What Are They Thinking

Just getting up to speed on what went down at UC Davis, and after watching the videos of the cops walking up, flamboyantly brandishing the pepper spray, and then hosing down a bunch of kids doing nothing but sitting with their arms crossed, and all I can wonder is what the fuck were they thinking? Maybe our society is just numbed by the abuses of authority figures, but this image is a powerful one, and one that does not reflect well on the police, the UC Davis administration, or by extension, the 1% crowd. I’ll bet the folks at CLGC, plotting to destroy #OWS, scream in anguish every time they watch this sort of blatant and disgusting police brutality, because it only fans the flames.

It’s really just amazing that any administration official would think that this is the appropriate response. It’s mind-boggling that anyone with law enforcement training thinks that was the appropriate response. Lt. John Pike wasn’t maintaining the public order or using appropriate force, what he did was to physically assault a bunch of kids who pay a hell of a lot of money to be on that college campus. He shouldn’t have a job today, and if any of his colleagues had any balls or any sense, they would have arrested him on the spot on multiple counts of assault.

And neither should that shithead chancellor of UC Davis, Linda P.B. Katehi. This open letter to her calling for her resignation points out the most salient fact:

I call for your resignation because you are unfit to do your job. You are unfit to ensure the safety of students at UC Davis. In fact: you are the primary threat to the safety of students at UC Davis. As such, I call upon you to resign immediately.

The kids aren’t a threat to public order, it’s the so-called adults. Who hired these morons?

*** Update ***

Predictably, the ass-covering has begun:

During the early afternoon hours and because of the request to take down the tents, many students decided to dismantle their tents, a decision for which we are very thankful. However, a group of students and non-campus affiliates decided to stay. The university police then came to dismantle the encampment. The events of this intervention have been videotaped and widely distributed. As indicated in various videos, the police used pepper spray against the students who were blocking the way. The use of pepper spray as shown on the video is chilling to us all and raises many questions about how best to handle situations like this.

To this effect, I am forming a task force made of faculty, students and staff to review the events and provide to me a thorough report within 90 days. As part of this, a process will be designed that allows members of the community to express their views on this matter. This report will help inform our policies and processes within the university administration and the Police Department to help us avoid similar outcomes in the future. While the university is trying to ensure the safety and health of all members of our community, we must ensure our strategies to gain compliance are fair and reasonable and do not lead to mistreatment.

The balls on this lady. She orders the cops in riot gear to go pepper spray the kids, then when everyone is horrified at what she has done, she forms a task force to figure out what happened. You don’t need a fucking task force to figure out what happened. You’re the problem. Just look in the mirror and ask yourself “Why am I such a blithering idiot?” And then resign.

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Police Pepper Spray #OWS Student Protestors Directly in their Faces at Occupy Davis

This is horrifying and brilliant all at once.

Today at Occupy Davis, a police officer approached a group of students sitting in a line peacefully on the ground, walked up and down the line and pepper-sprayed them directly in the face—as one would spray pesticide on weeds. What you’ll see in this video is such a callous display of police brutality, I don’t know how this police officer is going to go home and look at himself in the mirror.

As the students cry “Shame on you!” the police arrest a few students; but as the crowd circles them—non-threateningly, but insistent—the police begin to retreat. Then, amazingly, the students (via People’s mic) offer the retreating police a moment of peace: “We are willing to give you a brief moment of peace so that you may take your weapons and your friends and go. Please do not return.”

And the police do.

It’s frightening and amazing to watch:

Here’s contact information (via Twitter, of course): More »

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DHS ‘Coordinated’ Police Assaults on Occupy Everywhere Protestors

(Update from NYMag’s Daily Intel as of 8pm: “Around 2,000 activists have marched single-file back into the newly tentless Zuccotti Park. They are spending the evening in general assembly, forging a strategy for the coming days…” and links to OccupyNYC’s livestream, which won’t load directly on my pc.)

Via the Guardian, Rick Ellis at the Minneapolis Examiner:

Over the past ten days, more than a dozen cities have moved to evict “Occupy” protesters from city parks and other public spaces. As was the case in last night’s move in New York City, each of the police actions shares a number of characteristics. And according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies…

According to this official, in several recent conference calls and briefings, local police agencies were advised to seek a legal reason to evict residents of tent cities, focusing on zoning laws and existing curfew rules. Agencies were also advised to demonstrate a massive show of police force, including large numbers in riot gear. In particular, the FBI reportedly advised on press relations, with one presentation suggesting that any moves to evict protesters be coordinated for a time when the press was the least likely to be present.

