Contrary to the claims of conservatives, our Constitution does not guarantee the right to unfettered, utterly corrupt capitalism to allow the top 1% of our society to suck up all the wealth created by the working people of this country, leaving the rest of us to live paycheck to paycheck, constantly worrying about homelessness or bankruptcy (if we're lucky enough to have mere worries and not actualities).  What the Constitution does guarantee, and which pains our wealthy ruling class so much, is the rights of the 99% to vote, to speak out, and to organize. And these rights have been under attack in an unprecedented way in the past year. Republicans have spent the past year using all the power they have to destroy the right of workers to organize and of large numbers of people to vote. Now Mayor Bloomberg, who likes to play at being the "good" Republican, has shown his true colors by escalating the assault on freedom of speech with last night's raid of Occupy Wall St. (If you're in NYC and want to go show support, they're reconvening in Foley Square by City Hall.) 

Bloomberg would have you believe that he's not attacking basic First Amendment rights. His press release says:

No right is absolute and with every right comes responsibilities. The First Amendment gives every New Yorker the right to speak out – but it does not give anyone the right to sleep in a park or otherwise take it over to the exclusion of others – nor does it permit anyone in our society to live outside the law. There is no ambiguity in the law here – the First Amendment protects speech – it does not protect the use of tents and sleeping bags to take over a public space.

This is bullshit on its face---closing in on arguing that since print or digital media isn't "speech", it's not protected, since the tents are part of the necessary materials to speak---but even within this framework, Bloomberg is lying. The attacks on freedom of speech and press went well beyond evicting protesters and banning tents. Allison Kilkenny, writing for In These Times, explains how thorough the assault on speech and press was:

"Cleaning" is the city's favorite excuse to close down the protest, though the attempt at an innocent facade by the NYPD became all the more absurd when numerous reports began to trickle in of press being bullied and intimidated into leaving the area. Rosie Gray, a writer for the Village Voice tried to beg her way into gaining access to the plaza, which the police quickly quarantined during the raid, preventing media from seeing what was happening. "I'm press!" Gray reportedly exclaimed, to which a female officer replied, "not tonight."

Josh Harkinson from Mother Jones reported being "violently shoved" by police as he tried to photograph a man being placed into an ambulance on a stretcher, in addition to being removed from the park's area even when he told police he is press and has the "right to be here and observe what is going on." As the officer dragged him from the square, he told Harkinson if he stayed in the park he "could get hurt."

Additionally, Jared Malsin, the former chief English editor of Maan News Agency, was arrested alongside City Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez, who was reportedly bleeding from the head by the time he was arrested.

The obstruction of witnesses seemed a high priority for the NYPD, who in addition to blocking media access, also prevented residents near the park from leaving their building, and told doormen to "lock up," according to NBC New York reporter Melissa Russo.

According to the Tech Herald, the airspace over the area was also closed, forcing helicopters to land instead of getting pictures. many reporters on Twitter asserted that they'd been removed from covering the raid, and many were threatened with arrest and stripped of their press passes. In addition to Mother Jones and the Village Voice, the NY Observer was blocked, and Tech Herald is also claiming that the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, NBC, CBS, and Reuters were denied access. There are AP pictures, but because of all this, the pictures of the raid are pretty thin. Even without direct reports from reporters being denied access (or arrested), the timing of the raid makes clear Bloomberg's media blackout intentions. They clearly hoped that by doing this work while most reporters are in bed, they would gain an advantage over the press and prevent them from getting there on time. 

Then there's the destruction of the library, which I suspect was on the top of the list of things the NYPD and Bloomberg did not want reporters getting pictures of. Media Bistro is reporting that the NYPD destroyed over 5,000 books that have been amassed in the OWS library over the past two months. The young protesters who were volunteering as librarians tweeted the ordeal of watching what has come to be, historically speaking, the symbol of authoritarian governments oppressing its citizens. 

