‘Vitoria!’ Mass protests force Brazil congress to reject ‘bill of discontent’
RT | June 26, 2013
Brazil’s legislative body has thrown out a proposed constitutional amendment, which was a key grievance of protesters across the country. The government is also planning to introduce a range of political reforms to appease demonstrators.
In what in being seen as a victory for people power, the measure was defeated on Tuesday by Congress by 430 votes to nine; with the Rio Times saying the protests were “largely fueled by social media and citizen journalists.”
The amendment, known as PEC 37, would have limited the power of state prosecutors to investigate crimes.
The protesters had argued that PEC 37 might have opened the way to more corruption; a problem which is endemic in Brazil.
Brazil ranks 69 out of 174 countries on the 2012 Transparency International index, a score that indicates significant problems with corruption.
The defeat of PEC 37 will keep public prosecutors at the forefront of the fight against corruption. If the amendment had become law, it would have granted power to carry out criminal investigations exclusively to the police.
Critics to the bill argued that it would have prevented prosecutors from conducting fair, impartial and effective criminal investigations, particularly into organized crime and corruption, in which the police themselves have been embroiled. In December last year 63 police officers were arrested after a yearlong bribery investigation.
The police in Brazil are amongst the most corrupt in the world and have been mired in recent years in a number of corruption scandals.
Congress also voted Tuesday to funnel all revenue and royalties from newly-discovered oil fields off the Brazilian coast into education and health.
The new fields are among the largest finds in recent years and, once fully operational, are expected to produce tens of billions of barrels of oil; although they are located deep on the ocean floor and extracting the oil will require expensive new technology and carries huge risks.
Protestors also voiced their anger at other issues, which they say the government is mishandling, including soaring levels of corruption, poor public services and the huge cost of staging the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics, both to be held in Brazil.
The government, though, has promised a range of initiatives, which they say will combat corruption and improve public services.
A referendum proposing political reform is meant to address campaign financing and political representation, and the government says a vote may take place as soon as September 7.
A controversial plan to bring in foreign doctors to reverse a shortfall in the country is being pushed through despite the objections of Brazilian medical practitioners and an increase in public transport fares in many cities has also been scrapped. The President of the Senate, Renan Calheiros, has even proposed free transport for students.
Yet it is still unclear whether or not these hasty political concessions are having an impact. Protests are due to continue in the city of Belo Horizonte Wednesday, with tens of thousands of people expected to take part.
In a security nightmare for police, the demonstration will take place at the same time as the semifinal of the Confederation Cup between Brazil and Uruguay. One protest group has said it plans to protest outside the national team’s hotel.
Last Saturday there were violent clashes in Belo Horizonte during another protest and President Rousseff has warned against a repeat of violence.
Court blocks NYPD bid to fire whistleblower as commissioner brags of ‘awesome powers’
RT | June 21, 2013
The New York City Police Department’s latest attempt to fire Adrian Schoolcraft, the whistleblower who secretly recorded evidence of corruption among his superiors over three years ago, was blocked this week in federal court.
Schoolcraft has said he began wearing a microphone to defend himself against citizens’ allegations that he used racial slurs while policing the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant, a poor and primarily African-American section of Brooklyn. By wearing the device from June 1, 2008 until October 15, 2009, though, he soon began recording directions from NYPD higher-ups who pressured officers to fill monthly arrest quotas, which is illegal.
“He wants three seat belt [summonses], one cell phone, and 11 others,” one police sergeant is heard saying on the tape. “I don’t know what the number is, but that’s what [an executive officer] wants.”
Upon complaining of corrupt policies and wrongful arrests, Schoolcraft has said, he began receiving threats from fellow police officers and was eventually reassigned to a desk job.
Three weeks after he told the NYPD the damning recordings existed, Schoolcraft’s home was raided by a large group of officers who forcibly checked him into a psychiatric ward in Queens citing suicidal tendencies. Approximately twelve of Schoolcraft’s superiors were on hand at his home. Reportedly among them was Paul Browne, a top aide to Commissioner Ray Kelly, whose presence would indicate Kelly knew of and approved of the raid.
After Schoolcraft refused treatment, the officers guarding him at a Queens hospital handcuffed him to a bed and prevented him from using a telephone. He was held there for three days until his father tracked him down and signed him out. The Schoolcraft family later received a bill for $7,185 for his stay at the facility.