The FBI has so far failed to respond to requests for an official response, and of the 14 local police agencies contacted in the past 24 hours, all have declined to respond to questions on this issue.

But in a recent interview with the BBC,” Oakland Mayor Jean Quan mentioned she was on a conference call just before the recent wave of crackdowns began…

Charlie Pierce at Esquire’s Daily Politics Blog sums it up nicely:

Your right to peaceably assemble for the redress of grievances, and how you may do it, and what you may say, will be defined by the police power of the state, backed by its political establishment and the business elite. They will define “acceptable” forms of public protest, even (and especially) public protest against them. This is the way it is now. This is the way it has been for some time. It’s just that people didn’t notice. And that was the problem with the Occupy protests. They resisted the marginalization — both literal physical marginalization, and the kind of intellectual marginalization that keeps real solutions to real problems out of our kabuki political debates. They could not be ignored…
More »

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Not Confusing At All

In one of the least professional acts I have seen in a long, long time, the Oakland Police Officer’s Association has published an open letter to the community questioning the Mayor:

We represent the 645 police officers who work hard every day to protect the citizens of Oakland. We, too, are the 99% fighting for better working conditions, fair treatment and the ability to provide a living for our children and families. We are severely understaffed with many City beats remaining unprotected by police during the day and evening hours.

As your police officers, we are confused.

On Tuesday, October 25th, we were ordered by Mayor Quan to clear out the encampments at Frank Ogawa Plaza and to keep protesters out of the Plaza. We performed the job that the Mayor’s Administration asked us to do, being fully aware that past protests in Oakland have resulted in rioting, violence and destruction of property.

Then, on Wednesday, October 26th, the Mayor allowed protesters back in – to camp out at the very place they were evacuated from the day before.

To add to the confusion, the Administration issued a memo on Friday, October 28th to all City workers in support of the “Stop Work” strike scheduled for Wednesday, giving all employees, except for police officers, permission to take the day off.

That’s hundreds of City workers encouraged to take off work to participate in the protest against “the establishment.” But aren’t the Mayor and her Administration part of the establishment they are paying City employees to protest? Is it the City’s intention to have City employees on both sides of a skirmish line?

It is all very confusing to us.

It’s not very confusing at all. Putting aside the fact that I don’t think I have seen a police force of a major city attempt to publicly shit on the Mayor since the days Rudy Giuliani was fomenting riots in NY, here is what happened. The Mayor ordered you in to clear out the plaza. You goons got dressed up in your body armor and helmets and riot gear, and went out and over-reacted. You shot an Iraq war veteran in the head with a tear gas canister, braining him, crushing his skull, and sending him to the hospital where he is still unable to speak. Not done with your thuggish bullshit, you then threw flash-bang grenades at the people trying to save his life. Even worse for you, you can’t lie about it, because it was all caught on tape. Here it is again in case you missed it:

You aren’t stopping “rioting, violence, and destruction of property” by shooting people standing peacefully five yards away from you. You are creating rioting.

So what the mayor is doing now is trying to do some damage control. While she may embrace the spirit of the #OWS movement, she clearly did not want any bad behavior taking place, so she called you in. But you shit the bed, didn’t you? And it isn’t the first time, either. Being a police misconduct lawyer in Oakland is quite lucrative, because of you. From the flatfoots on the beat to BART officers gunning down riders, you guys have created quite an impression.

So it isn’t confusing at all. Maybe you should sit down, take off your taser and put down your riot baton, and think on it a minute. At least have the good sense to think about it for a little bit before penning another asinine open letter.

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More Shitty Cops

This is flabbergasting to me:

The conviction of Detective Arbeeny on official misconduct, offering a false instrument for filing and falsifying business records, was merely the latest example of police corruption, prosecutors said.

On Jan. 25, 2007, prosecutors said Detective Arbeeny planted a small bag of crack cocaine on two innocent people.

The detective’s lawyer, Michael Elbaz, tried to discredit the most important prosecution witnesses, Yvelisse DeLeon and her boyfriend, Juan Figueroa. Ms. DeLeon had testified that the couple drove up to their apartment building in Coney Island and were approached by two plainclothes police officers. She said she then saw Detective Arbeeny remove a bag of powder from his pocket and place it in the vehicle.