Protesters locked arms and tried to keep the dumpsters full of books and tents from leaving, but obviously to no avail. Personally, I donated about a dozen books to OWS, mostly about feminism in response to requests for more feminist discourse and history. Some of them weren't exactly books you can just saunter into a local library branch or Barnes & Noble to find, either, such as the radical feminism reader. So this image of the books being tossed into the trash is just adding to the emotional distress of this situation. 

So don't believe the lies. If this was just about a clean park, there would have been no need to go over the fucking top in the asssaults on speech and press that included threatening journalists (and arresting one), squelching witnesses, and destroying over 5,000 books that were provided, free of charge, by supporters who want to assist protesters' desire to educate themselves and, frankly, give them something to do during their downtime. 

Why is all this happening with the TSA searches?  Why now? It’s a good question.  There’s some confusion about whether or not the body scan or the invasive pat downs are separate issues, which is giving Will Saletan an excuse to say that people should just acquiesce to the scanner and stop throwing fits. But the problem is that they escalated the amount of groping you have to endure if you say you don’t want to be scanned.  Plus, there’s a problem with framing this as a choice, as Lindsay notes.

Saletan purports to be an expert on applied ethics, yet he is blind to the sexualized coercion implicit in the “choice” between allowing a stranger in another room to see your naked body vs. having your junk touched.

She expresses a concern that a National Opt-Out Day would be used not to stop the searches, but to privatize the searches.  That’s a distinct possibility, but I think it’s true regardless of how people protest.  If opt-out days actually are organized effectively, they can be used as protests against whoever the hell is groping people in airports, so I’m coming around to the idea that it might be a good idea.  My main concern is that opt-outers will be seen by non-opting-out passengers as the enemy, and the point of the protest could be lost.  But the problem of backlash is true of any protest.

Anyway, more Lindsay:

Ostensibly giving passengers a choice between a scan and a pat-down makes the invasion of privacy seem more acceptable. It gives the passenger the illusion of control. We’re so busy playing “scan or grope?” that we forget to ask why we’re paying for scanners the TSA can’t even justify with a cost-benefit analysis.

This is the way it works.  Invasions of basic privacy are tied to “choice”, to make it easier for people to blame the victim.  You’re seeing this in action here with some people saying, “Well, you don’t have to fly,” and certainly with the “choice” between the scanner and the groping.  But, as Lindsay explains, that doesn’t quite work, since sometimes you’re groped after the scan, and some airports don’t have scanners, making the grope mandatory.  The “you don’t have to fly” thing is also bullshit, but it’s precisely the kind of bullshit women have been putting up with for millenia when it comes to restraints put on our freedom of movement and association.  If you get raped, well, it was your choice to go out without supervision/and drink/wearing that.  Obviously, restrictions on woman’s access to abortion and contraception are justified by saying you had the choice to keep your legs shut.  And so on.  This is why “women’s issues” are inseparable from police state issues, or letting a bunch of assholes work as a voluntary police abuse force of rapists.

So why now?  There’s another reason for the false choice.  Lindsay again:

My theory is that the agency wants to bully people into submitting to their very expensive and unpopular new toys…..

The new body search procedure seems designed to make the scanners look attractive by comparison.

When you tell people, get the scan or we’ll grab your genitals, you’ll take the former.  Why is it so important that people take the former?  To save time, for one, which is why the protest being suggested is to jam up the works by having people in large groups demand the pat down.  But I suspect there’s another reason, as well.  (Via.)

The companies with multimillion-dollar contracts to supply American airports with body-scanning machines more than doubled their spending on lobbying in the past five years and hired several high-profile former government officials to advance their causes in Washington, government records show.

L-3 Communications, which has sold $39.7 million worth of the machines to the federal government, spent $4.3 million trying to influence Congress and federal agencies during the first nine months of this year, up from $2.1 million in 2005, lobbying data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics show. Its lobbyists include Linda Daschle, a former Federal Aviation Administration official.

Rapiscan Systems, meanwhile, has spent $271,500 on lobbying so far this year, compared with $80,000 five years earlier. It has faced criticism for hiring Michael Chertoff, the former Homeland Security secretary, last year. Chertoff has been a prominent proponent of using scanners to foil terrorism. The government has spent $41.2 million with Rapiscan.