Schoolcraft eventually turned over his recordings, including of the night when he was dragged to the hospital, to the Village Voice, which dubbed the audio “The NYPD Tapes.” In 2009 and 2010, the NYPD charged Schoolcraft with approximately two dozen charges of leaving work early, failing to respond to department summonses, failure to obey an order, being away without leave, and others.
The department could have tried and fired Schoolcraft in early 2010, the Voice reported, but presumably suspended him instead because of the bad publicity that would come as a natural result of dismissing a man for exposing corruption.
“I think within the precinct, he was probably seen as a little bit eccentric,” Graham Rayman, a reporter for the Village Voice, told This American Life in 2010. “And also, he wasn’t going with the program. And anyone who doesn’t go with the program is automatically marked.”
For nearly four years he has been on leave without pay, waiting for the start of a federal lawsuit he filed against the department for intimidation and retaliation.
In response, the NYPD filed its own administrative suit seeking to fire Schoolcraft, a move Schoolcraft’s lawyers said will unduly influence the verdict in the original suit. The department was blocked from filing that suit this week.
“You have the power to arrest, to take away someone’s liberty. You have the power and the authority to use force and sometimes deadly force,” Kelly said this week in a speech to this year’s graduating class of the NYPD academy. “Now these are awesome powers.”
The commissioner, quoted by CBS, also said that different ethnic groups are “not always happy” with the department and that “all it takes is one errant police officer” to undermine the “great institution” that has been built by generations.
Related articles
- Judge in Whistleblower Cop Case Blocks City Move to Fire Him (blogs.villagevoice.com)
- NYPD Cop Arrests Man for Photographing Police Station from Public Sidewalk (photographyisnotacrime.com)
Mom Says DC Cop Assaulted Little Kid
By IULIA FILIP | Courthouse News | April 15, 2013
WASHINGTON – A police officer slammed a 10-year-old student’s head on a table, concussing him, while talking to students about “behaving in class,” the boy’s mother claims in court.
Chante Price sued Metropolitan Police Officer David Bailey Jr. and the District of Columbia, in Federal Court.
She claims Bailey assaulted her son while the boy was discussing a book with a classmate, at Wilkinson Elementary School in Southeast Washington.
Moten Elementary students were temporarily assigned to Wilkinson because of renovations, Price says in the complaint. She claims Bailey’s assault gave her 80-lb., 4-foot 10-inch son headaches for two weeks and made him afraid to go to school.
“On April 19, 2012, T.P. was in music class,” the complaint states. “T.P.’s teacher sent him to the cafeteria because he wasn’t participating adequately in the class. In the cafeteria, he sat at a lunch table with a few other classmates who were also being disciplined. Officer Bailey was present in the cafeteria. There were no other adults in the immediate vicinity.
“On information and belief, Officer Bailey regularly stopped in Moten Elementary School at Wilkinson as part of his routine patrol.
“Officer Bailey lectured the children about behaving in class. T.P. quietly discussed the book he was reading with a classmate.
“Officer Bailey approached T.P. and said, ‘Stop playing with me.’ T.P. responded that he was ‘not playing.’ Officer Bailey grabbed T.P. by the back of his head and slammed T.P.’s head forward into the table. Officer Bailey then grabbed T.P. by the shirt and forcefully lifted him off his chair. Officer Bailey threatened, ‘Play with me again, I’ll take you to 7D [the Seventh District police station].’ Officer Bailey dropped T.P. back onto his chair. (Brackets in complaint).
“T.P.’s teacher entered the cafeteria shortly after the incident, and T.P. reported the incident to her. The teacher responded that she could not do anything because Officer Bailey was a police officer.”
In addition to the concussion and headaches, the assault injured her son’s chest, Price says in the complaint.
She claims says her son now is afraid to go to school, where he “feels insecure in his classroom, even with a teacher present.”
Price says she filed a complaint against Bailey with the District of Columbia Office of Police Complaints, which is investigating, but the U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute Bailey.
D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said in a statement that “police officers should be afforded due process just like anyone else, before judgment is passed. It should also be noted that criminal charges were declined in this matter.”
Price seeks compensatory and punitive damages for constitutional violations, assault and battery.
She is represented by Arthur Spitzer with the American Civil Liberties Union.