“He brought out his pocket,” Ms. DeLeon told the court. “He said, ‘Look what I find.’ It looked like little powder in a little bag.”

Later in 2007, the detective was accused of stealing multiple bags of cocaine from the prisoner van he had been assigned to; Justice Reichbach found Detective Arbeeny not guilty of those charges.

Though there had been conflicting testimony during the trial about the existence of quotas within the department’s drug units, Justice Reichbach said, a system of flawed procedures in part led to the charges against Detective Arbeeny.

In the department’s Brooklyn South narcotics unit, for instance, drugs seized as evidence are not counted or sealed until they reach the precinct and can be handled by multiple officers along the way, Justice Reichbach said, adding that such unacceptable practices “pale in significance” to the “cowboy culture” of the drug units.

“Anything goes in the never-ending war on drugs, and a refusal to go along with questionable practices raise the specter of blacklisting and isolation,” he said.

Putting aside the fact that it makes no sense to me why drugs are not counted and accounted for BEFORE they leave the scene, what amazes me is why anyone would plant drugs on someone. It doesn’t appear that this was a personal grudge or anything like that- he just did it. Aren’t there enough actual people carrying around crack cocaine in New York to keep these people busy? I mean, we’re told all the time how much drug use is going on. Why do they need to invent criminals?

A couple things to keep in mind- if this happened once, it happened multiple times. How many people has Arbeeny screwed like this.

Second, if Arbeeny was doing this, his fellow cops new and not only said nothing, but went to court multiple times to testify under oath. As Gore Vidal said, perjury is the native tongue of police.

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Thug Life

It really is us versus them:

A three-year investigation into the police’s habit of fixing traffic and parking tickets in the Bronx ended in the unsealing of indictments on Friday and a stunning display of vitriol by hundreds of off-duty officers, who converged on the courthouse to applaud their accused colleagues and denounce their prosecution.

As 16 police officers were arraigned at State Supreme Court in the Bronx, incensed colleagues organized by their union cursed and taunted prosecutors and investigators, chanting “Down with the D.A.” and “Ray Kelly, hypocrite.”

As the defendants emerged from their morning court appearance, a swarm of officers formed a cordon in the hallway and clapped as they picked their way to the elevators. Members of the news media were prevented by court officers from walking down the hallway where more than 100 off-duty police officers had gathered outside the courtroom.

The assembled police officers blocked cameras from filming their colleagues, in one instance grabbing lenses and shoving television camera operators backward.

The unsealed indictments contained more than 1,600 criminal counts, the bulk of them misdemeanors having to do with making tickets disappear as favors for friends, relatives and others with clout. But they also outlined more serious crimes, related both to ticket-fixing and drugs, grand larceny and unrelated corruption. Four of the officers were charged with helping a man get away with assault.

So hundreds of cops come together in an unruly mob to cheer dirty cops. Meanwhile, the same city’s cops are busy pepper spraying, beating down, and attacking peaceful protestors.

The way God intended things to be.

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“Meet Oakland, Singapore-by-the-Bay.”

Gods bless Mr. Charles P. Pierce (he’ll need it):

Make no mistake about it: The actions of the police department in Oakland last night were a military assault on a legitimate political demonstration. That it was a milder military assault than it could have been, which is to say it wasn’t a massacre, is very much beside the point. There was no possible provocation that warranted this display of force. (Graffiti? Litter? Rodents? Is the Oakland PD now a SWAT team for the city’s health department?) If you are a police department in this country in 2011, this is something you do because you have the power and the technology and the license from society to do it. This is a problem that has been brewing for a long time. It predates the Occupy movement for more than a decade. It even predates the “war on terror,” although that has acted as what the arson squad would call an “accelerant” to the essential dynamic.

Basic law enforcement in this country is thoroughly, totally militarized. It is militarized at its most basic levels. (The “street crime units,” so beloved by, among other people, the Diallo family.) It is militarized at its highest command positions. It is militarized in its tactics, and its weaponry and, most important of all, in the attitude of the officers themselves, and in how they are trained. There is a vast militarized intelligence apparatus that leads, inevitably, to pre-emptive military actions, like the raids on protest organizations that were carried out in advance of the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis. Sooner or later, this militarized law enforcement was going to collide head-on with a movement of mass public protest, and the results were going to be ugly. (There already had been dry runs elsewhere, most notably in Miami, in 2003, during protests of a meeting of trade ministers.)