You know you’ve fucked with privileged people when USA Today suddenly starts engaging in the investigative journalism of government corruption that you usually only find in places like The Nation.

Point is, there’s a lot of money to be made by selling scanners to airports.  And there’s a revolving door between people who work in high levels of government and those profiting off selling these devices.  It’s in the financial interest of these corporations that are lobbying the hell out of this to have you told that you use their products or you have your junk touched. 

Yep, we seem to have reached that stage of capitalism where sexual abuse is being used as a threat to get people (taxpayers in this case) to spend money to pad corporate profits. I wonder, once wingnut America figures that one out, if they’ll calm down with the outrage?  I mean, the free market is why you have to submit to the groping!  Suggesting your privacy comes before their profits is just as good as saying that you’re a dirty commie, didn’t you know?

Good news, though it’s sorry that it’s come to this—-the Justice Department is now officially moving to sue the state of Arizona over the “papers please” law.  The argument is that the law usurps the federal government’s authority over issues such as immigration law enforcement.  I’m sure the lawyers out there could explain why the Justice Department thought this was the best angle, instead of doing something like arguing that the law is fundamentally discriminatory.  Maybe the disingenuous attempts to forbid racial profiling in the text of the law while encouraging it in practice make that a harder case to build than you’d think?  That’d be my guess.

The most important thing is that Arizona faces resistance to this move to make blatant anti-Hispanic racism official government policy.  Beyond just sucking on its face, laws that encourage racism directly also help foster an atmosphere where racism is more generally seen as acceptable.  For instance, check out this story about the Apache Junction American Legion in Arizona.  Just out of spiteful racism, they banned Cinco de Mayo celebrations at the post, on the scurrilous grounds that it’s not a real Mexican holiday.  Which is funny, because I suspect they’d ban it for being a real Mexican holiday if that’s what it was.  No matter; in the U.S., Cinco de Mayo is a Mexican-American equivalent of what St. Patrick’s Day used to be, or what gay pride parades currently are.  It’s a way of being positive and proud in the face of bigotry, a celebration of diversity, and a reason to have a good time.  The only people who can really be against that sort of thing are those that are eaten up by hate. 

You can really see, in this instance, how an official act of racism from the government created more hatred and animosity all around.  It’s a vicious cycle.  The government passed the law, and people, for good reason, protested it.  The protesters are perceived by cranky white people as uppity, and probably as illegal, and so they strike back against them by taking racist potshots aimed at celebrations the encourage diversity.  This sows even more anger and distrust between neighbors, and for no good reason.

Unfortunately, this means the initial reaction the Justice Department lawsuit will probably be more cycles of racism/protest/increased racism.  But it has to be done, because the only other alternative is allowing the state government to continue to stoke hatred against its Hispanic citizens.  Official government intervention against racism creates backlashes, but it eventually works to tone down racism—-look at the results of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  It created an upswing in some hostilities, and it didn’t actually bring an end to racism, but eventually it helped usher in an era where racists at least had to hold their cards a little closer to their chests.  Which is far from perfect, but better than the available alternatives.

Marc Ambinder asks if conservatives have gone mad.

Our black president with a Kenyan father asks the conservative Arizona legislature what the fuck they were thinking giving law enforcement carte blanche to ask for your papers or your life.

This has been another edition of Asking The Motherfucking Obvious.

So, a twelve year old was handcuffed and detained for writing on her desk.  But before the little overactive hippie civil libertarian in you gets all crazy up in arms about it, look at the foul language she wrote:

Alexa Gonzalez was scribbling a few words on her desk Monday while waiting for her Spanish teacher to pass out homework at Junior High School 190 in Forest Hills, she said.

“I love my friends Abby and Faith,” the girl wrote, adding the phrases “Lex was here. 2/1/10” and a smiley face.

Everyone knows that “Abby and Faith” is MS-13 code for “kill all the white bitches”.  Those street gangs are clever.  And oddly sentimental.

Of course, where there’s a potential civil right violation that liberals might care about, there’s Ann Althouse to add an uncomfortable patina of completely unnecessary sexual discomfort and authoritarian scapegoating. 

