If we are focused on militarization of our nation's police
departments, we are missing the bigger picture. The growing violence
and the appearance of an armored division, even in many of our small
towns, is a result of a growing violent nature within our Corporate
Empire. Under the greedy desires of the Ruling Class, we are breeding
a nation of professional killers. From the games our children are
exposed to, and on through the conditioning by the TV cartoons and the
reading materials pushed by the mass media, we are twisting the
innocent minds of new born babes into violent, angry little puppets,
ready to serve their masters.
Perhaps you have not yet felt the boot of the Master's Robots. You
may live in a gated community, where the police stand guard protecting
you from the "rabble".
Or you may be one of those fortunate folk who still cling to a Middle
Class life style, living in a mostly White neighborhood, among "Your
Kind". You teach your young to keep their noses clean and they will
stay out of trouble...maybe. But more and more often our young are
being used for target practice, especially our children of Color.
But before we blame the police, or even our Masters, we need to look
in the mirror. We are allowing our minds to be dragged toward the
Gates of Hell. We do not need to go there. We do hold the final
power...the Power of the Masses.
If we don't like having our police force armed to the teeth, take away
their arms. Turn our police into Peace Keepers. Turn our Corporate
Empire into a democracy. Send our Ruling Masters straight to Hell.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/28/14, S. Kashdan <skashdan@scn.org> wrote:
> Do Cops Just Tase People for Fun Now?
>
>
>
> By Steven Rosenfeld [2]
>
>
>
> AlterNet [1], August 26, 2014 |
>
>
>
> http://www.alternet.org/print/civil-liberties/do-cops-just-tase-people-fun-now
>
>
>
> On the first Sunday in August, Brandon Ruff, an offduty sergeant with the
> Philadelphia Police Department, was given three guns by a friend who wanted
>
> to turn them in to the police under the city's no-questions-asked firearms
> policy. Little did Ruff know when he walked into a station at 6:30pm, that
> by midnight he would be assaulted by a half-dozen police officers using
> Tasers--stun guns delivering up to 50,000 volts--arrested, thrown in a cell,
>
> and put under a police investigation.
>
>
>
> "You are a piece of f**king sh*t, you are scum, and you are supervisor. You
>
> are a disgrace to me, this department and the 35th District. You do not
> belong on this job," a desk sergeant yelled at Ruff, after he produced his
> police ID, according to a federal civil rights lawsuit [3] filed by the
> officer on Monday, seeking damages and a court review of cops who use "their
>
> status as police officers to have persons falsely arrested, assaulted and
> [subject to] malicious prosecution and unlawfully searched... to achieve
> ends not reasonably related to their police duties."
>
>
>
> Excessive use of force by police is hardly new. But it is unusual when a
> police officer points the finger at abuses by fellow cops, as Ruff does in
> his lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania. When Ruff identified himself as a cop,
> one officer shouted back, "I'll fucking tase you," the lawsuit said. A
> half-dozen other officers then ambushed him as he stepped outside to make a
>
> telephone call, grabbing him, roughing him up, shocking him and finally
> arresting him.
>
>
>
> Ruff's suit was one of two filed in federal court Monday citing police
> brutality and Tasers. In his suit, Ruff said that Philadelphia police were
> "deliberately indifferent" to the need for "more or different" training,
> supervision, investigation and discipline in for "false arrest... [and]
> evidence planting." Ruff said the department also turned a blind eye to
> "police officers with emotional or psychological problems."
>
>
>
> The second federal lawsuit [4] filed Monday over Taser abuse, in San
> Bernardino County in southeast California, concerned eight deputy sheriffs
> who routinely tortured prisoners at a jail with Tasers, even sharing videos
>
> of the assaults for entertainment. The victim, Cesar Vazquez, was regularly
>
> attacked while working in the jail's kitchen. The lawsuit has even more
> graphic details than Ruff's cop-on-cop violence:
>
>
>
> Vazquez "was given a job within the [West Valley Detention] Center as a
> 'chow server;' in that job, Plaintiff was to possess greater privileges than
>
> other inmates, including telephone calls, television time, and freedom of
> movement within the Center," the suit said. "Soon after starting this job,
> Plaintiff was told by [San Bernadino County Sheriff Department Captain
> Robert] Escamilla and [Deputy Sherrif Russell] Kopasz that these two
> deputies used a Taser or other electroshock weapon on, or 'tased,' all chow
>
> servers as part of an 'initiation' process."
