ICE Unchained Won't Stop With Just the Browns

Still got an "I'm With Her" sticker on your car? Belong to the ACLU, NAACP or Human Rights Campaign?  Ever publicly express a less-than-worshipful opinion about the Pumpkin Traitor?

Get your affairs in order, because no obviously fake "papers" are going to save you now.


Zandar:

This is a war being fought right now.  ICE is saying that they reserve the right to come in and raid any city in America, demand identification, and round people up for non-compliance or even documenting the atrocities.
This is Trump's America in 2019.

Cops Who Murder Walk; Bitches Who Laugh at Trumpies Get Prison Time

No, that is not an exaggeration. For the moment, her appeal is likely to be heard by Obama-appointed judges who understand the First Amendment.  But every day, those judges are being replaced by trumpies who think Bull Connor was a bleeding-heart liberal.

Scott Lemiuex at LGM:

…she has been convicted on two counts. Tina Nguyen [H/T Downpuppy] adds valuable context:

The Justice Department will not press federal charges against two white Baton Rouge police officers involved in last year’s shooting death of a black man, Alton Sterling, multiple media outlets reported Tuesday, bringing renewed attention to how Attorney General Jeff Sessions, already controversial, is choosing to deal with allegations of police bias and racially motivated shootings. The decision is not entirely surprising: federal civil rights charges in such cases are rare, due to the high burden of proof, and even the Obama-era D.O.J. repeatedly declined to charge police officers involved in high-profile deaths. Still, it is stunning to see what cases Donald Trump’s attorney general has decided to prosecute.

On Wednesday, a jury convicted a 61-year-old female activist who had laughed during Sessions’s January confirmation hearing in the Senate. Desiree Fairooz, a longtime protester affiliated with the anti-war group Code Pink, had been escorted out of the room for laughing in response to Senator Richard Shelby’s assertion that Sessions had a “clear and well-documented” history of “treating all Americans equally under the law.” (Sessions had, in fact, been denied a federal judgeship in 1986 because of a history of racially charged remarks, and Shelby himself had once run a campaign ad suggesting that Sessions was a Klan sympathizer.) Fairooz, along with two other protesters, faces up to a year in prison.

How to Make Enemies and Influence People to Hate Us

Ahmad Muhammed is going to go on to do great things for this country - his country.  But the conservatards of Irving, Texas are going to continue electing racist shitheads like their current mayor and police chief.

Via Digby:

Glenn Greenwald wrote this morning:

There are sprawling industries and self-proclaimed career “terrorism experts” in the U.S. that profit greatly by deliberately exaggerating the threat of Terrorism and keeping Americans in a state of abject fear of “radical Islam.” There are all sorts of polemicists who build their public platforms by demonizing Muslims and scoffing at concerns over “Islamaphobia,” with the most toxic ones insisting that such a thing does not even exist, even as the mere presence of mosques is opposed across the country, or even as they are physically attacked.

The U.S. government just formally renewed the “State of Emergency” it declared in the aftermath of 9/11 for the 14th time since that attack occurred, ensuring that the country remains in a state of permanent, endless war, subjected to powers that are still classified as “extraordinary” even though they have become entirely normalized. As a result of all of this, a minority group of close to 3 million people is routinely targeted with bigotry and legal persecution in the Home of the Free, while fear and hysteria reign supreme in the Land of the Brave.

What happened in Irving, Texas, yesterday to a 14-year-old Muslim high school freshman is far from the worst instance, but it is highly illustrative of the rotted fruit of this sustained climate of cultivated fear and demonization. The Dallas Morning News reports that “Ahmed Mohamed — who makes his own radios and repairs his own go-kart — hoped to impress his teachers when he brought a homemade clock to MacArthur High,” but “instead, the school phoned police.”

Despite insisting that he made the clock to impress his engineering teacher, consistent with his long-time interest in “inventing stuff,” Ahmed was arrested by the police and led out of school with his hands cuffed behind him. When he was brought into the room to be questioned by the four police officers who had been dispatched to the school, one of them — who had never previously seen him — said: “Yup. That’s who I thought it was.” As a result, he “felt suddenly conscious of his brown skin and his name — one of the most common in the Muslim religion.”

14 Years of Hysteria, Stupidity and Waste for No Good Reason

Some of us even predicted it back then.

Reader JB at TPM:

To me the most notable thing looking back on 9/11 13 years later is how crystal clear it is now that it was an anomalous event and not, contrary to all the rhetoric of the time, the dawn of a new era of domestic terrorism. The fact that basically nothing analogous – meaning a domestic terror attack planned and executed by foreigners or local cells funded by Al Queda or like groups -- has happened in the 13 years since is pretty incredible and unexpected. Perhaps more surprising still is that the only viable explanation for the dearth of attacks is that terrorists motivated to carry out attacks inside the United States do not exist.

We know this because, if they did exist, at least in any remotely capable form, they would have succeeded in carrying out dozens or hundreds of attacks by now because it is simply impossible to completely stop motivated terrorists from carrying out attacks in a free and open society with endless targets and no-questions-asked access to automatic firearm.

Could an attack happen tomorrow? Of course. But once every 13 years would still be an anomalous event, not a systemic threat. Remember the talk as the rubble smoldered of hundreds, maybe thousands, of “sleeper cells” lurking out there, waiting to strike? Well, we now know there were none at the time, and apparently none were formed even after we have fought two wars and killed thousands of innocent civilians since 9/11. One would think our actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etcetera would spawn at least a few motivated and effective enemies bent on revenge through domestic attacks. Apparently not.

So, ironically, if we had done absolutely nothing in response to 9/11 aside from hold funerals and shake our heads in disbelief, we would have been no less safe than we are now after two useless wars, trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, and a decade of taking off our shoes for domestic flights. I’m not saying this was obvious when 9/11 happened. Far from it. I was just as freaked out as anyone else at the time and I think it would have been foolish to ignore the threat. But the fact is if we had we would have been far better off, because as it turns out there were not hundreds of other Mohammed Attas out there in the wings. In fact, there were none, at least not with any meaningful capabilities (which would exclude folks like the shoe bomber and the Tsarnaev brothers). We know this to be the case because if such people did exist we would have been hit 100 times over by now. It is too damn easy to sow terror and chaos with motivation and even a below average IQ. Think Newtown or D.C. sniper.

