
The video also shows both the driver side and passenger side windows either open or without tints, but we don’t see the initial stop, which may have shown the windows closed – not that dark tints should excuse them for violating the woman’s rights like that.
However, they’ve already learned that they can shoot up a truck in a case of mistaken identity and not face charges.
After all, it was only in 2013 that LAPD cops shot up a truck driven by two women after claiming it matched the description of a truck being driven by a whistleblower cop turned cop killer named Chris Dorner.
Dorner had been driving a gray Nissan Titan. The women had been driving a blue Toyota Tacoma.
So naturally police began fearing for their lives, which is why they opened fire on the Tacoma, driven by a 47-year-old daughter, accompanied by her 71-year-old mother, both of them delivering newspapers in a residential neighborhood.
Margie Carranza and her mother, Emma Hernandez, ended up receiving a $4.2 million settlement. The cops ended up on paid desk duty for a while before returning to the streets.
Moments after that shooting, a Torrance police officer shot up another pickup truck thinking it was Dorner’s truck, but that was also a different make and color and driven by a man named David Perdue who looked nothing like Dorner. He ended up receiving a $1.8 million
settlement.
LAPD Chief Charlie Beck determined the eight cops who left Carranza’s truck with more than 102 bullets violated department policy, but said he was not allowed to disclose what, if any, discipline they may receive because a state law protects cops’ personnel files from public eyes.
So with that type of job security, it is no wonder LAPD officers tend to shoot first and ask questions later.
LAPD have not released the name of the murder suspect they were seeking, who they say is also responsible for several burglaries in the area, nor the make and model of his truck, not that it would make a difference to them as we saw in the Dorner incidents.
The women, who also had two kids in the back seat of the truck, were released after police determined they were not the murder suspect. They are probably also eligible for a settlement.
Los Angeles to raise minimum wage to $15 by 2020
RT | May 20, 2015
The Los Angeles City Council agreed to raise the city’s minimum wage by more than a dollar per hour each year until the amount reaches $15 an hour by 2020, city officials said on Tuesday. The measure would affect the finances of 800,000 people.
Based on a 40-hour workweek, the raise would amount to an additional $48 a week or approximately $2,000 a year before taxes for the next five years. Los Angeles is now the largest city to adopt major a minimum-wage increase, joining three others that have passed similar legislation: Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle. The move also puts pressure on other large urban centers, such as New York, to do the same.
“Make no mistake,” said Councilman Paul Krekorian, the measure’s sponsor, according to the Los Angeles Times. “Today the city of Los Angeles, the second-biggest city in the nation, is leading the nation.”
The measure also ties yearly wage increases to the consumer price index starting in 2022. In Krekorian’s original measure, an amendment was included that would have required employers to grant workers 12 paid days off each year. There was a huge outcry from the business community, however, and the amendment was dropped before Tuesday’s vote. It will be considered again as separate legislation.
The wage increase measure will now go to the city attorney’s office to be drafted as an ordinance, and then back to the City Council for approval later this year, before finally being signed into law by the Mayor. The first increase to go into effect will push the minimum wage from $9 per hour up to $10.50 in July 2016.
The City Council’s 14-1 vote on the measure did not come without inducement. Corporate employers have been reluctant to increase hourly pay rates despite record profits, and have left it largely up to politicians to try to solve the problem of stagnating wages, as the cost of living continues to increase.
The much-publicized efforts of the Service Employees International Union to support fast food workers in their quest for a $15 wage have been effective in raising the bar for wages. As part of the campaign, it publicized how corporations have been relying on state subsidies, such as food stamps and housing support, to supplement their employees’ wages.
Critics, many of them business leaders, say the increase will turn the city into a“wage island,” pushing businesses away into places outside the city limits where they can pay employees less.
“They are asking businesses to foot the bill on a social experiment that they would never do on their own employees,” Stuart Waldman, president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Association trade group, told the New York Times.
“A lot of businesses aren’t going to make it. It’s great that this is an increase for some employees, but the sad truth is that a lot of employees are going to lose their jobs.”