>
>
>
> "Escamilla and Kopasz then proceeded to place their weapons on the
> Plaintiff's
> upper thighs, and produced a shock to the Plaintiff's body, causing pain so
>
> intense that Plaintiff leapt to his feet; Escamilla and Kopasz each
> laughed," the suit said, noting that they tased Vazquez once a week or more.
>
> "On another occasion, while Plaintiff and other inmates were watching
> television, Escamilla approached them and said that he was going to hold a
> 'taser seminar,'" the suit continued. "Escamilla told Plaintiff to sit down
>
> so that the deputies could try to break the Plaintiff's 'record' of the
> number of electroshock weapons Plaintiff could endure at a time."
>
>
>
> The suit said that Vazquez "cooperated" with another string of taser
> assaults by [Deputy Sheriff Nicholas] Oakley "since Oakley used a threat of
>
> physical harm... which Plaintiff considered more serious than the possible
> tasing." The suit said another deputy sheriff, Andrew Cruz, "tased Plaintiff
>
> between 20 and 30 times... while housed at the facility," between March and
>
> December 2013.
>
>
>
> Both lawsuits say a range of constitutional rights were violated, starting
> with freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, and due judicial process.
> The California suit seeks $30 million in damages; the Philadelphia suit
> doesn't specify a figure, but calls on the court to look at the
> "psychological problems" among officers using Tasers.
>
>
>
> AlterNet has long documented [5] abusive policing and misuse of Tasers.
> Civil liberties groups such as the New York Civil Liberties Union have
> issued reports on police misuse of Tasers. In late 2011, the NYCLU found [6]
>
> that in 75 percent of incidents where New York police had used Tasers, the
> cops issued no verbal warning. In only 15 percent of incidents involving
> Taser use, the target was "armed or thought to be armed," NYCLU found.
>
>
>
> On Tuesday, the San Bernardino branch of the NAACP held [7] a press
> conference with the widow of Dante Parker, a 36-year-old African-American
> man who was tasered by county sheriff deputies on August 12 and later died
> at a hospital. The NAACP was calling on the federal government to take over
>
> the investigation into Parker's death, as the Department of Justice is doing
>
> with Michael Brown's killing in Ferguson, MO.
>
>
>
> "We are asking for transparent accountability as to what happened to Mr.
> Parker's encounter with the San Bernardino County Sheriff's deputies and how
>
> and why did Mr. Parker die in their custody," Samuel Carl Jr., Victor Valley
>
> NAACP president, said [7]. "While this instance regarding Mr. Parker's death
>
> is heartbreaking and all the questions and answers have yet to be known, we
>
> also stand here today with the realization that African-Americans are dying
>
> at the hands of those sworn to protect and serve the community in record
> numbers."
>
>
>
> The family's lawyer told [7] the San Bernardino Sun that "the evidence will
>
> show in this case that this did not happen as the deputies described it."
> The newspaper cited remarks by his widow, Bianca Carlisle Parker, who is
> left with five children:
>
>
>
> Bianca Parker said since her husband's death, her youngest son, 6-year-old
> Dan'te Parker, has asked every morning "Why all black men have to die?"
>
>
>
> "He was our provider, he was the rock of our family," she said, beginning to
>
> sob. "And I don't want to go through life being a bitter person but I feel
> myself having a whole bunch of anger and I'm not an angry person. I'm very
> forgiving, and it's not right. He taught me how to be a better person. He
> taught me how to not be prideful. He taught me how to apologize to people.
> We've known each other since we were 13. This is not just some dude off the
>
> street. He was a loving, caring father."
>
>
>
> The more one looks for examples of police brutality and excessive weapon
> use, the more one finds. George Curry, editor in chief of the National
> Newspaper Publishers Association News Service, wrote [8] after Michael
> Brown's
> killing that estimates based on incomplete reporting by police agencies
> across America suggest that white police are killing African Americans at a
>
> much higher rate than is admitted.
>
>
>
> "According to stats compiled by the U.S. Department of Justice, an unarmed
> African American died at the hands of an armed white police officer at the
> rate of nearly two per week from 2005 to 2012. Over that 8-year-period, 400
>
> police killings were reported per year. White officers killed a black
> person, on average, 96 times per year.
>
>
>
> "As bad as those figures are, they grossly understate the problem. The FBI
> statistics are based on the voluntary reporting of local law enforcement
> jurisdictions. Currently, approximately 750 of 17,000 law enforcement
> agencies regularly report their figures to the FBI. That means if the ratio
>
> holds true for all 17,000 agencies, the annual 96 black deaths at the hands
>
> of white cops could be as high as 2,170 a year or almost 42 (41.73) per
> week--nearly six per day (5.94).