A few sad teenagers have committed far, far more domestic terror attacks than all the Islamic militants in the world over the past decade, and that is an outcome I think very few would have predicted, myself included, in the aftermath of 9/11. I’m sure the Rudy Guiliani set would love to take credit for the lack of attacks, but I think any serious expert on stopping domestic terrorism attacks would agree that the only way to bat as close to 1000 as we have is if your enemy is fictional.

The Inhumanity of Being of a Cop

Cops deny the humanity of people who are not cops, and in doing so destroy their own humanity. There is no solution to this, other than dismantling the entire law enforcement system in this country and building something very different from scratch.

At TPM, Aurin Squire talks candidly with cops who are family and friends, and discovers that even the least conservative and aggressive are too conservative and aggressive:

Our chorus of sad and angry laughter echoed through my head as I took notes— disbelieving laughter at how far we still had to go, but hope for how far we have come. (I was sitting in the student lounge at Juilliard, after all). The system was racist, yes, but after hearing officers describe their jobs, I realized the very nature of their profession is one of infuriating contradictions and compromises. Regardless of color, to be an American cop means being both powerful enough to take someone’s life, and powerless to change the societal systems that breed crime and fear.

“You can’t fix anything. You don’t have an answer. You have a mandate,” said Wright. “The ritual of doing the job”—seeing people at their worst, barking orders at them— “makes you disconnect from yourself and the world…It only takes three to five years for your humanity to be gone.”

Which makes it very easy to shoot to death a mentally ill teenaged girl.

Digby:

Yes, there is undoubtedly something else they could have done. This was a mentally disturbed teen-age girl with a knife. They could have retreated, called for some help to try to talk her down or even used a taser if they really felt afraid for their lives. But why should they bother? This is easier. 

Remember, these cops have very tough jobs. We can't second guess their actions even when it might seem obvious to anyone with half a brain and the tiniest common sense that there might be other options besides opening fire on a disturbed teenage girl inside a police station. 

 How did we get here?  Another TPM piece gives a brief history of policing.

And Gaius Publius at Hullabaloo cites another piece on the origins of police and comments:

"The police were created to use violence"

I'll close with what for me is his main point. This is hard to believe, and hard to grasp, but it's the only way to make sense of news that comes at us like a train. Chris Hayes could do "killer cop goes free" stories from now till the rest of his life, never run out, and in our hearts, every one of us knows it. There's an endless supply of "killer cops" and their stories, most hidden from view, never prosecuted unless there's an outcry, and rarely even then.

So why is there seemingly no way ever to curb the violence of the police? The answer's in front of us. Because:

The police were created to use violence to reconcile electoral democracy with industrial capitalism. Today, they are just one part of the “criminal justice” system that plays the same role. Their basic job is to enforce order among those with the most reason to resent the system — in our society today, disproportionately among poor black people.

Every word a true one. Remember your Dickens, then remember that you can't have a world owned and harvested by men like David Koch and Jamie Dimon without an enforcement mechanism.

It continues in yet another example of cop terrorism, cop racism, cop power-tripping, cop attacks for no reason.

Big Fucking Deal: Holder Puts Stop to Police Theft

There aren't many single policy changes that can make a huge difference in the lives of the most oppressed among us: minorities, the poor, the marginalized of all kinds whose lives are destroyed by thieving cops just because they can.

Digby:

This is a big deal:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without evidence that a crime occurred.

Holder’s action represents the most sweeping check on police power to confiscate personal property since the seizures began three decades ago as part of the war on drugs.

Since 2008, thousands of local and state police agencies have made more than 55,000 seizures of cash and property worth $3 billion under a civil asset forfeiture program at the Justice Department called Equitable Sharing.

SNIP

A Justice official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss the attorney general’s motivation, said Holder “also believes that the new policy will eliminate any possibility that the adoption process might unintentionally incentivize unnecessary stops and seizures.”

This program was a huge incentive to what can only be called outright theft of private property by police authorities. It's actually hard to believe they got away with it for so long. But interestingly, the alleged anti-federal right (along with the pro-police center) had no problem with it. They get very angry about any kind of taxes on rich people but had no problem with police targeting innocent people and just taking everything they own to fund their own activities. Odd that.

One hopes the libertarians among us will give old Holder and Obama some kudos for this action. It's been easy for Democrats to let this stuff go for both political and economic reasons. It funds police and lets politicians look like they are tough on crime. Ending this is going to make police across the nation --- many of who already hate Holder and Obama --- very angry. Tough.

On Second Thought, Just Fire Them All

Digby:

I continue to be stunned at these police officers' lack of maturity and professionalism. I understand that they're upset at both the protests and the shootings of their fellows in NYC and that's fine. But their antics in the face of criticism proves in living color what we see in so many individual incidents: they don't just want respect, they want submission. They will brook no discussion and accept no accountability, have no use for psychology or patience because the weapons in their holsters should be sufficient to gain instant compliance.  We cannot call ourselves a free society as long as that is the case.

What Are We Teaching Our New Cops?

This week, 62 Kentuckians graduated from the State Police Academy. I am not familiar with the curriculum, but I hope in light of the nationwide increase in police brutality over the last few years that they were taught at least one non-violent technique for dealing with the public.

From Firedoglake:

- Police brutality occurs in San Francisco as officers use their illegitimate power to beat a civilian on his bicycle for breaking the law

- A 14 year old teenager is brutalized by police after being arrested for shoplifting

 Here's the video of the teenager. "Brutalized" is quite the euphemism for "beaten and then tased in the face."

Digby:

The alleged crime he committed that supposedly justified all this was shoplifting. This kid needs to learn that if you want to get away with stealing you need to be a white guy in a suit who steals millions. They never get tasered.

Kentucky State Police are revered in the Commonwealth. Mostly that's because in a state with 120 small-town county sheriffs, professional troopers have been the only thing standing between citizens and the corruption and violence of untrained deputies.

I would hate to see KSP degraded by arbitrary violence to the point that people can't trust them any more.

QOTD

Charles Pierce:

Ultimately, it is cruelty that is the real New Normal. We accept it every time we accept that cops can stop teenagers for "furtive movements," or when they respond to every unusual situation as though it were taking place atop Mount Suribachi. We accept it every time we accept that "the economy" is some faceless force over which we have no control, and that the plight of its victims are somehow the natural result of immutable natural laws, instead of the natural result of thousands of individual decisions, many of which were made down the marble halls not 10 feet from this keyboard, where the Congress is back to discuss, seriously, how a distant government could do such horrible things to its own citizens.