LAPD considers deploying unmanned drones for ‘tactical events’
RT | June 6, 2014
Defending the decision to pursue unmanned drones to assist in police work, the LAPD – who say they will cooperate with privacy groups on the matter – said the devices are being purchased by citizens, so why not allow law enforcement to use it as well?
At a news conference Thursday at LAPD headquarters, Chief Charlie Beck revealed the unmanned drones could assist police forces in “standoffs, perimeters, suspects hiding…and other tactical events.”
“We’re interested in those applications,” he said.
Beck responded to criticism of the plans by human rights and privacy groups by explaining that the technology is already “in the hands of private citizens” and corporations, so why shouldn’t law enforcement experiment with the devices as well?
“When retailers start talking about using them to deliver packages, we would be silly not to at least have a discussion of whether we want to use them in law enforcement,” the police chief said.
In December, Amazon and UPS announced ambitious plans to start testing UAVs for making home deliveries.
Late last month, the LAPD received two Draganflyer X6 unmanned drones as a ‘gift’ from the Seattle Police Department, in what seems to have been an effort by the latter to avoid public uproar.
Seattle authorities purchased the UAVs for $82,000 in 2010, funded by grants from the Department of Homeland Security. However, neither the city council nor the public was aware of the police drone program until a 2012 lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation over the department’s application for operation certificates from the Federal Aviation Administration.
The resulting public outcry over the drones forced the mayor to terminate the program in February 2013.
“These vehicles were purchased by the Seattle Police Department using federal grants. There was no cost to the city of Los Angeles,” police said.
Each remote-controlled vehicle is 3 feet (90cm) wide, has three rotors and can carry a video camera.
In order to calm public suspicion that the drones will infringe upon privacy rights, Beck said the LAPD would work closely with the American Civil Liberties Union during the “vetting process” of the UAVs.
“I will not sacrifice public support for a piece of police equipment,” Beck said, as quoted by the Los Angeles Times. “We’re going to thoroughly vet the public’s opinion on the use of the aerial surveillance platforms.”
The LAPD added it would seek approval from the Police Commission before unleashing the drones above Los Angeles.
Hector Villagra, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California, issued a statement: “The Los Angeles Police Department asked the ACLU of Southern California to meet and articulate our concerns about the privacy issues raised by the use of drones. We agreed to do so… However, at this point the ACLU SoCal has no plans to participate in any process to craft policies for LAPD’s use of drones, nor have we been formally invited to lead a team of advocates to help craft such policies.”
“As the ACLU has previously said, we question whether any marginal benefits of drones programs justify the serious threat to privacy they pose.”
Law Enforcement Agencies All Over California Have Been Secretly Using Stingray Devices
By Tim Cushing | Techdirt | March 14, 2014
More documents have been uncovered (via FOI requests) that show local law enforcement agencies in California have been operating cell phone tower spoofers (stingray devices) in complete secrecy and wholly unregulated.
Sacramento News10 has obtained documents from agencies in San Jose, Oakland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento and Alameda County — all of which point to stingray deployment. As has been the case in the past, the devices are acquired with DHS grants and put into use without oversight or guidelines to ensure privacy protections. The stingrays in use are mainly limited to collecting data, but as the ACLU points out, many manufacturers offer devices that also capture content.
Some of these agencies have had these devices for several years now. Documents obtained from the Oakland Police Dept. show the agency has had stingrays in use since at least 2007, citing 21 “stingray arrests” during that year. This is hardly a surprising development as the city has been pushing for a total surveillance network for years now, something that (until very recently) seemed to be more slowed by contractor ineptitude than growing public outrage.
The device manufacturer’s (Harris) troubling non-disclosure agreement (which has been used to keep evidence of stingray usage out of court cases as well as has been deployed as an excuse for not securing warrants) rears its misshapen head again, mentioned both in one obtained document as well as by a spokesperson reached for comment. One document states:
“The Harris (REDACTED) equipment is proprietary and used for surveillance missions,” the agreement reads. “Its capabilities can only be discussed with sworn law enforcement officers, the military or federal government. This equipment’s capabilities are not for public knowledge and are protected under non-disclosure agreements as well as Title 18 USC 2512.”