Meet Oakland, Singapore-by-the-Bay. There will be more of these. Depend on it. After all, they have fans out there…

And why shouldn’t the police be militarized? After all, we keep handing them “wars” to fight. A war on drugs. A war on terror. A war on graffiti. (Thanks, Rudy.) Wars are not properly fought with half-measures. Wars are fought over territory and wars are fought over power. You put enough war propaganda into the heads of young men, hand them weapons, and give them a license to use them, and they are not going to see fellow citizens through the visors on their helmets. They are going to see enemies. Wars have enemies. In Oakland last night, the police took action against enemies…

It’s time for the country to realize that something is dangerously out of control here, and that it’s not a bunch of people in sleeping bags in the public parks. There is a tradition of public protest in this country. Hell, this country is itself an act of public protest. Preserve that, or preserve nothing else, because there’s nothing else worth preserving. Police officers are public servants. They are not soldiers, facing down enemies. This is not a war. This is America.

Of course, Mr. Pierce grew up in Massachusetts, where we’re still proud of those dangerous, work-shy DFH rabble who started a decade-long war against public order and their property-owning betters by throwing rocks at duly authorized troops doing their jobs to “protect and support crown-appointed colonial officials attempting to enforce unpopular Parliamentary legislation.”

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Surviving Iraq to Get Gunned Down in Oakland

Looks like the jackbooted thugs in Oakland are having a good old time. First they brain a Marine veteran and fracture his skull with a teargas projectile, then when a crowd gathers to help him, they chuck flash-bangs into the crowd and on top of the critically wounded man. Don’t believe me? Watch for yourself:

We’ll file this under the new Police professionalism.

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Open Thread: Invisible DFHs!

(Tim Egan via GoComics.com)

Via Joe Coscarelli at NYMag’s Daily Intel:

The NYPD deputy who was seen far and wide on video firing pepper spray not once, but twice at nonviolent Occupy Wall Street protesters feels “tortured” by the incidents, but “would do things the same way,” according to sources who have spoken with him. DNA Info reports that Anthony Bologna said, “I did not intend to spray the women,” and has a different version of events than what the video appears to show. According to the officer, who sources say believes he “acted with the best intentions,” there were three men on the ground attempting to grab the legs of other cops from underneath the orange netting that had protesters corralled. That’s not what it looks like; maybe he just has really bad aim.

According to Bologna, his intended targets jumped up in the commotion and ran east. The second video of Bologna’s trigger-happy pepper-spraying is not accounted for, but did contribute to getting him relegated to desk duty.

Bologna was lightly punished, but according to sources, hopes to be “back on the street.” Maybe then he could track down the three mysterious hoodlums who nearly ruined his career.

Someone who’s a middle-management veteran of the NYPD should be able to come up with a better explanation than a crumb-faced toddler who blames the broken cookie jar on “Mr. Boogie Monster and the bad bears”.

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The Idea Was To Make Him Take a Vacation

The mad pepper spray wielding cop has been punished>

A New York police commander who pepper-sprayed protesters during the opening days of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations last month faces an internal disciplinary charge that could cost him 10 vacation days, the police said Tuesday.

The commander, Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, has been given a so-called command discipline, according to a law enforcement official. Officials said investigators found that the inspector ran afoul of Police Department rules for the use of the spray. The department’s patrol guide, its policy manual, says pepper spray should be used primarily to control a suspect who is resisting arrest, or for protection; it does allow for its use in “disorder control,” but only by officers with special training.

The Internal Affairs Bureau reviewed the episode and found that Inspector Bologna “used pepper spray outside departmental guidelines,” said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman. He declined to elaborate.

The inspector can accept the charge and plead guilty, or he can opt for a departmental trial. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly is the ultimate arbiter of punishment in such matters and has wide leeway in his decisions.

Inspector Bologna’s actions on Sept. 24, when he sprayed several penned-in women, were captured on video and spread widely on the Internet. It became a defining moment in the protests.

This just strikes me as an absurd punishment- if someone is so stressed out as a cop they are macing people for no reason, using excessive force outside departmental guidelines, why take away their vacation days? Seems to me a more fitting punishment would be a mandatory month or two of vacation days, unpaid, and with some anger management courses to help work through some of the obvious issues.

Having said that, I’m mildly surprised they even admitted to the wrongdoing.