>
>
>
> Curry said that a conservative estimate--based on cutting those numbers in
> half--would still mean three deaths at police hands daily. Of course, not
> every person shocked with a Taser dies. But police agencies across America
> certainly know that Tasers can be very dangerous, if not fatal.
>
>
>
> In March, San Francisco police responded to a report of a young man with a
> Taser in a city park in a neighborhood that's become a Silicon Valley
> bedroom community. Police ended up shooting and killing Alex Nieto, 28, in
> an incident that prompted his family to file a federal civil rights lawsuit
>
> [9] against the city this past Friday.
>
>
>
> "In the aftermath of the incident, the City and County of San Francisco
> ('CCSF') and the involved Officers claimed Alex defied Officers' orders and
>
> pointed a taser at them," the suit said. "To date, CCSF has refused to
> release the involved Officers' names. Instead, CCSF has engaged in a media
> campaign to besmirch Alex's reputation as a well known San Francisco
> resident who never sustained a single arrest."
>
>
>
> On Monday, the media covered the funeral of Michael Brown. The same day, two
>
> federal lawsuits were filed on different ends of the country, including one
>
> by a police officer, saying that police are using tasers to unnecessarily
> assault civilians and torture prisoners.
>
>
>
> On Tuesday, in the same county where a Latino man was mercilessly attacked
> by sheriff's deputies, the NAACP called on the FBI to take over the
> investigation of yet another police killing involving excessive force and
> Tasers. That same day in Georgia, the lawyer for the family of a man who
> died in April after being tased 13 times held a press conference saying [10]
>
> police didn't follow their own rules for using tasers, prompting the police
>
> to say that man, Gregory Towns, died from other causes.
>
>
>
> And in San Francisco, Alex Nieto's family is still waiting for answers about
>
> why their son was killed by police.
>
>
>
> [11]
>
>
>
> See more stories tagged with:
>
>
>
> tasers [12],
>
>
>
> police brutality [13],
>
>
>
> police killings by Tasers [14],
>
>
>
> naacp [15],
>
>
>
> San Bernardino Sheriffs and Dante Parker [16],
>
>
>
> San Bernadino Sheriffs and Cesar Vazquez [17],
>
>
>
> Philadelphia Police Sgt. Brandon Ruff [18],
>
>
>
> michael brown [19],
>
>
>
> Alex Nieto and San Francisco Police [20]
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Source URL:
> http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/do-cops-just-tase-people-fun-now
>
>
>
> Links:
>
>
>
> [1] http://alternet.org
>
>
>
> [2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/steven-rosenfeld
>
>
>
> [3] http://www.courthousenews.com/2014/08/26/70754.htm
>
>
>
> [4] http://www.courthousenews.com/2014/08/26/70763.htm
>
>
>
> [5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/taser-abuse
>
>
>
> [6]
> http://www.nyclu.org/news/nyclu-analysis-finds-misuse-of-tasers-police-across-ny-state
>
>
>
> [7]
> http://www.sbsun.com/government-and-politics/20140819/naacp-calls-for-accountability-in-dante-parkers-police-custody-death
>
>
>
> [8]
> http://www.stlamerican.com/news/columnists/guest_columnists/article_00fb7d1e-27dd-11e4-bc3a-001a4bcf887a.html
>
>
>
> [9]
> http://www.scribd.com/doc/237546801/Refugio-Nieto-and-Elvira-Nieto-v-City-and-County-of-San-Francisco-et-al-8-22-2014
>
>
>
> [10]
> http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/08/27/georgia-cops-fired-taser-13-times-as-a-cattle-prod-to-make-tired-man-walk-before-he-died/
>
>
>
> [11] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on Do Cops Just Tase
> People for Fun Now?
>
>
>
> [12] http://www.alternet.org/tags/tasers
>
>
>
> [13] http://www.alternet.org/tags/police-brutality
>
>
>
> [14] http://www.alternet.org/tags/police-killings-tasers
>
>
>
> [15] http://www.alternet.org/tags/naacp
>
>
>
> [16] http://www.alternet.org/tags/san-bernardino-sheriffs-and-dante-parker
>
>
>
> [17] http://www.alternet.org/tags/san-bernadino-sheriffs-and-cesar-vazquez
>
>
>
> [18] http://www.alternet.org/tags/philadelphia-police-sgt-brandon-ruff
>
>
>
> [19] http://www.alternet.org/tags/michael-brown
>
>
>
> [20] http://www.alternet.org/tags/alex-nieto-and-san-francisco-police
>
>
>
> [21] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blind-Democracy mailing list
> Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
> https://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
>
Friday, August 29, 2014
The Courage to Disarm
We need more articles such as this one. But how do we move them into
the Corporate Media? While so much of our concern is regarding the
strangle hold by the international oil cartels, and rightfully so, we
forget that what keeps them in power is the weapons industry. Every
nation, every cluster of rebels, and even our town law enforcements
are armed to the teeth. The only possible outcome is Murder...mass
murder.