The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Dept. had this to (not) say when asked about its stingray usage:
“While I am not familiar with what San Jose has said, my understanding is that the acquisition or use of this technology comes with a strict non-disclosure requirement,” said Under sheriff James Lewis in an emailed statement. “Therefore it would be inappropriate for us to comment about any agency that may be using the technology.”
Law enforcement agencies are conveniently choosing to believe a manufacturer’s non-disclosure agreement trumps public interest or even their own protection of citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights.
The devices aren’t cheap, either. Taxpayers are shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars for these cell tower spoofers, and the agencies acquiring them are doing very little to ensure the money is spent wisely. ACLU’s examination of the documents shows that many of the agencies purchased devices without soliciting bids.
It’s hard to know whether San José or any of the other agencies that have purchased stingray devices are getting good value for their money because the contract was “sole source,” in other words, not put out to competitive bidding. The justification for skirting ordinary bidding processes is that Harris Corporation is the only manufacturer of this kind of device. (We are aware of other surveillance vendors that manufacture these devices, though a separate Freedom of Information Request we submitted to the Federal Communications Commission suggests that, as of June 2013, the only company to have obtained an equipment authorization from the FCC for this kind of device is Harris.)
With Harris effectively locking the market down, buyers are pretty much ensured prices far higher than the market would bear if opened to competition. (Not that I’m advocating for a robust surveillance device marketplace, but if you’re going to spend taxpayers’ money on products to spy on them, the least you can do is try to get the best value for their money… ) Using federal grants also allows these departments to further avoid public scrutiny of the purchase and use by circumventing the normal acquisition process.
Beyond the obvious Fourth Amendment concerns looms the very real threat of mission creep. These agencies cite combating terrorism when applying for federal funds, but put the devices to use for ordinary law enforcement purposes. The documents cite stingray-related arrests, but since so little is known about the purchase, much less the deployment, there’s really no way to tell how much data and content totally unrelated to criminal investigations has been collected (and held) by these agencies.
Wanted: Dead, Not Alive: The LAPD is Afraid of What Renegade Cop Chris Dorner has to Say
By Dave Lindorff – This Can’t be Happening – 02/10/2013
Let’s not be too quick to dismiss the “ranting” of renegade LAPD officer Chris Dorner.
Dorner, a three-year police veteran and former Lieutenant in the US Navy who went rogue after being fired by the LAPD, has accused Los Angeles Police of systematically using excessive force, of corruption, of being racist, and of firing him for raising those issues through official channels.
By all media accounts, Dorner “snapped” after his firing, and has vowed to kill police in retaliation. He allegedly has already done so, with several people, including police officers and family members of police already shot dead.
Now there’s a “manhunt” involving police departments across California, focusing on the mountains around Big Bear, featuring cops dressed in full military gear and armed with semi-automatic weapons.
Nobody would argue that randomly killing police officers and their family members or friends is justified, but I think that there is good reason to suspect that the things that Dorner claims set him off, such as being fired for reporting police brutality, and then going through a rigged hearing, deserve serious consideration and investigation.
The LAPD has a long history of abuse of minorities (actually the majority in Los Angeles, where whites are now a minority). It has long been a kind of paramilitary force — one which pioneered the military-style Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) approach to “policing.”
If you wanted a good example to prove that nothing has changed over the years, just look at the outrageous incident involving LAPD cops tasked with capturing Dorner, who instead shot up two innocent women who were delivering newspapers in a residential area of Los Angeles. The women, Margie Carranza, 47, and her mother, Emma Hernandez, 71 (now in serious condition in the hospital), were not issued any warning. Police just opened fire from behind them, destroying their truck with heavy semi-automatic fire to the point that it will have to be scrapped and replaced. The two women are lucky to be alive (check out the pattern of bullet holes in the rear window behind the driver’s position in the accompanying photo). What they experienced was the tactics used by US troops on patrol in Iraq or Afghanistan, not the tactics that one expects of police. Their truck wasn’t even the right make or color, but LAPD’s “finest” decided it was better to be safe than sorry, so instead of acting like cops, they followed Pentagon “rules of engagement”: They attempted to waste the target.