Community Policing Done So, So Wrong

To protect, serve and set new standards of counter-productiveness.

Digby, on the firefighter who was almost tazed because he waved at local police officers:

Such "disrespect" can cost you your life on the mean streets of many inner cities. But the police are supposed to be different. Nowadays, a whole lot of them have adopted this gangster ethos of demanding instant "respect" and total compliance. They just use a taser to do it instead of a gun. Homicide requires a whole lot more paperwork.

This isn't confined to police officers either. My husband was in a TSA security line at LAX earlier this week and got into a conversation with a women who told him she'd been harassed at a Canadian airport recently. He said to her that she should always comply with the TSA because they have a lot of power over individual citizens and it makes no sense to fight it. He was yanked out of the line by TSA agents and taken to a secure corner where they quizzed him about what he meant by saying that TSA has "power" over people. They went through every item in his carry on bags and he almost missed his plane. He tried to explain that he was only telling the woman that she should comply with their orders, but they were apparently upset at being characterized as people who might abuse their power. So they abused their power and harassed a citizen for saying something completely obvious.

This is creeping authoritarianism. We've got millions of people in America wearing uniforms and carrying some kind of government authority and we're all going to have to learn that they will not be disrespected, even if they are delusional idiots. No, it's not the end of the world and we're not being rounded up and sent to the gulag. But it's not exactly freedom and liberty either.

And fifty years later it's still the hippies with their organic gardens that really piss them off.

While the Seattle PD is showing remarkable common sense during Hempfest, down in Texas they're sending in paramilitary SWAT teams to put a stop to unauthorized okra:

A small organic farm in Arlington, Texas, was the target of a massive police action last week that included aerial surveillance, a SWAT raid and a 10-hour search.

Members of the local police raiding party had a search warrant for marijuana plants, which they failed to find at the Garden of Eden farm. But farm owners and residents who live on the property told a Dallas-Ft. Worth NBC station that the real reason for the law enforcement exercise appears to have been code enforcement. The police seized "17 blackberry bushes, 15 okra plants, 14 tomatillo plants ... native grasses and sunflowers," after holding residents inside at gunpoint for at least a half-hour, property owner Shellie Smith said in a statement. The raid lasted about 10 hours, she said.

Local authorities had cited the Garden of Eden in recent weeks for code violations, including "grass that was too tall, bushes growing too close to the street, a couch and piano in the yard, chopped wood that was not properly stacked, a piece of siding that was missing from the side of the house, and generally unclean premises," Smith's statement said. She said the police didn't produce a warrant until two hours after the raid began, and officers shielded their name tags so they couldn't be identified. According to ABC affiliate WFAA, resident Quinn Eaker was the only person arrested -- for outstanding traffic violations.

The city of Arlington said in a statement that the code citations were issued to the farm following complaints by neighbors, who were "concerned that the conditions" at the farm "interfere with the useful enjoyment of their properties and are detrimental to property values and community appearance." The police SWAT raid came after "the Arlington Police Department received a number of complaints that the same property owner was cultivating marijuana plants on the premises," the city's statement said. "No cultivated marijuana plants were located on the premises," the statement acknowledged.

Hey, these police agencies all have enough military gear to fight a small war. Do you think they aren't going to find reasons to use it?

This story about an ex marine officer testifying before his town council made the rounds this week and well... it's not exactly wrong:

"What we're doing here, and let's not kid about it, is we're building a domestic army and shrinking the military because the government is afraid of its own citizens ... "

"The last time more than 10 terrorists were in the same place at the same time was September 11th, and all these [armored] vehicles wouldn't have prevented it, nor would they have helped anybody."

"We're building an Army over here and I can't believe people aren't seeing it, is everybody blind?"

But what about the scourge of narco-terrorists growing illegal okra and blackberries, huh? What are we going to do about that?

This is how you do it right: 

See what happens when you legalize? Common sense, community and good humor.

by digby

Check out the bags of Doritos the Seattle Police Department is handing out to the Hempfest revelers:

That's called common sense community policing.

I can't go along with the Dark Side of the Moon thing though. It really must be heard at the highest volume possible.

H/T@GrahamKIRO7

 

The "Torturable Class"

I seriously doubt Chicago is unique - or even unusual - in this.

Liliana Segura at The Nation:

On January 25, 1990, the Chicago Reader, the free alternative weekly, published a cover story, nearly 20,000 words long, titled “House of Screams.” Written and reported over the course of a year by journalist John Conroy, the investigation exposed, in meticulous detail, a long and chilling history of abuse by police against suspects on the South Side of Chicago. At the Area 2 Violent Crimes Unit, Police Commander Jon Burge had overseen and participated in the systemic torture of an untold number of African-American men, dating back to the early 1970s. They had been beaten, burned against radiators, suffocated with plastic bags and, most disturbingly, had their genitals subjected to electric shocks. “Fun time” was how Burge referred to the electrocution sessions, which, Conroy would later reveal, drew on his experience as a military police officer in Vietnam.

Despite its bombshell revelations, the story did not spark immediate or widespread outrage. Even the local dailies failed to run with it. So over the next seventeen years, Conroy would write twenty-two more articles about Chicago’s police torture regime—stories that laid bare the extent of the abuse and decried the total impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators. Among those who knew about the torture was former Cook County State’s Attorney Richard Daley, sworn in as mayor months before “House of Screams” was published. Some fifty men claim to have been brutalized in the eight years he served as state’s attorney.) In 2003, out of concern that innocent men had been convicted and sentenced to die based on confessions that had been tortured out of them, Governor George Ryan famously emptied Illinois’s death row, commuting 167 sentences and pardoning four men.

SNIP

When I ask Conroy why he thinks there was not more accountability—or even outrage—over the years of brutality meted out against so many men, he echoes a line from his play, delivered by the lawyer for Otha Jeffries. “I think it’s that there’s a torturable class in this country,” he says. So revelation after revelation, “people just didn’t care.”

That goes for the media outside Chicago, too, which mostly ignored the story for years. “This is the biggest national police scandal of the past fifty years,” Conroy says, reminding me of the innocent men who landed on death row. “Corruption is one thing. This was attempted murder.”

Read the whole horrifying thing.

And that was decades before the Warren Terra militarized police forces across the country and President Smirky himself assured them that torture is the patriotic thing to do.

"Are You One of Those People?"