Related article
Justice Dept. Supports Right of Citizens to Photograph and Film Police
By Noel Brinkerhoff | AllGov | March 12, 2013
Mannie Garcia (photo: manniegarcia.com)
The Obama administration says Americans have the constitutional right to record police officers making arrests, lending weight to a legal debate that has grown in the era of camera-ready smartphones.
The administration’s legal position was stated in a court filing by the U.S. Department of Justice, which has sided with the plaintiff in Garcia v. Montgomery County.
The case involves Mannie Garcia, a photojournalist who, in June 2011, took pictures of two police officers in Wheaton, Maryland, making an arrest. The officers demanded that Garcia stop taking photos, and when he refused, they put him in a choke hold, confiscated his camera and arrested him. Garcia was later acquitted of disorderly conduct. He then sued the officers and department.
Garcia is best known for two photos he took of U.S. presidents: George W. Bush staring out the window of Air Force One in 2005 at the damage in New Orleans caused by Hurricane Katrina and the portrait of Barack Obama that Shepard Fairey turned into the iconic Obama “HOPE” poster.
In the statement filed in a Maryland federal court, the Justice Department said all individuals—not just credentialed photojournalists—have a First Amendment right to record law enforcement officers performing their duties.
The department added that Americans are protected under the Fourth and 14th Amendment from having their recordings seized without a warrant or due process.
Justice officials have urged the court to uphold these constitutional guarantees and reject the police department’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
To Learn More:
U.S. Weighs In Favor Of Right To Record Police (by Josh Gerstein, Politico)
Mannie Garcia v. Montgomery County, Maryland (U.S. District Court, Maryland)
Illinois Law Criminalizing the Recording of Police Activity Comes to an End after 51 Years (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)
Why are Americans Arrested for Videotaping Police in Public Places? (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)
Police militarization comes under nationwide investigation
RT | March 07, 2013
The American Civil Liberties Union has launched a campaign to investigate the growing trend of placing militarized police units in cities and towns across the country.
Doors busted down and windows smashed in. It’s becoming more of a regular occurrence each day in America as heavily-armed SWAT teams are being sent to the homes of suspects, often nonviolent ones, with enough firepower to take down a small army. In November, a botched raid ended with an 18-year-old girl in the hospital. Other incidents haven’t been exactly isolated either: guns get drawn on both grannies and grandkids alike, and equipping law enforcement officers with the means to make these nightmares become reality is easier by the day.
Police units across the US are becoming more like militaries than the serve-and-protect do-gooders that every young schoolboy once aspired to be. Not only are officers being trained to act with intensity as the number of these home invasions increase, but more and more police departments are being awarded arsenals of heavy-duty weaponry that are then being turned not onto members of al-Qaeda, but innocent children and unsuspecting house guests.
ACLU affiliates across the United States filed Freedom of Information Act requests with law enforcement agencies on Wednesday in hope of obtaining as much material as possible relevant to the ongoing expansion of small town police squads to heavily armed squadrons of soldiers.
“Federal funding in the billions of dollars has allowed state and local police departments to gain access to weapons and tactics created for overseas combat theaters – and yet very little is known about exactly how many police departments have military weapons and training, how militarized the police have become, and how extensively federal money is incentivizing this trend,” reads a statement released by the ACLU. “It’s time to understand the true scope of the militarization of policing in America and the impact it is having in our neighborhoods.”
On Wednesday, the ACLU issued a statement saying branches and affiliates in 23 states around the country filed over 255 public records requests only hours after the investigation was formally launched. The agencies hope that, by analyzing documents, can learn more about the extent that “federal funding and support has fueled the militarization of state and local police departments.”
“Equipping state and local law enforcement with military weapons and vehicles, military tactical training, and actual military assistance to conduct traditional law enforcement erodes civil liberties and encourages increasingly aggressive policing, particularly in poor neighborhoods and communities of color,” explains Kara Dansky, senior counsel for the ACLU’s Center for Justice. “We’ve seen examples of this in several localities, but we don’t know the dimensions of the problem.”
The ACLU says they want to know as much as possible about the type of training given to local SWAT officers, as well as information about the types of technology used by agencies around the country. Through the FOIA requests, the ACLU hopes to learn what types of weapons have been used, who they’ve been used on and what the end result has been. They also want documentation pertaining to the growing use of GPS technology, surveillance drones and any agreements between local police departments and the National Guard. The ACLU is also interested in any relationships between small law enforcement units and the US Departs of Defense and Homeland Security.