LAPD officers fired on this car with clear intent to kill (check out the bullet holes behind the driver-seat position). Trouble was, it was the wrong make and wrong color, and instead of Dorner, it was two Latino women, one of whom is now in serious condition from her wounds. No warning was given before the barrage.
Local residents say that after that shooting, which involved seven LAPD officers and over 70 bullets expended, with nobody returning fire, the street and surrounding houses were pockmarked with bullet holes. The Los Angeles Times reports that in the area, there are “bullet holes in cars, trees, garage doors and roofs.”
In roofs?
What we had here was an example of a controversial tactic that the military employed in the Iraq War, and still employs in Afghanistan, called “spray and pray” — a tactic that led directly to the massive civilian casualties during that US war.
We shouldn’t be surprised that two brown-skinned women were almost mowed down by the LAPD–only that they somehow survived all that deadly firing directed at them with clear intent to kill.
The approach taken by those cop-hunting-cops of shooting first and asking questions later suggests that the LAPD in this “manhunt” for one of their own has no intention of capturing Dorner alive and letting him talk about what he knows about the evils rampant in the 10,000-member department. They want him dead.
When I lived in Los Angeles back in the 1970s, it was common for LAPD cops to bust into homes, gestapo-like, at 5 in the morning, guns out, to arrest people for minor things like outstanding court warrants for unpaid parking tickets, bald tires, or jaywalking.
Police helicopters also used to tail me — then an editor of an alternative news weekly — and my wife, a music graduate student, as we drove home at night. Sometimes, they would follow us from our car to front door with a brilliant spotlight, when we’d come home at night to our house in Echo Park. It was an act of deliberate intimidation. (They also infiltrated our newspaper with an undercover cop posing as a wannabe journalist. Her job, we later learned, was to learn who our sources were inside the LAPD — sources who had disclosed such things as that the LAPD had, and probably still has, a “shoot-to-kill” policy for police who fire their weapons.)
Friends in Los Angeles tell me nothing has changed, though of course the police weaponry has gotten heavier and their surveillance capabilities have gotten more sophisticated and invasive.
It is clear from the LAPD’s paramilitary response to the Occupy movement in Los Angeles, which included planting undercover cops among the occupiers, some of whom reportedly were agents provocateur who tried to encourage protesters to commit acts of violence, and which ended with police violence and gratuitous arrests, as in New York, that nothing has changed.
In other words, Dorner may be irrational, but he ain’t crazy.
A black military veteran, Dorner joined the police because he reportedly believed in service. Unable to go along with the militarist policing he saw on the job, he protested through channels and was apparently rewarded by being fired. Now, in his own violent way, he is trying to warn us all that something is rotten in the LAPD, and by extension, in the whole police system in the US. Police departments almost everywhere in the US, have morphed, particularly since 9/11/2001, from a role of providing public safety and law enforcement into agencies of brutal fascist control.
As Dorner says in his lengthy manifesto (actually quite explicit and literate, but described as “ranting” in corporate media accounts), in which he explains his actions and indicts the LAPD, “The enemy combatants in LA are not the citizens and suspects, it’s the police officers.”
That could be said of many US police departments, I’m afraid.
Example: Last fall, I had the experience of trying to hitchhike in my little suburban town. A young cop drove up and informed me (incorrectly, it turns out) that it was illegal to hitchhike in Pennsylvania. When I expressed surprise at this and told him I was a journalist working on an article on hitchhiking, he then threatened me directly, saying that if I continued to try and thumb a ride, he would “take you in and lock you up.”
When I called a lawyer friend and said I was inclined to take the officer up on that threat, since I was within my rights under the law hitchhiking as long as I was standing off the road, he warned me against it, saying, “You don’t know what could happen to you if you got arrested.”
And of course he’s right. An arrest, even a wrongful arrest, in the US these days can lead to an added charge — much more serious — of resisting arrest, with a court basing its judgement on the word of the officer in the absence of any other witnesses. It can also lead to physical injury or worse, if the officer wants to lie and claim that the arrested person threatened him or her.