The ridiculous, counter-productive and democracy-destroying witch hunts of American muslims is far from over, much less free of long-term consequences, as The Nation documents in a special issue.

From Laila Al-Arian's article "When your father is accused of terrorism."

Aref, knowing nothing about the supposed missile sale, was asked to witness the loan payment. The informant spoke in code, using the word chaudry—a common South Asian surname—to refer to the missile. Aref was arrested and, in March 2007, sentenced to fifteen years in prison on terror charges, including support for a foreign terrorist organization and money laundering.

“It’s fabricated police work,” says Andrew Shryock, a University of Michigan professor, regarding these types of prosecutions using government informants. “And the disturbing thing is not that it produces arrests but that the public tolerates it.”

Aref’s case galvanized peace activists in Albany, who held vigils and wrote letters to the judge calling for Aref’s release. Among them was Steve Downs, a former attorney for New York state, who volunteered in his defense. The day after Aref’s conviction, he visited his client in prison. “He looked at me and said, ‘I want to fire you as my lawyer,’” Downs told me, smiling. “But he said, ‘I want to hire you as my brother.’ He said, ‘I don’t have any family in this country, and I need family more than I need lawyers.’”

Downs and the Muslim Solidarity Committee, as the mostly non-Muslim Albany activists called themselves, raised thousands of dollars to help cover the rent for Aref’s wife and four children. Downs and others also drove Aref’s children to visit their father in prison, fourteen hours away in Indiana.

“I’m not sure I would’ve had the guts to do any of this by myself,” Downs says of the activism around Aref’s case, which drew strength from the number of people involved. Now 70 and retired, Downs says his profession long discouraged him from involvement in political causes, so that for twenty-eight years, he was in a “cocoon.” Today, he is glad to have broken free of it.

“When I was 3 years old, my father died in World War II,” he recalls. “He was a Navy doctor. Later, I asked my mom, ‘Why did he die?’ She would say, ‘Well, there was this war—the Nazis came to power in Germany.’ I would ask, ‘How did Hitler come to power if he was so bad?’ And she would say, ‘Because good people who could have stopped him didn’t do anything.’

“A lot of time growing up, I was angry at good people who didn’t do anything,” Downs says. “Until one day, I realized I was one of those people.”

Real democracies aren't afraid of pluralism. Real democracies don't take their failures to solve big problems out on defenseless little people. Real democracies don't bully their own citizens.

Strip-searched for Drinking Beer

Note that no one involved in this blatant case of state-sanctioned sexual abuse of two children has been fired, much less arrested, charged, convicted and imprisoned.

Apparently that's because the guards were following orders, their supervisors didn't know what the guards were doing, state officials didn't know what the policy was and the department commissioner has been allowed to retire.

As a Kentucky taxpayer, I sincerely hope the parents of these molested teens take the state for millions.

Jennifer Hewlett at the Herald:

A federal judge has ruled that a Kentucky juvenile detention center's screening of two Perry County teen half-siblings while they were naked was unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guards against unreasonable search and seizure.

U.S. Senior District Judge Karl S. Forester made the ruling June 14 in a 23-page document that also addresses other legal issues in the case, which stems from the intake screenings of the two juveniles at the Breathitt Regional Juvenile Detention Center in 2009. The teens were jailed after being charged with underage drinking, charges that were later dismissed.

The parents of the Perry County teens filed suit against the two jail guards who conducted the screenings, Mitchell Gabbard and Rebecca Harvey; Breathitt detention center director Gary Sewell, superintendent Gary Drake and assistant superintendent Jeff Voyles; then-Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice commissioner J. Ronald Haws; and then-deputy state juvenile justice commissioner A. Hasan Davis.

The two were arrested for "public intoxication," a ridiculous charge that cops use as an excuse to grab and intimidate anyone they don't like.

At the very least, I hope this disabuses everyone of the notion that juvenile detention facilities are "kiddie jails." They are full-fledged prisons, complete with locked-down, windowless, solitary-confinement cells; mandatory silence and sexually predatious staff.

Perfectly Legal

Although this particular agency has suspended the practice in the face of publicity, there is neither law nor constitution to prevent any jurisdiction - including your friendly neighborhood jail - from using it any time it likes.

Digby:

When the Supreme Court ruled that police strip searches are legal and that all Americans who are taken into police custody should be prepared to submit to "visual inspection" I wonder if this is what they had in mind for women? From Kevin Gosztgola:

In the prison that operates under the umbrella of the Michigan Department of Corrections, women are forced to remove their clothing and spread the lips of their vaginas so that a guard can peer inside. Female prisoners are forced to do this after they meet with family members, religious workers, their lawyers, or anyone else who may visit them in prison.

Women who have been subjected to this depraved procedure have given voice in a letter submitted to the state’s Corrections Department. Rather than outline what guards in the facility do, here are a few descriptions from victims:

They place you in a chair. You are completely naked. I had the officer then tell me, “spread your pussy lips.” Then I had one tell me to put my heels on the chair and use my hands to open my lips. … I feel like I’m being prostituted by these officers … I am an abused woman, and every time this happens I feel completely lost again.

SNIP

That Michigan practice is appalling. But I'd guess it doesn't fall outside the boundaries the Supreme Court set for strip searches. So ladies, even if you aren't a prisoner, if you find yourself in police custody, don't be surprised if they do this to you too. These things are all about humiliation and domination --- breaking your spirit. If they are allowed to do it, and I suspect they are under Florence, they very likely will.

The ACLU says this is sexual assault by the state. But I'm pretty sure the Supreme Court just said that was ok. After all, they said that anyone, even someone who had committed no crime and was in police custody on a trivial charge such as running a red light or failing to pay a warrant for parking tickets --- or civil disobedience --- could be subject to stripping naked and undergoing the above described procedure.

While I agree that this sounds like sexual assault by the state, it's probably perfect legal.

Gosztola updates:

It should be made extremely clear. What was happening to these women was a human rights violation that the US government opposes when it is done to Afghan women. Yet, under the guise of public safety, the Michigan Department of Corrections was routinely committing human rights violations at the Huron Valley Correctional Facility. Someone should be held accountable and be fired or, perhaps, even face prosecution; but there is a culture of impunity for government officials that develop and enforce policies which result in the cruel or inhumane punishment of human beings. Justice for female prisoners who were traumatized is unlikely.

Still legal, still constitutional, still going on everywhere.