Why make a star out of a kid that defaced school property with graffiti? She’s an especially cute girl, willing to pose with her wrists together in the handcuff position. I’m sure some readers appreciate the entertainment on that level. Do we know the whole story of why she was arrested and why handcuffs were deemed necessary?

Well, she was probably willing to do it because she was fucking handcuffed.  And we do know the whole story, because, per the above linked article, the city admitted it was in the wrong. 

City officials acknowledged Alexa’s arrest was a mistake.

“We’re looking at the facts,” said City Education Department spokesman David Cantor. “Based on what we’ve seen so far, this shouldn’t have happened.”

“Even when we’re asked to make an arrest, common sense should prevail, and discretion used in deciding whether an arrest or handcuffs are really necessary,” said police spokesman Paul Browne.

Now, yes, it is theoretically possible that this 80-pound girl whose most apparent sin was committing to loving her friends before getting out of sixth grade (junior high changes EVERYTHING, little girl) somehow pulled out a hunting knife and threatened to gut her teacher, but I’m pretty sure that would have come out at some point.  The problem, however, is that this is apparently school policy.

Alexa Gonzalez no longer faces a suspension for scribbling with a lime green marker, but principal Marilyn Grant told her mother, that agency policy dictated that she calls the cops.

Grant told Alexa’s mother that it wasn’t their fault that it was something they had to do,” Camacho said of her meeting with Grant at Junior High School 190 in Forest Hills. “She doesn’t consider it doodling.”

I’m not entirely sure what this principal considers doodling on a desk, then.  An antitrust violation?

Anyway, back to Althouse:

Is stoking the victimhood feelings of your child like this a good idea? The girl did wrong, as she knows. She should apologize, straighten up, and rededicate herself to schoolwork. The mother should not tolerate the child’s sickly overreaction — even if she believes the school is too harsh in its response to crimes committed by kids in school.

The child’s “sickly overreaction”, as Althouse put it, was crying and vomiting because she was treated like she just tried to commit armed robbery.  How the fuck should twelve year olds react to their detainment for doing shit that kids have done since we started building schoolhouses? 

A class action lawsuit was filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union last month against the city for using “excessive force” in middle school and high schools. A 12-year-old sixth-grader, identified in the lawsuit as M.M., was arrested in March 2009 for doodling on her desk at the Hunts Point School.

Fine. Let the courts review the patterns and, if the schools are violating the law, provide a remedy congruent with the legal violation that leaves room for the schools to preserve discipline and good order.

Well, I’m not entirely sure how “don’t send kids to the police station for drawing on a desk” would prevent schools from enacting policies which preserve discipline and good order, but then again, I’m not a callous, soulless hack who’s willing to defend a guy who attempts to tamper with a government phone system because it’s not clear what he was going to do, but will strike the hammer down on a twelve year old girl because she’s too pretty (and because she was probably going to shiv her Spanish teacher, because that’s what those types do).

The new New World Order is afoot!

Barack Obama signed an Executive Order amending one of Ronald Reagan’s executive orders, which rescinded the exclusion INTERPOL would otherwise have from American tax laws. 

Short version: INTERPOL employees are no longer liable for American taxes.  That’s about it. 

Of course, if there’s one thing we know about the great body of conservative bloggers, it’s that their collective vocabulary is about 75 words, and roughly a third of those are synonyms for “Sharia”. 

Let’s start with Erick Ericson at Redstate:

The best and most reasonable take comes from Andy McCarthy. Let me put this in perspective for you.

[...]

For no discernible reason whatsoever, last Wednesday when no one was looking, Barack Obama signed an executive order giving all immunities of foreign powers to Interpol.

In other words, Interpol is now in a better position than any American law enforcement institution that operates on American soil. It cannot have its records searched or seized and it is not subject to the restraints of sunshine and transparency that FOIA requests can bring.

At a time when Obama is worried about ensuring the rights of terrorists against the abuses of the American government, he has no problem surrendering American rights to an arm of the United Nations.