If I had been in Los Angeles, I would most likely have been locked up for an incident like that. Forget about any warning. You aren’t supposed to talk back to cops in L.A. And if you are black or Latino, the results of such an arrest could be much worse.
I remember once witnessing LAPD cops stopping a few Latino youths who had been joyriding in what might have been a stolen car. There was a helicopter overhead, and perhaps a dozen patrol cars that had converged on the scene, outside a shopping mall in Silverlake. I ran over to see what was happening and watched as the cops grabbed the kids, none of whom was armed, out of the vehicle and slammed them against the car brutally. It was looking pretty ugly, but by then neighbors from the surrounding homes, most of them Latino, who had poured out onto their lawns because of the commotion, began yelling at the cops. One man shouted, “We see what you’re doing. These boys are all healthy. If anything happens to any of them after you arrest them we will report you!”
The cops grudgingly backed off in their attack on the boys, and took them away in a squad car. I don’t know what happened to them after that, but they were most certainly saved, by quick community response, from an on-the-spot Rodney King-style beating that could have seriously injured them, or worse.
As things stand right now, with the LAPD gunning for Dorner, and wanting him dead and silenced, not captured, the public has to worry that it has more to fear from the LAPD than it has to fear from Dorner himself. At least Dorner, in his own twisted way, has specific targets in mind. The LAPD is in “spray and pray” mode.
![Chris Dorner, in happier days, now a fugitive on the run from the LAPD "manhunters"](https://i0.wp.com/www.thiscantbehappening.net/sites/default/files/images/ChrisDorner.jpg "Chris Dorner, in happier days, now a fugitive on the run from the LAPD "manhunters"")
Chris Dorner, in happier days, now a fugitive on the run from the LAPD “manhunters”
Hopefully, Dorner will realize he can do more by figuring out a safe way to “come in from the cold” so he can try to testify about LAPD crimes, than by killing more cops. If he does manage to surrender, he’d better have a lot of support lined up to keep him safe while in custody.
It’s already clear that a lot of people in the LAPD want him dead.
Related articles
- Light on the Dark Side of Dorner’s Rampage (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Violent LAPD Shoots First at Anything Resembling Suspect’s Car (alethonews.wordpress.com)
Light on the Dark Side of Dorner’s Rampage
By Linn Washington Jr. – This can’t be happening – 02/11/201
On September 10, 2012 the Los Angeles Times published an article with the headline: “LAPD to hold meetings on use of force policies.”
Top Los Angeles police officials announced those community meetings to counter growing criticism about videoed brutality incidents involving LA police officers in the preceding months, that article noted.
On November 24, 2012 The Daily Beast posted an article with the headline: “In Los Angeles, Questions of Police Brutality Dog LAPD” reporting abuse incidents by officers of that department placed under federal oversight between 2001 and 2009 after repeated brutality and corruption scandals.
Over two months after that Daily Beast posting about LAPD brutality a fired LAPD officer unleashed a murderous rampage as revenge against his claimed unfair firing by the LAPD.
That former LAPD cop, military veteran Christopher Dorner, claimed his attack campaign was retaliation against retaliation LAPD personnel directed against him for his reporting a 2007 brutality incident he observed while on duty.
LAPD officials found Dorner’s brutality claim against a policewoman unfounded and fired him for filing false statements. The father of the alleged victim said his mentally ill son confirmed Dorner’s account.
LA police officials contend that man sustained facial injuries from falling into some bushes while resisting arrest by Dorner, not from the female officer’s kick.
Despite the recent record of brutality detailed in news coverage last fall, a New York Times article on the Dorner rampage inferred brutality by Los Angeles police – brutality that sparked two of America’s most destructive urban riots – was not a current problem.
The last sentence in the seventh paragraph of that February 7, 2013 New York Times article stated: “Mr. Dorner laid out grievances against a police department that he said remained riddled with racism and corruption, a reference to a chapter of the department’s history that, in the view of many people, was swept aside long ago.”
That ‘view’ of many people cited in the NY Times article obviously did not include the views of the dozens participating in an October 2012 demonstration against police brutality outside the LAPD headquarters.