“The American people deserve to know how much our local police are using military weapons and tactics for everyday policing,” adds Allie Bohm, an advocacy and policy strategist for ACLU. “The militarization of local police is a threat to Americans’ right to live without fear of military-style intervention in their daily lives, and we need to make sure these resources and tactics are deployed only with rigorous oversight and strong legal protections.”
In 2011, the Department of Defense gave half-a-billion dollars’ worth of military machinery that would have been left otherwise unused to law enforcement agencies coast-to-coast. Among the items offered up to officers at no cost at all that year were grenade launchers, helicopters, military robots, M-16 assault rifles and armored vehicles. Before 2012 came to a close, figures for that year were expected to end with more than a 400 percent increase.
Peter Kraska, a criminologist at Eastern Kentucky University, tells journalist Radley Balko that while the militarization of police squads is indeed accelerating, it isn’t likely the ACLU will get all the answers they want.
“My experience is that they’ll have a very difficult time getting comprehensive, forthright information,” Kraska says. “If the goal here is to impose some transparency, you have to understand, that’s not what the SWAT industry wants.”
Related article
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)
Sometimes, When “All the Facts are In,” It’s Worse: The UC-Davis Pepper-Spray Report
By J. Brad Hicks | April 15th, 2012
You know how every time somebody in law enforcement does something that looks bad, we’re told that we should “wait until the facts are in” before passing judgment? Well, after Lieutenant Pike of the UC Davis Police Department became an internet meme by using high-pressure pepper-spray on peaceful resisters, the campus hired an independent consulting firm to interview everybody they could find, review all the videos and other evidence, review the relevant policies and laws, and issue a final fact-finding report to the university. The university just released that report, along with their summary (PDF link), and the final report is even worse than the news accounts made it seem.
You probably weren’t aware that the protesters warned the university that they were going to be protesting two weeks in advance, were you? The campus, and campus police, had two weeks’ notice to plan for this, and yes, on day one, one question they addressed was, “What if the protesters set up an Occupy encampment?” Two weeks in advance they planned, well, if they do that, then we’ll send in police to remove the tents, and to arrest anybody who tries to stop them. Now, under California law, when planning an operation like this, there’s a checklist they’re supposed to follow when writing the operational plan, specifically to make sure that they don’t forget something important. Had they done so? They would have avoided all four of the important steps they screwed up. When asked about it? Nobody involved was even aware that that checklist existed.
The most important thing that the checklist would have warned them about was do not screw up the chain of command. Let me make clear who was in the chain of command. Under normal circumstances, it runs from university Chancellor Katehi, to campus police Chief Spicuzza, to campus police Lieutenant Davis, to his officers, including one I’ll call Officer Nameless. (The report refers to him by a code letter.) Once the cops arrive on the scene, there’s supposed to be one and only one person in a position to give orders to the other officers on the scene, including any higher-ups who are there (if any). Officer Nameless, who wrote the plan, was put in charge of the scene by Lt. Pike. By law, the officer in charge of the scene is not supposed to get directly involved. He or she (in this case, he) is supposed to stand back where he can see the whole scene, and concentrate on giving orders, and everybody else is supposed to refrain from giving orders. Officer Nameless instead ignored his responsibilities, and waded in, and so did Lt. Pike; Chief Spicuzza sat in her car half a block away, communicating with the radio dispatcher by cell phone, and at one time or another, all three of them, Officer Nameless and Lieutenant Pike and Chief Spicuzza were yelling out contradictory orders.
But before it even came to that point, the student protesters had, with the help of Legal Services, gone over all the relevant state laws, city ordinances, campus ordinances, and campus regulations and concluded that no matter what the Chancellor thought, it was entirely legal for them to set up that camp. When the university’s legal department found out that Chancellor Katehi was going to order the camp removed, they thought they made it clear to her that the students were right.
I kept having to stop and slap my forehead over that one repeated phrase in the report: (this person or that) was under the impression she had made it clear that (some order was given), but nobody else present had that impression. Anybody who is “under the impression that they made it clear” that some order was given who who didn’t put it in writing and who hasn’t had that order paraphrased back to them? Should be slapped. Or at the very least demoted. Unless you actually said it, you didn’t “make it clear.”