How has it come that the multitude is held captive and led around by a
small band of greedy, self-serving bullies? They are driving us like
cattle over a cliff of no return. Not only ending the Human Race, but
all innocent life on this Planet Earth.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/28/14, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> The Courage to Disarm
> Published on
> Thursday, August 28, 2014
> by
> Common Dreams
> The Courage to Disarm
> by
> Robert C. Koehler
>
> (Photo: Face-to-Face)
> The Ferguson tragedy, like all those that preceded it and all that will
> follow - involving the trivial and panicky use of lethal force, by the
> police or anyone else - stirs up questions the social status quo doesn't
> dare face.
> My sister, Sue Melcher, put it this way: "I find myself also nauseated that
> another issue never seems to enter the discussion: the issue that a highly
> trained officer could make such a mistake with a gun demonstrates that just
> having the weapon present increased the danger of the situation. Had the
> citizens been armed, how many more casualties could there have been? None
> of
> us is 'healthy' enough to be trusted to use lethal force wisely - and is
> that even possible?"
> The "wise" use of lethal force . . .
> We've wrapped our global civilization around the certainty that we
> understand and revere life in all its vastness and mystery so completely
> that we know when to cut it short, indeed, that we - those of us who are
> officially sanctioned good guys - have a right to cut it short in, it would
> seem, an ever-widening array of circumstances. In so doing, we allegedly
> make life better for the social whole. This is called militarism. To keep
> this profitable lie going, we refuse to look deeply at its consequences.
> When we inflict death on distant cultures, at the sterile remove that
> modern
> weapons grant us, we can avoid all but the most cursory awareness of the
> consequences of our actions. But when we do it at home, it's not always so
> easy.
> Ferguson, Ferguson. A community - and a nation - erupted in agony at the
> hellish absurdity of Michael Brown's killing. One of the deeper, darker
> questions concealed in the maelstrom of rage and grief of Ferguson is this
> one: What if Officer Darren Wilson had not been armed when he told the two
> teenagers to get out of the street? What if the police force that employed
> him knew of, and practiced, effective, nonlethal forms of keeping order in
> the community (and did not regard the people it was "protecting" as the
> enemy)? This is not a simple question, but it has a simple answer. Michael
> Brown would be alive and Darren Wilson would not be in hiding.
> But no one is asking it because the popular imagination doesn't even
> entertain the possibility that such methods exist - or can be created.
> I ask this question now not to toss a superficial answer or two at the
> national and global violence epidemic we're caught in but to establish,
> first of all, the idea that violence has consequences and, furthermore,
> that
> having lethal force at one's fingertips also has consequences. "None of us
> is 'healthy' enough to be trusted to use lethal force wisely," Sue wrote.
> This is true if only because such power can always be wrested away from us,
> and knowing this is bound to bring an intensified level of panic into
> someone's decision-making process - even a trained professional's.
> The demand for police accountability that the Ferguson tragedy has
> unleashed
> is a demand for public scrutiny of an officer's state of mind when he makes
> the decision to use lethal force. At present, such accountability is murky,
> contained as it is within the police and legal community. Most likely,
> these
> communities will protect their own and cut officers slack for acting out of
> panic.
> Consider what Michael Bell learned during his campaign for police
> accountability. Bell, a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force
> whose 21-year-old son was killed by a police officer in Kenosha, Wis., in
> 2004, eventually won a wrongful death lawsuit in the incident and used the
> $1.75 million settlement to pursue a campaign for stricter police
> accountability in Wisconsin.
> Writing recently in Politico, Bell noted the results of the campaign's
> research: "In 129 years since police and fire commissions were created in
> the state of Wisconsin, we could not find a single ruling by a police
> department, an inquest or a police commission that a shooting was
> unjustified."
> What concerns me about this isn't so much the protection of police officers
> who use lethal force unnecessarily as the protection of lethal force
> itself.
> This is what gets off scot free time and again, in shooting after shooting,
> and therefore remains unquestioned as a necessary part of social order. If
> the consequences of lethal force were subjected to objective scrutiny, I
> believe we'd be looking for alternatives with far more seriousness.