On October 22, 2012 the Los Angeles Times published an article with the headline: “Downtown L.A. streets closed by protest at LAPD headquarters.”
Yes, the 1992 riots that rocked LA following the state court acquittal of the four LA police officers charged in the videoed savaging of Rodney King – a disturbance causing over $1-billion in damages and claiming 53 lives – arguably qualifies as long-ago.
But long-ago does not apply to incidents within the past year like the woman kicked in her groin by a female LAPD officer in July 2012 who died minutes later while hog-tied inside a patrol car.
That ‘view’ cited in the NY Times article is not shared by victims of the incidents triggering those LAPD brass community meetings like the skate boarder suckered punched by police, the nurse slammed to the ground by two officers who gave each other a fist-bump for their take-down and the handcuffed man shot by police.
While ‘many people’ certainly believe or want-to-believe LAPD brutality is long gone, perhaps by reforms implemented during that federal oversight, news media accounts pushing that view without balance of companion context comprise an element (albeit small) in the constant framing of police brutality as isolated incidents instead of long standing, systemic procedure by police across America.
At least that NY Times article referenced racism and brutality unlike many media entities that reported Dorner’s rampage without providing context beyond his crazed reaction to his firing.
The March 1968 Kerner Commission Report on sixties-era urban riots – the majority triggered by police abuse incidents including the deadly 1965 LA Watts Riots – criticized the news media for failing to “analyze and report adequately on racial matters” in America that included coverage of festering grievances like police brutality.
Compounding context-deficient coverage, news media reportage on police brutality rarely examines the central role played by prosecutors in perpetuating the problem.
The Los Angeles DA’s Office pushed one case protecting alleged police misconduct all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where in 2006 that court’s conservative majority issued a ruling experts said eroded protections for whistle-blowing public employees.
The case involved a veteran LA prosecutor who said supervisors retaliated against him arising from his exposing improprieties by a deputy during a drug investigation. Those supervisors pursued the drug prosecution despite those improprieties and then bashed the whistle-blower for providing the defense details of the improprieties as required by law.
That 11/12 Daily Beast article began with an anecdote about LA city prosecutors declining to charge officers caught lying about a December 2010 incident where a woman was beaten and tazed by four officers, one of whom videoed the incident.
Fired Officer Dorner alleged that his LAPD problems began in July 2007 when his training officer, a female, kicked a man during an arrest outside a hotel. Dorner claimed that training officer and their immediate supervisor compelled him to fudge his official report omitting the kicking, according to court findings.
LAPD officials found Dorner guilty of making false statements relying largely on an Internal Affairs investigation. The IA investigator interviewed the training officer and two hotel employees but neither Dorner nor the victim according to an October 2011 California state appellate court ruling that upheld a trial court ruling rejecting Dorner’s appeal of his 2009 LAPD firing.
LAPD officials, in their administrative proceeding, faulted Dorner for failing to immediately report the alleged kicking incident. Officials brushed aside Dorner’s stated fears of backlash for exposing that alleged misconduct and his having quickly reported that incident privately to two LAPD supervisors he knew whom he also had told about racial slurs directed at him during his police academy training.
Officials also claimed Dorner manufactured the brutality complaint to maliciously deflate an adverse performance evaluation he suspected he would receive from his training officer.
LAPD officials have initiated a reexamination of Dorner’s firing since the rampage began.
Dorner, in an online manifesto posted before his rampage, criticized the fact that officers involved in both the Rodney King and other brutality scandals were promoted not penalized.
An analysis of the Dorner incident prepared by Drexel University professor George Ciccariello-Maher and Mike King, a PhD candidate at UC Santa Cruz reminded that brutality against non-whites remains a “structural function” of the LAPD.
“It is the commonness of excuses for police abuse/murder, the erasure of the victims as collateral damage that should be highlighted when trying to make sense of this broken, rogue, former Los Angeles cop,” Ciccariello-Maher and King wrote.
Photo – credit Wikipedia
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From the Archives
American media distortion on Palestine
By Alison Weir | MEMO | May 1, 2013
… We have conducted a number of statistical studies on this issue and found that US media were covering Israeli deaths in far greater detail than they were covering those of Palestinians.