It turns out that it is illegal for anybody to lodge on the campus without permission, but the relevant law only applies to people trying to make it their permanent dwelling. The law prohibits non-students from camping on campus for any reason, but neither student affairs nor the one cop sent to look could find any non-students who were there overnight. A campus regulation says that students can’t set up tents without permission, but that regulation is not enforceable by police, only by academic discipline. Campus legal “thought they made it clear” that the law was on the students’ side, but according to multiple witnesses, what they actually said was “it is unclear that you have legal authority to order the police to do this” and Chancellor Katehi heard that as “well, they didn’t say I don’t have that authority, only that it’s not clear.”
Chancellor Katehi, on her part, “thought she made it clear” that when police ordered the students to leave, they were (a) not to wear riot gear into the camp, (b) not to carry weapons of any kind into the camp, (c) were not to use force of any kind against the students, and (d) were not to make any arrests. But all that anybody else on that conference call heard her say out loud was “I don’t want another situation like they just had at Berkeley,” and Chief Spicuzza interpreted that as “no swinging of clubs.”
Chief Spicuzza “thought she made it clear” more than once that no riot gear was to be worn and no clubs or pepper sprayers were to be carried. What Lieutenant Pike said back to her, each time, was, “Well, I hear you say that you don’t want us to, but we’re going to.” And they did, including that now-infamous Mk-9 military-grade riot-control pepper sprayer that he used. Oh, funny thing about that particular model of pepper-sprayer? It’s illegal for California cops to possess or use. It turns out that the relevant law only permits the use of up to Mk-4 pepper sprayers. The consultants were unable to find out who authorized the purchase and carrying, but every cop they asked said, “So what? It’s just like the Mk-4 except that it has a higher capacity.” Uh, no. It’s also much, much higher pressure, and specifically designed not to be sprayed directly at any one person, only at crowds, and only from at least six feet away. The manufacturer says so. The person in charge of training California police in pepper spray says that as far as he knows, no California cop has ever received training, from his office or from the manufacturer, in how to safely use a Mk-9 sprayer, presumably because it’s illegal. But Officer Nameless, when he wrote the action plan for these arrests, included all pepper-spray equipment in the equipment list, both the paint-ball rifle pepper balls and the Mk-9 riot-control sprayers.
The students set up their tents on a Thursday night. Chancellor Katehi ordered the cops to (a) only involve campus police, because she didn’t trust the local cops not to be excessively brutal, and (b) get them out of here by 3 AM Thursday night. Chief Spicuzza had to tell her that that wasn’t physically possible, they couldn’t get enough backup officers from other UC campuses on that short notice, it was going to have to be Friday night at 3 AM. Chancellor Katehi said “no can do,” that they had to be out of there before sunset Friday night, so that the camp wasn’t joined by drunken and stoned Friday night partiers that would endanger the camp and even further endanger cops trying to deal with them — arguably an entirely reasonable objection. So she ordered Chief Spicuzza to get them out of there by 3 PM Friday afternoon. Chief Spicuzza “was under the impression” (oh, look, there’s that phrase again) that she made it clear to the Chancellor that for one thing, it couldn’t be safely done, at 3:00 PM the protesters and passers-by would way outnumber her officers, and for another, it couldn’t be legally done, because there was no way to legally arrest someone for “overnight camping” in the middle of the afternoon. Nobody else who was in that meeting thinks she made that clear, only that she made it clear that she didn’t want to do it but couldn’t explain why not. Still, when she gave the order to Lieutenant Pike, he very definitely did raise the same objections, clearly and unambiguously, backed up by multiple witnesses, who all agree that Chief Spicuzza told him, “This was decided above my level, do it anyway.”