> Bell's son, for instance, was killed in the course of a routine traffic
> stop. According to the police report, one officer screamed that his gun had
> been grabbed and a second officer shot the young man in the head, "sticking
> the gun so close against his temple that he left a muzzle imprint."
> Because the Bell family hired a private investigator, they learned details
> of their son's killing independently of the legal system, e.g., "that the
> officer who thought his gun was being grabbed in fact had caught it on a
> broken car mirror," Bell wrote. In other words, a minor misperception
> escalated instantly into a fatal shooting, ending a young man's life and
> inflicting a lifetime of grief on those who loved him. Not only that, it
> shattered the life of at least one of the officers involved. The officer
> who
> screamed that his gun had been grabbed committed suicide six years later.
> Violence explodes in every direction. According to the Badge of Life
> website, U.S. police officers commit suicide at a rate of 17 per 100,000
> officers, well above the rate of the general public and close to that of
> the
> U.S. military. It's also well above the rate of officers who are killed in
> the line of duty.
> "Particularly startling in the study was the finding that not a single
> suicide in 2008 (or 2009) was ever attributed to police work," the site
> notes. "While police departments announce that law enforcement is a 'highly
> stressful, traumatic job,' they prefer to place the blame for a suicide on
> the family or on the officer for having some kind of 'personal problem.'"
> Lethal force gets off scot free.
> As militarization of the police escalates and our brutal wars for profit
> come home to haunt us, the time has come to face the violence we bring on
> one another in the name of social order. The time has come to find the
> courage to disarm.
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
> License
> The Courage to Disarm
> Published on
> Thursday, August 28, 2014
> by
> Common Dreams
> The Courage to Disarm
> by
> Robert C. Koehler
>
> (Photo: Face-to-Face)
> The Ferguson tragedy, like all those that preceded it and all that will
> follow - involving the trivial and panicky use of lethal force, by the
> police or anyone else - stirs up questions the social status quo doesn't
> dare face.
> My sister, Sue Melcher, put it this way: "I find myself also nauseated that
> another issue never seems to enter the discussion: the issue that a highly
> trained officer could make such a mistake with a gun demonstrates that just
> having the weapon present increased the danger of the situation. Had the
> citizens been armed, how many more casualties could there have been? None
> of
> us is 'healthy' enough to be trusted to use lethal force wisely - and is
> that even possible?"
> The "wise" use of lethal force . . .
> We've wrapped our global civilization around the certainty that we
> understand and revere life in all its vastness and mystery so completely
> that we know when to cut it short, indeed, that we - those of us who are
> officially sanctioned good guys - have a right to cut it short in, it would
> seem, an ever-widening array of circumstances. In so doing, we allegedly
> make life better for the social whole. This is called militarism. To keep
> this profitable lie going, we refuse to look deeply at its consequences.
> When we inflict death on distant cultures, at the sterile remove that
> modern
> weapons grant us, we can avoid all but the most cursory awareness of the
> consequences of our actions. But when we do it at home, it's not always so
> easy.
> Ferguson, Ferguson. A community - and a nation - erupted in agony at the
> hellish absurdity of Michael Brown's killing. One of the deeper, darker
> questions concealed in the maelstrom of rage and grief of Ferguson is this
> one: What if Officer Darren Wilson had not been armed when he told the two
> teenagers to get out of the street? What if the police force that employed
> him knew of, and practiced, effective, nonlethal forms of keeping order in
> the community (and did not regard the people it was "protecting" as the
> enemy)? This is not a simple question, but it has a simple answer. Michael
> Brown would be alive and Darren Wilson would not be in hiding.
> But no one is asking it because the popular imagination doesn't even
> entertain the possibility that such methods exist - or can be created.
> I ask this question now not to toss a superficial answer or two at the
> national and global violence epidemic we're caught in but to establish,
> first of all, the idea that violence has consequences and, furthermore,
> that
> having lethal force at one's fingertips also has consequences. "None of us
> is 'healthy' enough to be trusted to use lethal force wisely," Sue wrote.
> This is true if only because such power can always be wrested away from us,
> and knowing this is bound to bring an intensified level of panic into
> someone's decision-making process - even a trained professional's.
> The demand for police accountability that the Ferguson tragedy has
> unleashed
> is a demand for public scrutiny of an officer's state of mind when he makes
> the decision to use lethal force. At present, such accountability is murky,
> contained as it is within the police and legal community. Most likely,
> these
> communities will protect their own and cut officers slack for acting out of
> panic.
> Consider what Michael Bell learned during his campaign for police
> accountability. Bell, a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force
> whose 21-year-old son was killed by a police officer in Kenosha, Wis., in
> 2004, eventually won a wrongful death lawsuit in the incident and used the
> $1.75 million settlement to pursue a campaign for stricter police
> accountability in Wisconsin.