Ramparts Lives: LA Police Torture Occupiers

LA cops didn't suddenly start mistreating protesters out of the blue; obviously this is long-standing standard procedure for anyone who is not instantly obedient.

Ernest A. Canning at the Brad Blog:

Many of the individuals who were swept up by last week's LAPD raid on the Occupy LA encampment at Los Angeles City Hall were arrested even as they attempted to disperse in accordance with police directives, according to testimonials from some who were detained in the early morning hours of November 30th and held on misdemeanor charges for days after.

Their videotaped testimonials [some of which are posted below] both corroborate and reinforce the excessive force and post-arrest abuse charges detailed in our previous article on the Occupy LA raid, in which detainees charged that they were hand-cuffed behind their backs and left to languish inside L.A. County Sheriff's Department (LASD) buses for eight to nine hours without access to food, water, medicine, or toilets as they were left to urinate on themselves in their seats.

The details also suggest that these conditions were imposed upon innocent demonstrators who were the victims of indiscriminate, false arrests by law enforcement officials. Worse, one written account suggests the LAPD's misconduct included not only pillaging the encampment and police brutality, but even torture...

Read the whole horrifying, sickening thing.

Of All the Things to Waste Public Money On

The worst has to be police brutality against peaceful protesters exercising their First Amendment rights.

Jon Walker at Firedoglake speculates last week:

Watching the massive late night raids on the occupations at places like Oakland and New York City I’m left thinking, who is paying for all this?

These massive late night raids can’t be cheap. They involve dozens, perhaps hundreds of police officers, often brought in from other nearby jurisdictions. There just aren’t that many police on the graveyard shift, so the bulk of them must be getting paid costly overtime to work evictions in the middle of the night. I can also only assume renting police from other jurisdictions to work a late night shift must come with some significant additional costs.

In these bad economic times, cities and other local jurisdictions have been struggling hard to find funds to pay for even the most basic public services, including police. They have been forced to make extremely painful cuts at every level to stay within budget. They simply don’t have large pools of funds to spare.

Either cities like Oakland have decided using massive police force to break up peaceful demonstrations is worth wasting money that could have gone to fund needed city services like schools, public transit and infrastructure repair, or the cities are getting federal money from agencies like the Department of Homeland Security to pay for these military style crackdowns.

Neither of the two possibilities is good news, but I find it strange that all over the country several large cities simultaneously decided now is the moment to waste a huge amount of their limited budgets on expensive late night raids that require overwhelming police presence.

I don’t have the answer to the question yet, but I have my suspicions. I think the American people deserve to know exactly who is footing the bill for what appear to be nation-wide coordinated attacks on the occupy movement.

By this week, Kevin Gosztola had some data on how that unnecessary expense is being spun to turn taxpayers against Occupy:

The excessive and gratuitous use of police at Occupy protests, especially in New York and other large cities, has led a number of people to wonder how cities are paying for the police to patrol demonstrations and encampments. Now, with a report from AP circulating, those who despise the Occupy movement or have grown impatient with it have ammunition to lash out even more.

According to AP, the movement has cost “local taxpayers at least $13 million in police overtime and other municipal services.” AP finds the “heaviest financial burden has fallen upon law enforcement agencies tasked with monitoring marches and evicting protesters from outdoor camps. And the steepest costs by far piled up in New York City and Oakland, Calif., where police clashed with protesters on several occasions.”

The findings, AP concludes, are “more or less in line with the cost of policing major public events and emergencies.” Nonetheless, AP adds, “the price of the protests” is drawing the “ire” of taxpayers in cities. The report notes, “Cash-strapped police departments have cut overtime budgets, travel and training to respond to the recession. Nonetheless, city officials say they have no choice but to bring in extra officers or hold officers past their shifts to handle gatherings and marches in a way that protects free speech rights and public safety. In some cities, officials say the spending is eating into their overtime budgets and leaving less money for other public services.”

AP goes on to mention how money has been saved by cities. For example, in Des Moines, the parks department has saved money because Occupy Des Moines takes their garbage out and, when the first snow fell in Iowa, they shoveled the sidewalk. Protesters agreed to pay the “full cost of their electricity usage.” But the AP report follows that up with an example that suggests many of the occupations are not “good neighbors” at all.

The impetus of the report is that police resources are being strained by the continued assembling of citizens all over the country. In some cases, police forces are considering cutting back internally to absorb the costs. All this exercising of First Amendment rights is costing Americans because of “public safety” concerns and the need to “protect free speech rights.”

Attaching a dollar amount to the movement at a time when cities and states all over the country are facing debt can only turn Americans against the Occupy movement if Americans do not understand why so much taxpayer money is being expended. That may be of great help to a number of cities, which understand there is wide support for the camp so they have to watch how they contain and crack down on occupiers.

All of this raises a series of questions: Why should the New York Police Department (NYPD) be used to fortify Wall Street so casino capitalists who collapsed the economy in 2008 do not have to face protesting Americans? Why should the NYPD be used to mass a squadron of officers and police vehicles around any demonstration, which inevitably creates a crowd control issue that turns into a situation where NYPD officers beat or shove protesters and arrest those who do not budge when mistreated?

Why should taxpayers subsidize a massive police operation to evict peaceful protesters from a park when they have been there for nearly two months and have earned much support from New York City residents? Why should taxpayers have to foot the tab for police officers who improperly and coldly use pepper spray on protesters? Why should they have to pay for officers who fire off flash bang grenades in the midst of peaceful assemblies? Why should they have to pay for officers who slink back to avoid being spotted when they fire off a tear gas canister right at the head of an Iraq War veteran, who then goes to the hospital with a brain injury?

Why should they foot the bill for the pepper-spraying of an 84-year old woman, who becomes so disoriented from the spray that she has to be saved by an Iraq War veteran nearby who keeps her from falling over and being trampled? Why should taxpayers support the use of funds to violate freedom of the press by arresting journalists at demonstrations? Why should taxpayers pay for police officers that are going to brutalize pregnant women and give them a miscarriage? Why should taxpayers pay for police who stand around and seize and destroy property from citizens who are demonstrating, like books, tents, insulating materials, a food cart or even a truck?

Both city and state police in Albany have been reluctant to spend unnecessary amounts of resources on peaceful protesting. Albany police leaders, according to the Albany Times Union, were willing to hold off making arrests for the “low-level offense of trespassing, in part because of concern it could incite a riot or draw thousands of protesters in a backlash that could endanger police and the public.”