Predictably, the fact that Barack Obama has allowed the World Police to operate within our borders and given them all of West Virginia to use as concentration camps (READ BETWEEN THE LINES, PEOPLE) is setting off alarms among the most vigilant of our civilian security forces.  The Anchoress is worried that this is the beginning of Kristallnacht, and that INTERPOL and ACORN are somehow going to join forces to form the ultimate acronym, CLARINET PORNO.  Confederate Yankee is pretty damn sure that they still have actual Nazis running INTERPOL, and that somehow these tax regulations will allow them to kidnap American soldiers for gay sex in Amsterdam.

The Astute Bloggers believe Barack Obama has empowered INTERPOL to capture George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for war crimes.  Protein Wisdom is pretty sure that Obama plain hates the constitution and was a shitty law professor, which burns most of all.

Now, sure, all of these people are total morons.  But they’re actually super double special fucking morons, and for a very special reason. 

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Oh really, now—how long have I been blogging about this "electrical shock device" and the deaths, maimings and abuse heaped upon the guilty and the innocent, the elderly, the mentally disabled, the bedridden and wheelchair bound, as well as humans minding their own business on bicycles and at a child's baptism party? Never mind the story of a Taser being used to sodomize a suspect.

Law enforcement officials around the country have been on a mission to prove that face-to-face negotiations are passe, and compliance should be achieved by physical assault, even in cases where there is no threat to the officer. Occasionally (well in too many cases), the Taser "negotiation" ended up with the Tasee DOA.

Now the company has decided to issue this hilarious-if-it-wasn't enraging advisory to police that there might be a bit of a problem if you unleash the 50K blast directly into someone's chest. Did someone need to consult Mr. Wizard to figure out this "problem?" (Raw Story):

Taser International stressed that suffering an "adverse cardiac event" after being zapped was "extremely unlikely," but human rights groups say hundreds of people have been killed by the electroshock weapons.

In a bulletin dated October 12, the Arizona-based company issued new guidelines saying it had "lowered the recommended point of aim from center of mass to lower-center of mass for front shots."

"When possible, avoiding chest shots with ECDs (Electronic Control Devices) avoids the controversy about whether ECDs do or do not affect the human heart," it explained.

"Researchers have concluded that a close distance between the ECD dart and the heart is the primary factor in determining whether an ECD will affect the heart. The risk is judged to be extremely low in field use," it said.

Read that carefully - Taser International still doesn't take responsibility for the danger and outcomes we've seen of its "non-lethal device." 

"We have not stated that the Taser causes (cardiac) events in this bulletin, only that the refined target zones avoid any potential controversy on this topic."

Taser's training bulletin states that "the risk of an adverse cardiac event related to a Taser. .. discharge is deemed to be extremely low." However, the bulletin says, it is impossible to predict human reactions when a combination of drug use or underlying cardiac or other medical conditions are involved.

"Should sudden cardiac arrest occur in a scenario involving a Taser discharge to the chest area, it would place the law-enforcement agency, the officer and Taser International in the difficult situation of trying to ascertain what role, if any, the Taser. .. could have played," the bulletin says.

The bulletin recommends that when aiming at the front of a suspect, the best target for officers is the major muscles of the pelvic area or thigh region. "Back shots remain the preferred area when practical," it says.

Meanwhile the devices are being handed out to guards at schools, and proliferating without any standardized training to law enforcement departments all over the world. And of course, this bit of business from Taser International shows a buff black brother getting it right in the target zone.

Related:
* Man dies from police taser after fleeing from arrest on marijuana warrant
* Taser abuse: how many have to die before something is done about it?
* NAACP steps forward to support federal standards for the use of Tasers
* Sunshine State sadism: 43 children tased during prison tour
* VA: The Tasing of the Hula Hoop Lady

Josh at Right Wing Watch emails me some of the most over-the-top stuff and this is no exception. With the hanging of that census worker Bill Sparkman in Kentucky with “FED” on his chest, it’s not hard to compile TEH CRAZY. Take a look at the legitimacy that Faux News gives the deranged Michele Bachmann as she whips up hysteria and paranoia over the 2010 Census.