> Writing recently in Politico, Bell noted the results of the campaign's
> research: "In 129 years since police and fire commissions were created in
> the state of Wisconsin, we could not find a single ruling by a police
> department, an inquest or a police commission that a shooting was
> unjustified."
> What concerns me about this isn't so much the protection of police officers
> who use lethal force unnecessarily as the protection of lethal force
> itself.
> This is what gets off scot free time and again, in shooting after shooting,
> and therefore remains unquestioned as a necessary part of social order. If
> the consequences of lethal force were subjected to objective scrutiny, I
> believe we'd be looking for alternatives with far more seriousness.
> Bell's son, for instance, was killed in the course of a routine traffic
> stop. According to the police report, one officer screamed that his gun had
> been grabbed and a second officer shot the young man in the head, "sticking
> the gun so close against his temple that he left a muzzle imprint."
> Because the Bell family hired a private investigator, they learned details
> of their son's killing independently of the legal system, e.g., "that the
> officer who thought his gun was being grabbed in fact had caught it on a
> broken car mirror," Bell wrote. In other words, a minor misperception
> escalated instantly into a fatal shooting, ending a young man's life and
> inflicting a lifetime of grief on those who loved him. Not only that, it
> shattered the life of at least one of the officers involved. The officer
> who
> screamed that his gun had been grabbed committed suicide six years later.
> Violence explodes in every direction. According to the Badge of Life
> website, U.S. police officers commit suicide at a rate of 17 per 100,000
> officers, well above the rate of the general public and close to that of
> the
> U.S. military. It's also well above the rate of officers who are killed in
> the line of duty.
> "Particularly startling in the study was the finding that not a single
> suicide in 2008 (or 2009) was ever attributed to police work," the site
> notes. "While police departments announce that law enforcement is a 'highly
> stressful, traumatic job,' they prefer to place the blame for a suicide on
> the family or on the officer for having some kind of 'personal problem.'"
> Lethal force gets off scot free.
> As militarization of the police escalates and our brutal wars for profit
> come home to haunt us, the time has come to face the violence we bring on
> one another in the name of social order. The time has come to find the
> courage to disarm.
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
> License
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blind-Democracy mailing list
> Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
> https://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
>
the Corporate Media? While so much of our concern is regarding the
strangle hold by the international oil cartels, and rightfully so, we
forget that what keeps them in power is the weapons industry. Every
nation, every cluster of rebels, and even our town law enforcements
are armed to the teeth. The only possible outcome is Murder...mass
murder.
How has it come that the multitude is held captive and led around by a
small band of greedy, self-serving bullies? They are driving us like
cattle over a cliff of no return. Not only ending the Human Race, but
all innocent life on this Planet Earth.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/28/14, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> The Courage to Disarm
> Published on
> Thursday, August 28, 2014
> by
> Common Dreams
> The Courage to Disarm
> by
> Robert C. Koehler
>
> (Photo: Face-to-Face)
> The Ferguson tragedy, like all those that preceded it and all that will
> follow - involving the trivial and panicky use of lethal force, by the
> police or anyone else - stirs up questions the social status quo doesn't
> dare face.
> My sister, Sue Melcher, put it this way: "I find myself also nauseated that
> another issue never seems to enter the discussion: the issue that a highly
> trained officer could make such a mistake with a gun demonstrates that just
> having the weapon present increased the danger of the situation. Had the
> citizens been armed, how many more casualties could there have been? None
> of
> us is 'healthy' enough to be trusted to use lethal force wisely - and is
> that even possible?"
> The "wise" use of lethal force . . .
> We've wrapped our global civilization around the certainty that we
> understand and revere life in all its vastness and mystery so completely
> that we know when to cut it short, indeed, that we - those of us who are
> officially sanctioned good guys - have a right to cut it short in, it would
> seem, an ever-widening array of circumstances. In so doing, we allegedly
> make life better for the social whole. This is called militarism. To keep
> this profitable lie going, we refuse to look deeply at its consequences.
> When we inflict death on distant cultures, at the sterile remove that
> modern
> weapons grant us, we can avoid all but the most cursory awareness of the
> consequences of our actions. But when we do it at home, it's not always so
> easy.