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Elliptical

James Fallows has a good round-up of news on the pepper spraying cop. He was caught on video doing the same thing to yet another protester, in clear violation of the NYC’s rules on the use of pepper spray, and the story is getting big play worldwide.

What’s interesting to me is how a protest designed to draw attention to the disparity in wealth between Wall Street millionaires and the rest of us, as well as the injustice of the bank bailout, has morphed into a conversation about police overreach. We’re like a big dysfunctional family that never deals with any of our problems, and when today’s problem gets us a little agitated, we latch on to one minor detail that’s related to some other festering sore in our collective psyche and use that to distract ourselves.

Now that we have our distraction, it’s time to burn someone at the stake. Instead of having a discussion about our tolerance and even celebration of brutal cops, para-military no-knock raids, and expensive, pointless security theater, we’re going to drill in on this one asshole who maced a few protesters and get him fired. Once that happens, we’ll go back to forgetting about the elephant in the room.

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Maybe This One Won’t Go Away

Interesting:

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said on Wednesday that the Internal Affairs Bureau will look into the decision of a high-ranking officer to use pepper spray on a number of female protesters at an Occupy Wall Street demonstration on Saturday.

***

The video, which has been posted on YouTube and the Web sites of numerous news organizations, shows a deputy inspector walking up to a group of women standing on the sidewalk behind the orange netting and shooting pepper spray at them. Then footage then shows the deputy inspector, who has been identified as Anthony Bologna, walking away.

Commissioner Kelly said he had seen video of the pepper spraying only on a television newscast, and questioned whether the snippet he saw offered enough context to evaluate what occurred.

***

“I don’t know what precipitated that specific incident,” he said, but added that demonstrators as a group were engaged in “tumultuous conduct” and were “intent on blocking traffic” as they marched down University Place on their return from Union Square to the financial district, where the protesters have been encamped for more than a week.

You gotta love the specious bullshit at the end there. First, all you need to see is the 2 minute snippet to understand that Bologna walked up to a group of penned folks, sprayed his mace all over them without even giving warning or letting the other cops know, for no reason, then nonchalantly slinked away like a coward. There’s really nothing more to it. It doesn’t matter what other demonstrators were doing, it doesn’t matter if someone somewhere else was engaged in “tumultuous conduct,” etc. None of that matters a bit, and shows a mentality of collective punishment and brutality we’ve all grown to accept in this country. Who gives a shit what other people were doing, Commissioner Kelly? Those people weren’t doing anything, and your whiteshirt thug walked up to them and maced them. Period. End of story.

Kelly’s comments indicate he is part of the problem.

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Just a Few Bad Apples

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Sometime the Lights are Shining on Me

I know I am going to get flamed for this, but I just don’t understand what the goal is for the occupy Wall Street crowd. I confess that I don’t have much use for crowds, so that always has to be factored in as part of my cynicism. And, I suppose, at least these folks are doing something, as opposed to sitting on their asses behind a computer bitching about Wall Street, which is all I have done. But you know what I think when I see shit like this:

I see that, and I don’t think of a coherent message to talk about how Wall Street and the Financial sector and their political influence are ruining the country. I see a bunch of trustafarian nitwits who should be braiding hair and drinking wheat beer in the parking lot of a Phish concert, weaving in a few bong hits and a couple games of hacky-sack. We’re just making it too easy for Wall Street and the money boys if this collection of motley fools is the opposition. It’s so fucking depressing.

Which gets me back to at least they are doing something. Having said all that, this kind of bullshit is outrageous:

There is no need for this kind of behavior from the cops. That man needs to be fired, promptly. Of course he won’t even be penalized in any way.

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Today in the Politics of Pets

Mary Shannon Johnstone is a talented photographer who is working on a documentary series called Breeding Ignorance, which is a four-part piece about where unwanted pets come from, how they are euthanized, life in a shelter, and the practice of spaying and neutering. Fair warning: some of the images are quite disturbing, and others are pretty graphic depictions of surgical procedures on cats and dogs. One thing I learned from the series is that some shelters have a spaying program for feral cats, which is awesome.

ED Kain has the story of Steven Seagal, who accompanied Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s excursion into a Phoenix neighborhood with an armored vehicle, all to arrest a suspected cockfighter. During that arrest, a puppy was killed after the tank Segal was riding in crashed into the house. Seagal is being sued for $100,000 and is being asked for a written apology.

Update: In unrelated news, a regular commenter reminds me that EDK also has a good post on climate change at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen that’s well worth a read.

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