Over at Jesus’ General, one of his commenters is a census worker who works in the deep woods of western North Carolina mountain country. This person gives a first-hand account about the sentiment out there.

The overwhelming anger is directed straight at the President. No question. Fear and racism at the core that has manifested into anti-government radicalism. We’re threatened and intimidated almost daily, just for trying to earn a days pay and uphold the Constitution. I’ve been called an “employee of president nigger” and team members have been bitten by dogs and threatened with shotguns.

All they really have time for is to hand you a taser and say “The public wants to kill you. Don’t be afraid to use this.”

I’ve been thinking about the topic of Amanda’s last post for a while now. 

Here’s what claims to be video of a conservative black man allegedly getting attacked by a union member (it looks a lot more like a lot of people falling down, and I initially thought the victim was an SEIU member).  From the video, I can’t tell what’s supposed to have happened other than a lot of uncoordinated middle-aged people scuffling with each other and then yelling about it afterwards.  It’s entirely unclear what the timeline of events were here, but it’s pretty clear some form of violence was involved.  Some on the right, incidentally, are ecstatic that this guy is black, because that means that Obama is a false prophet of racial harmony or, well, yes.  And such.  (Interestingly, the alleged victim’s allegations initially involved the black man you see rubbing his shoulder early in the video attacking him instead of the white man who was arrested, which is…odd, I’d say.)

More problematically, SEIU is now having violence threatened against it, with one caller declaring that they’re “gonna run up against the Second Amendment”.  Democratic Representative Brad Miller has received death threats over the health care bill.  GOP Representative Bob Inglis was loudly booed for telling his audience that Glenn Beck is an asshole. 

These protests are typified by a few key elements.  The first is that the protesters are angry enough to spend hours preparing to scream their ever-loving heads off about…things.  It’s a toxic mix of racial resentment, class resentment, general liberal-hatred, a continued belief that Barack Obama is some sort of fascist/socialist/communist dictator, and a series of other beliefs ranging from the murderous aims of liberals to our intent to ban religion.  It’s all driven by the prophets of crazy - the Becks, Limbaughs and O’Reillys, with the lesser Malkins and Buchanans plugging along just under the surface - living the dream of becoming millionaires while fomenting radicalism, something that hairshirted liberal extremists never quite got the hang of.  Clever people.

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Back in March I blogged about yet another example of cops out of control—the murder by cop of a 73-year-old black man, a cancer survivor, who was hosting a family cookout in front of his humble home in Homer, Lousiana.

Officer Tim Cox, and Officer Joey Henry showed up at Bernard Monroe's house to speak with the elderly man's son Shawn (he had a record, but didn't have any current warrants against him). The younger Monroe ran toward the house and Officer Cox pursued him and…

[T]he elder Monroe had started walking toward the front door, carrying only his drink bottle, to try to intervene. When Monroe got to the first step on the front porch, the witnesses said, Cox opened fire, striking him several times as adults and children stood nearby.

    "He just shot him through the screen door," said Denise Nicholson, a family friend who said she was standing a few feet from Monroe.  "After [Monroe] was on the ground, we kept asking the officer to call an ambulance, but all he did was get on his radio and say, 'Officer in distress.' "

    As Monroe lay dying, the witnesses said, the second police officer, who has not been publicly identified, picked up a handgun that Monroe, an avid hunter, always kept in plain sight on the porch for protection. Using a police-issue blue latex glove, the officer grasped the gun by its handle, the witnesses said, and then ordered everyone to back away from the scene.  The next thing they said they saw was the gun on the ground next to Monroe's body.

Well, here we are in August (the shooting was on Feb. 20) and there have been at least two investigations. Did anything come of this? The update is the two officers are moving on to other jobs. No one with a badge did any time for the slaying of an unarmed, elderly black man.

"Tim Cox told me he is moving to St. Tammany Parish and I think will be training canines for police departments," Colvin said. "I don't know what Joey Henry is going to do."

Both officers had been on paid administrative leave after the shooting, which is still under investigation by the FBI and state police.