> Ferguson, Ferguson. A community - and a nation - erupted in agony at the
> hellish absurdity of Michael Brown's killing. One of the deeper, darker
> questions concealed in the maelstrom of rage and grief of Ferguson is this
> one: What if Officer Darren Wilson had not been armed when he told the two
> teenagers to get out of the street? What if the police force that employed
> him knew of, and practiced, effective, nonlethal forms of keeping order in
> the community (and did not regard the people it was "protecting" as the
> enemy)? This is not a simple question, but it has a simple answer. Michael
> Brown would be alive and Darren Wilson would not be in hiding.
> But no one is asking it because the popular imagination doesn't even
> entertain the possibility that such methods exist - or can be created.
> I ask this question now not to toss a superficial answer or two at the
> national and global violence epidemic we're caught in but to establish,
> first of all, the idea that violence has consequences and, furthermore,
> that
> having lethal force at one's fingertips also has consequences. "None of us
> is 'healthy' enough to be trusted to use lethal force wisely," Sue wrote.
> This is true if only because such power can always be wrested away from us,
> and knowing this is bound to bring an intensified level of panic into
> someone's decision-making process - even a trained professional's.
> The demand for police accountability that the Ferguson tragedy has
> unleashed
> is a demand for public scrutiny of an officer's state of mind when he makes
> the decision to use lethal force. At present, such accountability is murky,
> contained as it is within the police and legal community. Most likely,
> these
> communities will protect their own and cut officers slack for acting out of
> panic.
> Consider what Michael Bell learned during his campaign for police
> accountability. Bell, a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force
> whose 21-year-old son was killed by a police officer in Kenosha, Wis., in
> 2004, eventually won a wrongful death lawsuit in the incident and used the
> $1.75 million settlement to pursue a campaign for stricter police
> accountability in Wisconsin.
> Writing recently in Politico, Bell noted the results of the campaign's
> research: "In 129 years since police and fire commissions were created in
> the state of Wisconsin, we could not find a single ruling by a police
> department, an inquest or a police commission that a shooting was
> unjustified."
> What concerns me about this isn't so much the protection of police officers
> who use lethal force unnecessarily as the protection of lethal force
> itself.
> This is what gets off scot free time and again, in shooting after shooting,
> and therefore remains unquestioned as a necessary part of social order. If
> the consequences of lethal force were subjected to objective scrutiny, I
> believe we'd be looking for alternatives with far more seriousness.
> Bell's son, for instance, was killed in the course of a routine traffic
> stop. According to the police report, one officer screamed that his gun had
> been grabbed and a second officer shot the young man in the head, "sticking
> the gun so close against his temple that he left a muzzle imprint."
> Because the Bell family hired a private investigator, they learned details
> of their son's killing independently of the legal system, e.g., "that the
> officer who thought his gun was being grabbed in fact had caught it on a
> broken car mirror," Bell wrote. In other words, a minor misperception
> escalated instantly into a fatal shooting, ending a young man's life and
> inflicting a lifetime of grief on those who loved him. Not only that, it
> shattered the life of at least one of the officers involved. The officer
> who
> screamed that his gun had been grabbed committed suicide six years later.
> Violence explodes in every direction. According to the Badge of Life
> website, U.S. police officers commit suicide at a rate of 17 per 100,000
> officers, well above the rate of the general public and close to that of
> the
> U.S. military. It's also well above the rate of officers who are killed in
> the line of duty.
> "Particularly startling in the study was the finding that not a single
> suicide in 2008 (or 2009) was ever attributed to police work," the site
> notes. "While police departments announce that law enforcement is a 'highly
> stressful, traumatic job,' they prefer to place the blame for a suicide on
> the family or on the officer for having some kind of 'personal problem.'"
> Lethal force gets off scot free.
> As militarization of the police escalates and our brutal wars for profit
> come home to haunt us, the time has come to face the violence we bring on
> one another in the name of social order. The time has come to find the
> courage to disarm.
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
> License
> The Courage to Disarm
> Published on
> Thursday, August 28, 2014
> by
> Common Dreams
> The Courage to Disarm
> by
> Robert C. Koehler
>
> (Photo: Face-to-Face)
> The Ferguson tragedy, like all those that preceded it and all that will
> follow - involving the trivial and panicky use of lethal force, by the
> police or anyone else - stirs up questions the social status quo doesn't
> dare face.
> My sister, Sue Melcher, put it this way: "I find myself also nauseated that
> another issue never seems to enter the discussion: the issue that a highly
> trained officer could make such a mistake with a gun demonstrates that just
> having the weapon present increased the danger of the situation. Had the
> citizens been armed, how many more casualties could there have been? None
> of
> us is 'healthy' enough to be trusted to use lethal force wisely - and is
> that even possible?"
> The "wise" use of lethal force . . .