So, there’s Lieutenant Pike. (Who, by the way, for obvious legal reasons since he’s still being investigated by internal affairs and, last I heard, still being sued by his victims, refused to be interviewed by the consultants, so everything we know about his side of this comes from what he told other people and what he wrote in his reports.) As far as he’s concerned, he’s been given an illegal and impossible order: take 40 or so officers – unarmed and unarmored officers – into an angry crowd of 300 to 400 people who aren’t doing anything illegal and make that crowd go away without using any force or getting any of your officers injured. For reasons Stanley Milgram could explain, it does not occur to Lieutenant Pike to disobey this order, so instead, he does the best he can, using his own judgement to decide which parts of his orders and which parts of the law to ignore. Unsurprisingly, it goes badly. Backed into a corner by an angry crowd (which has, by the way, demonstrably left him room to retreat, even with his prisoners, contrary to what he says in his report) that is confronting him with evidence that he is the law-breaker here, not them, he snaps. And rather than take it out on the more-powerful people who put him in this situation, he takes it out on the powerless and peaceful people in front of him, using a high-pressure hose to pump five gallons of capsacin spray into the eyes and mouths of the dozen or twenty people in front of him … and he would have used more if he’d had it, he only stopped when he did, halfway through his third pass down the line, because the sprayer emptied. When he gets back to the station, Chief Spicuzza (who has no idea what’s just happened) congratulates him in front of half the department for how well he just did. And now, as far as he’s concerned, he’s being hung out to dry. We’re apparently supposed to ignore the fact that multiple video sources contradict almost everything about his after-incident report because apparently, in his opinion, he was only following orders.
This is not better than the initial media reports. This is worse. This is an epic textbook in official-violence failure.
Related articles
- UC Davis: Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi (alethonews.wordpress.com)
UC Berkeley to use federal funds to purchase $200,000 ‘armed personnel carrier’
By Josiah Ryan | Campus Forum | June 29, 2012
The University of California – Berkeley Police Department (UCPD) has acquired a $200,000 grant from the Department of Homeland Security to purchase an “Armored Response Counter Attack Truck,” a police department spokesman told Campus Reform on Friday.
The eight-ton vehicle, commonly referred to as a “Bearcat,” is used by U.S. troops on the battlefield and is often equipped with a rotating roof hatch, powered turrets, gun ports, a battering ram, and a weapon system used to remotely engage a target with lethal force.
Lt. Eric Tejada, a spokesman for UCPD, said the university plans to use the vehicle along with neighboring counties in dangerous situations that could involve heavy weapons.
Tejada said that although he does know of any incident in the university’s 144-year history in which such a vehicle would have saved a life, the police department would have liked to deploy it in an incident last year when they mistakenly believed a man had an AK-47 assault rifle.
University of Virginia Professor Dewey Cornell, an expert in violence prevention and school safety, told Campus Reform on Friday that with approximately 4800 four-year colleges in the U.S., and an average of 10 homicides per year on college campuses, the average college can expect a homicide about once every 480 years.
“With all we hear we hear about the federal deficit it’s a shame there is money available for things like this but not for prevention,” said Cornell. “If a university has to resort to a Bearcat that means there is a failure somewhere else.”
A June 19 log of a Berkeley City Council meeting, however, suggests that that UCPD also intends to use the vehicle for “large incidents” including university sporting events and an annual street festival called the Solana Stroll.
The tactical working group of which the UCPD is a member said “the armored vehicle is needed for ‘large incidents’ such as CAL games and the Solano Stroll,” notes the meeting meetings minutes.
The grant was obtained under the DHS’s Urban Areas Security Initiative. The vehicle will be shared with two neighboring jurisdictions and likely will not be stored on UC-Berkeley’s campus, said Tejada.
Follow the author of this article on twitter: @JosiahRyan
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The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Last part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
By Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | August 28, 2016
Amidst his litany of condemnations, Jonathan Kay reserves some of his most vicious and vitriolic attacks for Kevin Barrett. For instance Kay harshly criticizes Dr. Barrett’s published E-Mail exchange in 2008 with Prof. Chomsky. In that exchange Barrett castigates Chomsky for not going to the roots of the event that “doubled the military budget overnight, stripped Americans of their liberties and destroyed their Constitution.” The original misrepresentations of 9/11, argues Barrett, led to further “false flag attacks to trigger wars, authoritarianism and genocide.”
In Among The Truthers Kay tries to defend Chomsky against Barrett’s alleged “personal obsession” with “vilifying” the MIT academic. Kay objects particularly to Barrett’s “final salvo” in the published exchange where the Wisconsin public intellectual accuses Prof. Chomsky of having “done more to keep the 9/11 blood libel alive, and cause the murder of more than a million Muslims than any other single person.” … continue
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