“We don’t have those resources, and these people were not causing trouble,” the official said. “The bottom line is the police know policing, not the governor and not the mayor.”

A city police source said his department also was reluctant to damage what he considers to be good community relations that have taken years to rebuild. In addition, the crowd included elderly people and many others who brought their children with them.

“There was a lot of discussion about how it would look if we started pulling people away from their kids and arresting them … and then what do we do with the children?” one officer said.

The Portland Police, which have been forceful in handling Occupy protests, have figured out there is a better way. The Oregonian reports the police “will be limiting police presence at Occupy Portland rallies.” Portland Police Chief Mike Reese said in a statement, “Officers will first ask protesters if they need police escort. If they don’t, they’ll be asked to self-police, and officers will respond only if there are complaints.”

It is true that there have been reports of incidents of crime at encampments. But consider the following: the NYPD was telling drunks to “take it to Zuccotti” or likely dropping off criminals at Zuccotti Park. Is this something taxpayers wish to be paying for? New York’s finest standing around and not arresting these people, which Bloomberg and others would characterize as “safety concerns”?

After visiting multiple occupations, I think any police force that finds is is not responsible for lawlessness or violent behavior in camps is grossly appalling. No camps oppose police arresting individuals whose crimes are making it difficult for them to occupy.

If the camps are expected to abide by city codes, ordinances and laws, then they most certainly deserve the protection of the police. Additionally, police should be working with organizers to police the area. Each camp has a security or safety team and can tell officers about what happens on a daily basis and who needs to be watched closely to prevent conflicts from escalating sharply.

No doubt, city leaders and state leaders will seize upon this report to justify the shut down of more camps in the country. They will promote this notion that the movement has made its point and been out for two months now and now it is time to pack up and go home (of course, many have no homes to go to; the camps are their home).

The First Amendment does not have an expiration date. It does not cease to protect citizens who dissent against their government because millions of dollars are spent. If cities or states cannot afford policing, that should not be blamed on Occupy protesters. It should be blamed on city and state governments for choosing to sign off on the asymmetric and expensive deployment of police for use in military-style operations to crackdown on the movement. It should be blamed on cities and states that refuse to respect and trust their own citizens and pay officers to babysit camps that are fully capable of calling police, firefighters or emergency medical services if they need assistance.

But even if every dime cities spend to violate citizens' constitutional rights could be justified, it's still nothing compared to how much money the crimes of the one percenters have cost and continue to cost the economy.

Zaid Jilani and Brad Johnson at ThinkProgress:

The AP piece does not provide the neccessary context to put this number into perspective. $13 million for policing of ongoing protests all over the country for two months is not a particularly large sum. For example, the 2004 Republican National Committee protests, which lasted for a single week and took place in a single location, cost $50 million to secure. A small tea party rally in November 2010 that attracted only a few dozen people cost $14,000, paid for by official congressional money.

The cost of securing these protests against economic inequality and political corruption also pales in comparison to one large figure: the wealth destroyed by Wall Street’s recession. The recession caused by Wall Street’s misdeeds destroyed $50 trillion of wealth globally by 2009, $20 trillion of that wealth in the United States alone. ThinkProgress has assembled the following chart to visualize these comparative costs:



Additionally, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost $13 million every 40 minutes this year, and the multibillionaire magnate Koch Brothers increase their wealth by $13 million every eleven hours.

None of this invalidates a discussion about the costs of securing the protests, but it does put it in context. Additionally, if the Associated Press wants to probe the costs of the demonstrations, it might also ask why police are using such expensive and heavy-handed tactics against demonstrators.

Finally, Teddy Partridge on how unnecessary all this expensive illegal policing really is:

Of course, those overtime expenses were necessary given the scary and unpredictable #Occupation the Portland Police Bureau was faced with, right? For an objective viewpoint, the reporter seeks out Mayoral ex-candidate, Police Chief Mike Reese, to justify his force’s huge overtime presence:

On the following Monday, Police Chief Mike Reese defended the police deployment. “In terms of keeping the peace, it was appropriate, and I don’t know how you put a dollar amount on that,” he said.

Next, though, we learn that a demonstration and march with no police presence turned out to require none after all (my bold):

The high costs stand in stark contrast to last weekend, when the bureau didn’t incur overtime as it changed course and decided not to provide police coverage for Occupy Portland’s march for universal health care, which remained peaceful.

So, the dollar amount Chief Reese can put on police overtime required to keep the peace when #Occupiers peaceably assemble to petition our government for redress of legitimate health care grievances is… ZERO. That makes #OccupyPortland’s point about Mayor Sam’s Deadline Countdown Party without really trying:

Occupy Portland protesters have said the massive police presence was unnecessary and a result of poor police management.

Lexington and Louisville's Occupations are far smaller than Portland or even Albany, and both cities' police forces seem to understand that treating them like criminals would be counter-productive in the extreme.

But if the one-percenters and their minions at Faux News establish a meme that Occupy causes budget cuts in city services, it will be used as an excuse by every city to try to destroy the protests once and for all.

The Price of Paramilitary Police

If the Occupy protests accomplish nothing else, they will be successful if they start a national debate about local police using military weapons and torture devices against American citizens who are peacefully protesting.

Digby:

What is that thing this NYPD officer is carrying today? TPM says it's reported to be a Long Range Acoustic device, aka LRAD.

In case you were wondering about the effects of an LRAD, read this report from the ACLU from last month:

The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania filed a federal lawsuit today on behalf of Karen Piper, a bystander who suffered permanent hearing loss after Pittsburgh police deployed a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) against protestors during the 2009 G-20 Summit. An LRAD emits harmful, pain-inducing sounds over long distances. Developed for use by the military, LRAD technology had never before been used against US civilians.

"Police departments should not be using weapons built for the military on civilian protesters," said Witold Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania "As this case shows, the LRAD cannot be controlled to prevent serious harm to innocent bystanders. Collateral harm to innocents may be justifiable in wartime, but not to quell protesters who overturned a couple of trash dumpsters.”

SNIP

"The intensity of being hit at close range by a high-pitched sound blast designed to deter pirate boats and terrorists at least a quarter mile away is indescribable. The sound vibrates through you and causes pain throughout your body, not only in the ears. I thought I might die," said Piper, now an English professor at the University of Missouri. "It is shocking that the LRAD device is being promoted for use on American citizens and the general public."