"They should have been gone," said Rev. Willie Young, head of the Claiborne Parish NAACP, on Wednesday. "I don't think taxpayers should have been paying their salaries all this time."

Hat tip, Tasered While Black.

This story was mentioned in the last Taser police abuse thread, and it deserves its own post.

God almighty, it makes me sick to keep reporting on this bullsh*t police brutality state because we all know there are so many good law enforcement officers putting their lives on the line every day. But they are working alongside some seriously disturbed/power-mad sadists with a badge who clearly have no skills, training or desire to properly subdue or communicate with civilians—they reach for the Taser, which is meant as a substitute for a GUN, and blast people into submission.

Officers who used pepper spray and a Taser to remove a man from a store bathroom found out only later he was deaf and mentally disabled and didn’t understand they wanted him to open the door, police said Tuesday.

A spokesman for the Mobile Police Department said the officers’ actions were justified because the man was armed with a potential weapon - an umbrella.

The man, Antonio Love, has, according to his mother Phyllis Love,

the mental capacity of a 10-year-old

and didn’t realize the police were trying enter the bathroom.

Police spokesman Christopher Levy said Tuesday store workers called officers complaining that a man had been in the bathroom for more than an hour with the door locked. Officers knocked on the door and identified themselves, but the person didn’t respond.

Officers used a tire iron to open the door, but the man pushed back to keep it shut. Officers saw the umbrella and sprayed pepper spray through a crack trying to subdue the man, Levy said. They shot the man with a Taser when they finally got inside, he said.

Officers didn’t realize Love was deaf or had mental problems until he showed them a card he carries in his wallet, Levy said. He was arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct, but officers released him and took him home after a magistrate refused to issue a warrant.

Levy said officers were justified in using force against Love since he had an umbrella.

“The officers really worked within the limits of our level-of-force policy,” he said. “We had no information about who this guy was.”

BTW, Love said that the officers laughed at him after they found out he was deaf. The officer has since been placed on administrative leave. I don’t know if it’s a training issue, a lack of humanity or what, but these weapons are being abused all around the country by the police—and the abuse is being affirmed by their superiors in many of these cases—it’s frightening. How can we stop the madness?

Here we go again. A cop is caught using a Taser not in the place of a gun, but as a device to ensure compliance from a belligerent person who is not a threat to the law enforcement officer.

Dash cam video has been released to FOX 7 showing exactly what happened between a Constable’s deputy and a 72-yaer-old woman, before she was tasered last month. The officer says says Kathryn Winkfein mouthed off, and was physically non-compliant. Winkfein told us that wasn’t true. Precinct 3 Sgt. Maj. Gary Griffin says he’s reviewed the dash cam footage and he’s standing by his deputy—he says followed policy.

Just after two in the afternoon on May 11, the video shows Deputy Chris Bieze stopping Kathryn Winkfein for speeding on a notoriously dangerous strip of Highway 71. After completing the paperwork, the officer returns to Winkfein’s truck, but she refuses to sign the speeding ticket.

“Take me to jail,” Winkfein demands on the tape, “I’m a 72-year-old woman.” That’s when the deputy opens the driverside door to arrest the great-grandmother. “Give me the ******* ticket now,” Winkfein curses. The deputy shoves her. “You’re gonna push me? A 72-year-old woman?”

The shove, the Constable’s office says, served to get the two out of oncoming traffic. Then, the deputy warns her one of five times.

“Stand back, ” Bieze says. “I’m gonna tase you.” She responds by saying, “I dare you.”

The deputy announces he’s going to taser Winkfein, and the woman hits the ground as the taser is deployed.

I do not see how the police could view this as a proper use of a taser.  Bieze threatens to taser her again if she does not put her hands behind her back.  He then tasers her again.  He then charges her with resisting arrest.

The video is a textbook example of how tasers have served to escalate the level of force in such encounters.  While Bieze might have called for back up or physically restrained Winkfein, he moves almost immediately to the use of the taser.  The fact that Constable McCain would watch this video and find (here) that Bieze acted properly raises serious questions of his own judgment.