> We've wrapped our global civilization around the certainty that we
> understand and revere life in all its vastness and mystery so completely
> that we know when to cut it short, indeed, that we - those of us who are
> officially sanctioned good guys - have a right to cut it short in, it would
> seem, an ever-widening array of circumstances. In so doing, we allegedly
> make life better for the social whole. This is called militarism. To keep
> this profitable lie going, we refuse to look deeply at its consequences.
> When we inflict death on distant cultures, at the sterile remove that
> modern
> weapons grant us, we can avoid all but the most cursory awareness of the
> consequences of our actions. But when we do it at home, it's not always so
> easy.
> Ferguson, Ferguson. A community - and a nation - erupted in agony at the
> hellish absurdity of Michael Brown's killing. One of the deeper, darker
> questions concealed in the maelstrom of rage and grief of Ferguson is this
> one: What if Officer Darren Wilson had not been armed when he told the two
> teenagers to get out of the street? What if the police force that employed
> him knew of, and practiced, effective, nonlethal forms of keeping order in
> the community (and did not regard the people it was "protecting" as the
> enemy)? This is not a simple question, but it has a simple answer. Michael
> Brown would be alive and Darren Wilson would not be in hiding.
> But no one is asking it because the popular imagination doesn't even
> entertain the possibility that such methods exist - or can be created.
> I ask this question now not to toss a superficial answer or two at the
> national and global violence epidemic we're caught in but to establish,
> first of all, the idea that violence has consequences and, furthermore,
> that
> having lethal force at one's fingertips also has consequences. "None of us
> is 'healthy' enough to be trusted to use lethal force wisely," Sue wrote.
> This is true if only because such power can always be wrested away from us,
> and knowing this is bound to bring an intensified level of panic into
> someone's decision-making process - even a trained professional's.
> The demand for police accountability that the Ferguson tragedy has
> unleashed
> is a demand for public scrutiny of an officer's state of mind when he makes
> the decision to use lethal force. At present, such accountability is murky,
> contained as it is within the police and legal community. Most likely,
> these
> communities will protect their own and cut officers slack for acting out of
> panic.
> Consider what Michael Bell learned during his campaign for police
> accountability. Bell, a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force
> whose 21-year-old son was killed by a police officer in Kenosha, Wis., in
> 2004, eventually won a wrongful death lawsuit in the incident and used the
> $1.75 million settlement to pursue a campaign for stricter police
> accountability in Wisconsin.
> Writing recently in Politico, Bell noted the results of the campaign's
> research: "In 129 years since police and fire commissions were created in
> the state of Wisconsin, we could not find a single ruling by a police
> department, an inquest or a police commission that a shooting was
> unjustified."
> What concerns me about this isn't so much the protection of police officers
> who use lethal force unnecessarily as the protection of lethal force
> itself.
> This is what gets off scot free time and again, in shooting after shooting,
> and therefore remains unquestioned as a necessary part of social order. If
> the consequences of lethal force were subjected to objective scrutiny, I
> believe we'd be looking for alternatives with far more seriousness.
> Bell's son, for instance, was killed in the course of a routine traffic
> stop. According to the police report, one officer screamed that his gun had
> been grabbed and a second officer shot the young man in the head, "sticking
> the gun so close against his temple that he left a muzzle imprint."
> Because the Bell family hired a private investigator, they learned details
> of their son's killing independently of the legal system, e.g., "that the
> officer who thought his gun was being grabbed in fact had caught it on a
> broken car mirror," Bell wrote. In other words, a minor misperception
> escalated instantly into a fatal shooting, ending a young man's life and
> inflicting a lifetime of grief on those who loved him. Not only that, it
> shattered the life of at least one of the officers involved. The officer
> who
> screamed that his gun had been grabbed committed suicide six years later.
> Violence explodes in every direction. According to the Badge of Life
> website, U.S. police officers commit suicide at a rate of 17 per 100,000
> officers, well above the rate of the general public and close to that of
> the
> U.S. military. It's also well above the rate of officers who are killed in
> the line of duty.
> "Particularly startling in the study was the finding that not a single
> suicide in 2008 (or 2009) was ever attributed to police work," the site
> notes. "While police departments announce that law enforcement is a 'highly
> stressful, traumatic job,' they prefer to place the blame for a suicide on
> the family or on the officer for having some kind of 'personal problem.'"
> Lethal force gets off scot free.
> As militarization of the police escalates and our brutal wars for profit
> come home to haunt us, the time has come to face the violence we bring on
> one another in the name of social order. The time has come to find the
> courage to disarm.
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
> License
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blind-Democracy mailing list
> Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
> https://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
>
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