Yet another pain compliance device in use against American citizens. The good news is that the intense pain it causes anyone in the vicinity is "harmless." Except when it causes permanent damage.

I suppose everyone is different. I think I can handle pepper spray as hideous as it sounds. (Maybe not. I've been lucky enough not to have it happen to me.) Being tasered sounds horrifying. But this weapon would be unbearable to me with my sensitive ears. In fact, it would be torture. Which is what all this "pain compliance" technology really is.

But still, as a spokesman for the company said:

If you stand right next to it for several minutes, you could have hearing damage," he said. "But it's your choice."

See? You have a choice. You can just not protest. If you do, expect torture and possible permanent damage. That's what being free is all about.

As for the pepper spray that Lt. Pike at UC Davis has made so famous, Digby writes this:

This article called "Pepper Spray, Pain and Justice" from the Civil Liberties Monitoring Project in northern California on the use of pepper stray as a torture device gives all the details of this famous case. It has informed my thinking about tasers and other uses of "pain compliance" and its implications for a free society. It's not long and I urge you to read it all if this situation alarms you.

It tells the harrowing story that you see in that video up top, including the chilling statement by the police after they were done pepper spraying one of the girls directly in the face: "We're not torturing you anymore."

It asks the question:

Are these valid tactics for the DA's office to use? May the Sheriff and the DA single out forest activists for "special treatment" when they are arrested and charged? The argument for this would be that the protests are costly to the county, and in an effort to contain those costs by reducing the number of protesters, or to prevent nonviolent civil disobedience which is expensive to the government, the government may use its discretionary powers to make the experience these activists have with the criminal justice system as unpleasant and costly as possible. The use of pepper spray to torment activists who are nonviolently sitting-in can be seen as the latest and most extreme step in this campaign.

The difficulty with this approach is that it puts the Sheriff and the DA into the position of the judge. It metes out punishment -- pain, days in jail, costly trips to court, disruption of normal life -- without the bother of proving guilt. Did the Queen in Alice in Wonderland say, "First the sentence, then the trial"? Even children can see that this is backwards.

One would think so. At the time this was written, they assumed the case would be decided in 1998. As I wrote, it was finally decided in 2009. But a jury found for the activists.

Of course it's torture. It couldn't be more obvious. The question we have to ask ourselves if our society believes torturing of political dissidents is acceptable.

Nor is pepper spraying just the torture of temporary pain. Diane Sweet at Crooks and Liars:

The U.S. Army concluded in a 1993 Aberdeen Proving Ground study that pepper spray "is capable of producing mutagenic and carcinogenic effects, sensitization, cardiovascular and pulmonary toxicity, neurotoxicity, as well as possible human fatalities."

At The Nation, former Seattle Chief of Police Norm Stamper calls for an end to paramilitary police:

The cop in me supported the decision to clear the intersection. But the chief in me should have vetoed it. And he certainly should have forbidden the indiscriminate use of tear gas to accomplish it, no matter how many warnings we barked through the bullhorn.

My support for a militaristic solution caused all hell to break loose. Rocks, bottles and newspaper racks went flying. Windows were smashed, stores were looted, fires lighted; and more gas filled the streets, with some cops clearly overreacting, escalating and prolonging the conflict. The “Battle in Seattle,” as the WTO protests and their aftermath came to be known, was a huge setback—for the protesters, my cops, the community.

More than a decade later, the police response to the Occupy movement, most disturbingly visible in Oakland—where scenes resembled a war zone and where a marine remains in serious condition from a police projectile—brings into sharp relief the acute and chronic problems of American law enforcement. Seattle might have served as a cautionary tale, but instead, US police forces have become increasingly militarized, and it’s showing in cities everywhere: the NYPD “white shirt” coating innocent people with pepper spray, the arrests of two student journalists at Occupy Atlanta, the declaration of public property as off-limits and the arrests of protesters for “trespassing.”

The paramilitary bureaucracy and the culture it engenders—a black-and-white world in which police unions serve above all to protect the brotherhood—is worse today than it was in the 1990s. Such agencies inevitably view protesters as the enemy. And young people, poor people and people of color will forever experience the institution as an abusive, militaristic force—not just during demonstrations but every day, in neighborhoods across the country.

SNIP

There will always be situations—an armed and barricaded suspect, a man with a knife to his wife’s throat, a school-shooting rampage—that require disciplined, military-like operations. But most of what police are called upon to do, day in and day out, requires patience, diplomacy and interpersonal skills. I’m convinced it is possible to create a smart organizational alternative to the paramilitary bureaucracy that is American policing. But that will not happen unless, even as we cull “bad apples” from our police forces, we recognize that the barrel itself is rotten.

SNIP

It will not be easy. In fact, failure is assured if we lack the political will to win the support of police chiefs and their elected bosses, if we are unable to influence or neutralize police unions, if we don’t have the courage to move beyond the endless justifications for maintaining the status quo. But imagine the community and its cops united in the effort to responsibly “police” the Occupy movement.
Picture thousands of people gathered to press grievances against their government and the corporations, under the watchful, sympathetic protection of their partners in blue.

Mental Illness Still Earning Death by Taser

The less-publicized aspect of the paramilitary force a few big cities are using against the Occupy protesters is that throughout the country police are still managing to kill innocent, unthreatening citizens with tasers.

Digby, on a case from San Bernadino:

The use of tasers on the mentally ill is one sub-category of this controversy that really needs investigation. People who are in a delusional state cannot be expected to understand the orders that they comply. Indeed, they very likely will feel the horrible pain and struggle all the harder to get away from it. It's counterproductive to the alleged purpose of the intervention.

Here you have a situation in which there is no public safety issue. They could have called in mental health professionals to deal with it. Using pepper spray and electrical shocks on an already agitated schizophrenic was stupid. And it killed him.

I guess we are just supposed to see this as more "collateral damage" in the ongoing war against crime. And that's a direct result of the militarization of our police departments. Ex police chief Joseph McNamara addressed this dynamic in this op-ed:

Simply put, the police culture in our country has changed. An emphasis on "officer safety" and paramilitary training pervades today's policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn't shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed. Police in large cities formerly carried revolvers holding six .38-caliber rounds. Nowadays, police carry semi-automatic pistols with 16 high-caliber rounds, shotguns and military assault rifles, weapons once relegated to SWAT teams facing extraordinary circumstances. Concern about such firepower in densely populated areas hitting innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that the police are fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be heavily armed.