For example, the New York Times was reporting on Israeli children’s deaths at a rate seven times greater than they were covering Palestinian children’s deaths; this didn’t even include the far larger number of words and amount of personal information given about Israeli victims compared to Palestinians. We also found that primetime network news programmes were covering Israeli children’s deaths at rates up to 14 times greater than the coverage given to Palestinians.
I discovered a system of reporting from the region in which a violent conflict between an officially “Jewish state” and the Muslims and Christians it had dispossessed (and was in the process of dispossessing further) was being covered most of the time by journalists with legal, familial or emotional ties to Israel. A great many are Israeli citizens (though this is almost never disclosed) or married to Israelis, their children also being Israeli.
I discovered that the Associated Press control bureau for the region, from which virtually all news reports that appear in US newspapers were transmitted, was located in Israel and was staffed almost entirely by Israeli and Jewish journalists (many of whom had served in the Israeli military).
I learned that the son of the New York Times bureau chief was serving in the Israeli military while his father was reporting on the conflict. In fact, I discovered that it was common for journalists in the region reporting for American media to have close personal ties to the Israeli military; that at least one staff member had been serving in the Israeli military even as he was reporting for the NY Times ; that US News & World Report’s senior foreign correspondent, who had covered and written about the Middle East for more than 40 years, had a son serving in the Israeli army during the time he was reporting there; that Middle East “pundit” Jeffrey Goldberg, whose commentary pervades both the print and broadcast media, is an Israeli citizen who served in the Israeli military.
I learned that CNN anchorman Wolf Blitzer lived in Israel for many years, at one point travelled around the US as the “voice of Israel” and had worked for an Israel lobby publication.
I learned that Time magazine’s bureau chief was an Israeli citizen, and that NPR’s long-time correspondent from the region had an Israeli husband who had served in the military and may be an Israeli citizen herself.
I also discovered that this pattern of Israel-centrism went beyond the regional reporting. In fact, the regional filtering of the news may not even be the most significant factor in the broken media reporting on this issue that Americans receive.
Within US-based journalism per se I discovered patterns of Israel-centrism that were deeply troubling. In some cases I personally experienced the intentional suppression of information on Palestine. Following are a few examples. … Read full article
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- Irreversible Fake News At The Washington Post March 22, 2023
- The depopulation agenda, Part 2: Creating food scarcity March 22, 2023
- UCSF orders their doctors to ignore COVID vaccine injuries March 21, 2023
- Indonesia to ditch Visa and Mastercard March 21, 2023
- If Americans Knew
- Bezalel Smotrich calls a lie “the biblical truth” March 22, 2023
- Joel Osteen’s startling interview with Bibi Netanyahu March 20, 2023
- Thursday-Friday: Israeli forces kill 5 Palestinians March 18, 2023
- Brownstone Institute
- The Real Trauma of Love Canal March 22, 2023
- The Narrative in Retreat March 22, 2023
- The Mandates Themselves Carry Grave Costs March 22, 2023
- Dr. Frieden’s Follies March 21, 2023
- Once More to the Lectern March 21, 2023
- The Devastation is Deeper and Wider than We Know March 21, 2023
- Richie Allen
- Gates: “AI Will Change Our Lives Just Like The Internet Did” March 23, 2023
- Bloke Wins Women’s Cycling Race – Says He Feels Like A Superhero March 23, 2023
- Canada Adds Million To Population In Under a Year March 23, 2023
- DeSantis: “Florida Will Lead Fight Against Central Bank Digital Currency” March 22, 2023
- Not A Lot Of People Know That
- Met Office & Their Opinion Poll March 22, 2023
- Climate change isn’t ‘particularly dangerous’: Richard Lindzen March 21, 2023
- The world is running out of time to avoid catastrophe, new UN report warns March 21, 2023
- No Wind Power In Summer? Solar Panels Won’t Save You! March 20, 2023
- No Tricks Zone
- Consent Factory
- The Censorship Industrial Complex March 10, 2023
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