So today the President will sit down with Skip Gates and his arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge PD to have a beer. A lot of Internet bandwidth and airwave time have been spent dealing with trivialities, such as who is consuming which brand of beer (Obama a Bud,  Gates tossing back a Jamaican Red Stripe. Crowley’s will opt for a Coors Blue Moon).

I just want to point out that the fact that we’re talking about a beer summit confirms the role of class in this whole brouhaha, an issue I raised earlier (”Why class does matter in the Gates arrest debate”). They are not sitting down to share a bottle of wine; the decision to “lower the class bar” by using the alcoholic beverage of the working (class) man is quite purposeful. Beer is a social signifier that Gates, Obama, and Crowley are on the same level as regular guys shooting the sh*t. Palin aligned herself with “Joe Six Pack” for the same reason—to indicate she’s down with the working class American.

Of course this is all artifice; Crowley is sitting down with the President of the United States and a superstar scholar from Harvard. Gates and Obama are way above Crowley’s station in their professional and social spheres. However, what the Gates incident has taught us is that if you take Barack Obama, Henry Louis Gates or any prominent black man out of context—they can still easily and quickly drop well beneath Crowley’s station given the right (or more accurately, wrong) circumstances. In the often-disappointing real world colored by perception and stereotypes, it’s a rude awakening. If the President and Prof. Gates are anonymized into the average black man, it is still a world of driving while black, voting while black, shopping while black, hailing a cab while black, and now, being in your own home while black that they would experience.

What will these three talk about today, as they chug a cold one? I venture they will touch upon race in some, hopefully productive way, but I can put money on it that class won’t be on the table.

***

racism

  • noun 1 the belief that there are characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to each race. 2 discrimination against or antagonism towards other races.

  — DERIVATIVES racist noun & adjective.

It’s clear

no one wants to be labeled a racist

, no matter how insane and inappropriate an action or comment they make. Some people seem to have a definition of it in their heads that excludes the possibility that anything THEY say or do might be steeped in racism, intended or not.

Take Boston Police Officer Justin Barrett, whose beat is District B-3 (Dorchester and Mattapan). He mass-mailed an execreble piece of trash to his presumably fellow non-racist friends (as well as The Boston Globe(!) and colleagues in the National Guard):

“His first priority of effort should be to get off the phone and comply with police, for if I was the officer he verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC deserving of his belligerent non-compliance.”

“He indeed has transcended back to a bumbling jungle monkey, thus he forever remains amid this nation’s great social/racial divide…”

“That paragraph was as pathetic as jungle monkey gibberish.”

You are a Fool. An infidel…You should serve me coffee and donuts on a Sunday morning.”

I am “not a racist but I am prejudice [sic] towards people who are stupid and pretend to stand up and preach for something they say is freedom but it is merely attention because you do not get enough of it in your little fear-dwelling circle of on-the-bandwagon followers.”

“Gates is a goddamned fool and you the article writer simply a poor follower and maybe worse, a poor writer. Your article title should read CONDUCT UNBECOMING a JUNGLE MONKEY-BACK TO ONE’S ROOTS. JB”

Ummmm…never mind racist, this man is a dumbass for it sending to the media. Or maybe he really thought there was nothing wrong in that missive. No one is saying he can’t have an opinion over who is right or wrong in this incident—why in god’s name is it relevant to refer to Gates as a “jungle monkey” in his criticism? BTW, the Police Commissioner, Edward Davis took Barrett’s gun and badge;  Barrett is awaiting a termination hearing.

Watch the “apology” below the fold.

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Anyone remember way back in the dusky mists of last month when National Review writer Ed Whelan outed an anonymous blogger because said blogger criticized him?  Well, now, an anonymous blogger at the National Review who is also an LA cop has advocated shooting people who assert their Fourth Amendment rights.

Ed Whelan eventually apologized for the outing, but it strikes me that someone in a position to enact an agenda of state-sanctioned execution for invoking the Constitution should maybe have their cloak of anonymity debated a bit more strenuously than a guy who said mean things on the Internet?  Perhaps, Rich Lowry?