Yes, police work is dangerous, and the police see a lot of violence. On the other hand, 51 officers were slain in the line of duty last year, out of some 700,000 to 800,000 American cops. That is far fewer than the police fatalities occurring when I patrolled New York's highest crime precincts, when the total number of cops in the country was half that of today. Each of these police deaths and numerous other police injuries is a tragedy and we owe support to those who protect us. On the other hand, this isn't Iraq. The need to give our officers what they require to protect themselves and us has to be balanced against the fact that the fundamental duty of the police is to protect human life and that law officers are only justified in taking a life as a last resort.

"Officer safety" is the excuse for tasers --- even on elderly women at traffic stops and unruly children having tantrums. In fact, it's commonly used so that the officers can demand instant compliance from the citizens regardless of the circumstances. I'm certainly sympathetic to the idea that policing is a dangerous job. But the pursuit of officer safety to the exclusion of everything else is to create a world in which the bill of rights is an anachronistic abstraction.

Being a cop in a free society is a tough gig. I think they deserve all the early pensions and great benefits they get for doing it. Anyone would burn out early from a job like that. But giving them carte blanche to use pain devices on the citizens in order to gain instant compliance and avoid any kind of physical altercation can't be right. Over time that war on crime morphs into a war on citizens.

Read the whole thing.

"Take One Step Out of Your Comfort Zone"

She's 84 years old. She was pepper sprayed. She's not intimidated. She's energized.

Want to feel inspired? Watch this.

It's a Protest, Not a Picnic

Entrenched power will always respond to a broad-based threat to that power with overwhelming violence.

Allison Kilkenny at The Nation:

On Sunday afternoon, around twenty-five police in full riot gear stormed an abandoned car dealership on Franklin Street and arrested a group of demonstrators who had been occupying the building. The occupation was “not orchestrated by Occupy Chapel Hill,” according to a flyer handed out to passersby, but was rather an “experiment,” and an extension of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Wielding assault rifles, officers rushed the building at about 4:30 pm, and pointed those weapons at people standing outside, ordering them to put their faces on the ground.

SNIP

The raid at Chapel Hill illustrates a few interesting aspects that have become systemic to the entire police response to the Occupy movement.

First, there is the conflation of damage to property with “violence,” and it’s unclear how these “traps” or barricades actually damaged the property value of an already abandoned car dealership, but let’s set aside that vague accusation for the time being.

Even if the demonstrators were damaging property, “violence” is usually only considered dire when it’s directed at human beings, not at an abandoned car dealership. If society was to get really serious about “violence” applying to inanimate objects and the environment, then every multinational conglomerate on the face of the earth could be charged as being criminally liable.

Consider major companies that seek to seize private property under eminent domain laws. For example, right now in Nebraska lawmakers are debating tightening eminent domain rules for procuring land during discussions related to the proposed $7 billion Keystone XL oil pipeline. Here we have a major company, TransCanada Corp, proposing destroying property owners’ land, not to mention the environment. Put another way, it’s like dynamiting a billion car dealerships simultaneously. But since the criminals wear suits instead of bandanas across their faces, the police ignore such crimes.

Or ponder the major banks and financial institutions that treated the US economy like a casino over the past few decades. Chopping up crap mortgages and reselling them with stellar ratings resulted in millions of people losing their homes, which now sit on the market, unsold, rotting away. Some might consider that damage to property, too.

The moral of the story is it’s okay to damage property, as long it’s rich people doing the damage, they largely outsource the destruction, and the victims are poor.

Additionally, there are varying degrees of “property damage.” Shattering the window of a Starbucks with a trashcan is not the same as, say, trampling the grass of a park. Badly beating protesters for the crime of brown grass should not be allowed to exist as an official police policy without cities and towns across America first seriously discussing if they think that punishment fits the “crime.”

Second, Chapel Hill helped draw attention to the police state that not only permeates places like New York City and Oakland, but now also places like Chapel Hill, North Carolina, population 57,233 according to the 2010 census.

“It’s like Baghdad!” one Tweeter exclaimed when they saw a photo of police advancing on the former car dealership, assault rifles raised.

The perhaps subconscious implication is that this kind of rough police/military-like treatment is fine when the victims are poor, foreign brown people or maybe even domestic poor brown people, but not for the good, wholesome folk of a city like Chapel Hill.

Ask any Occupy Oakland or Occupy Wall Street protesters if police brutalize demonstrators and they’ll give you the war-torn smirk of a veteran deeply familiar with just how out of control the police state has gotten in this country.

Every seasoned protester has their story of mistreatment: being slapped, kicked, punched, shot with rubber bullets, tear gassed, pepper sprayed or verbally harassed by police dressed in full riot gear and equipped with dangerous weaponry that can land protesters in the hospital in sometimes critical condition, as we saw in the case of veteran Scott Olsen.

Right now, police across the country are permitted to abuse protesters, fairly accountability-free, because Wall Street activists are considered undesirables who need to be suppressed and marginalized.

In Oakland, numerous media outlets report that police routinely cover their badge numbers so they can declare open season on protesters without fear of retribution later. This, combined with the fact that OPD propels tear gas canisters at protesters with the same casual indifference of meter maids handing our parking tickets, means activists are in more danger than ever from the police, and at no other time has there been less chance for accountability.

Before the raid, the Chapel Hill occupiers had drawn up plans to transform the space into a place for civic engagement and public support, including a free store, kitchen, clinic, performance space, school, workshop, library and dormitory. Right before the arrests, the space was hosting a free yoga class.

“Anarchism” does not always imply shattered store windows and scary masked black blocs. Some anarchists base their beliefs in mutual support, sympathy, and solidarity, truly bizarre and foreign concepts to police armed to the teeth with really cool toys designed to violently crush protest. Many police forces would benefit from a course in Anarchism and learning the difference between a peaceful occupation and the black bloc kind.

As Occupy chapters continue to resist nonviolently, Americans are beginning to understand that the police no longer exist to protect and serve but instead to bully, intimidate and crush peaceful dissent. And the justice system, rather than hold the most powerful criminals on Wall Street accountable, aims its scope at the most meager “criminals,” the one inflicting negligible damage—not to human beings but to property.

Today is Occupy's two-month anniversary. It's just getting started. It has a long, long way to go, and a lot more police riots in its future.

It's a protest, not a picnic.