Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
This post is in: 2020 Elections, Civil Rights, GOP Death Cult, Open Threads, Shitty Cops
This is NOT how we should treat our veterans.
— VoteVets (@votevets) July 26, 2020
You know, the entire history of the USA begins with a few red coats' having snowballs thrown at them, panicking and firing a volley into a crowd. All as a result of having troops in the streets of a city that didn't ask for them, didn't want them and viewed them as invaders. https://t.co/jP8bWbDxpm
— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) July 17, 2020
As a Portlander, I wanted to counter the narrative that our city is no longer safe since it's being overrun by violent protests. So, I made maps for perspective on them.
(The yellow box is the overall protest area while the red is the most recent, headline grabbing protests.) pic.twitter.com/BB7DklYpwI
— D Paul Angel (@D_PaulAngel) July 24, 2020
Navy vet who says he was injured in clash with federal officers in Portland tells @ABC he wants to use attention on him "to refocus this whole discussion back to Black Lives Matter."
“If I had been a black veteran…do you think I would have gotten as much attention as I did?” pic.twitter.com/btq0wD61QH
— ABC News (@ABC) July 22, 2020
With sunflowers, helmets and googles, the Wall of Moms forms a human barrier between police and protesters in Portland, and offers a way for middle-aged white women to show solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter portland protesters https://t.co/euG10SiqoV pic.twitter.com/4PfUfRGPsH
— AFP news agency (@AFP) July 25, 2020
Donald's
Hate
Squad https://t.co/Dmioh4j63K— Schooley (@Rschooley) July 24, 2020
Don't want to romanticize FBI & mil who obviously have their own dirty laundry. But this is on the mark. No accident that DHS is taking lead here. A swirl of police agencies with ambiguous remits and toadies and ideologues at the top, all unconfirmed, ready to do Trump's bidding. https://t.co/8ZlJnQulXu
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 24, 2020
Portland resident:
trump's main concern in all of this is getting viral clips of amateur goons shooting unarmed protestors and he won't stop sending in more goons until he does. https://t.co/QZWFouMS5j
— golikehellmachine (@golikehellmachi) July 27, 2020
he also wants you to die if you’re a member of the secret police force deployed to portland, because imagine the ads he could make with that footage.
— golikehellmachine (@golikehellmachi) July 27, 2020
the part that isn't said often enough is that he *also* doesn't care in the slightest about the brownshirts he's deploying here; he'd be even happier to see them killed in the streets than he would be a protestor.
— golikehellmachine (@golikehellmachi) July 27, 2020
if you think a violent confrontation will help your poll numbers, it means that you're actively hoping americans kill one another to make you look better on social media. there's no other conclusion to draw.
— golikehellmachine (@golikehellmachi) July 27, 2020
Late Night Bad Indicators Open Thread: PortlandPost + Comments (75)
This post is in: Shitty Cops, Nazis- I hate these guys
Please watch this video:
So help me out here- which cop is the bad apple? Is it the one beating him on the legs? Or the one who blasted him in the face with pepper spray? Or the ones beating his upper torso? Or the ones cracking his hands with a baton?
I’m so confused.
by Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix| 83 Comments
This post is in: Shitty Cops
The cop who shot Rayshard Brooks at a Wendy’s in Atlanta was charged with felony murder today. If you’ve read about the case, Brooks, who was shot in the back, had gotten a Taser from one of the officers.
A key detail: Fulton County DA Paul Howard says former officer Garrett Rolfe knew that the taser Rayshard Brooks was holding had been fired twice and didn't pose any danger to the officers when Brooks turned and tried to fire it at officers before Rolfe shot Brooks in the back.
— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) June 17, 2020
The cops knew who he was, they knew he was drunk, and they knew what he had in his hand was essentially a useless piece of plastic. Yet one of them shot him in the back. There was no justification to kill him even if he had a loaded Taser, but this is just an open-and-shut case of murder.
It may be an important detail that the DA in Atlanta is facing a runoff election against an opponent with a 2:1 fundraising advantage.
(via LGM — they just had a fundraiser and I chipped in, you can, too.)
by Betty Cracker| 148 Comments
This post is in: Civil Rights, Criminal Justice, Open Threads, Politics, Shitty Cops
Trump signed a piece of paper that didn’t mean shit a while ago. CNN’s account of the Sharpie action notes that by signing an executive order on “police reform,” Trump is taking “his first concrete steps on Tuesday to address growing national outcry over police brutality.”
Yeah, right. It’s a bullshit feint at “reform” because Trump doesn’t give a shit about changing a broken system, but he does very much want to be reelected. To his surprise, the unrest isn’t helping him like it helped Nixon in 1968 — no matter how many times a day Trump tweets “LAW & ORDER” and “SILENT MAJORITY.” That’s because, unlike Nixon, Trump is the incumbent.
He’s also mind-bogglingly stupid. Here’s a quote from the idiotic signing ceremony that shows how unserious/dumb/deluded/inarticulate Trump is on the topic:
Trump on how prevalent bad cops are: "They’re very tiny. I use the word tiny. It’s a very small percentage. But nobody wants to get rid of them more than the really good and great police officers."
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) June 16, 2020
If “the really good and great police officers” wanted to get rid of the shitty cops, they’d speak up instead of ignoring or covering up for psychopathic colleagues. Until that starts happening a lot more frequently, it’s not unreasonable for the public to assume all cops are okay with the status quo. More from CNN:
Trump said Americans “demand law and order” and hailed the efforts of law enforcement to quell violence during protests against police brutality earlier this month.
“Without police, there is chaos,” Trump said.
There was a lot of chaos WITH police last week. In Tampa, they repeatedly chased, tear-gassed and fired projectiles at peaceful protesters and needlessly arrested people. In Bethel, Ohio, local cops stood by while violent, gun-toting pro-Trump creeps assaulted peaceful protesters right under their noses. In New Mexico, cops referred to armed right-wing agitators who menaced protesters as “heavily armed friendlies.”
Trump signed a piece of paper today. It didn’t mean shit. Nothing will change at the federal level until Trump and his GOP enablers are out of power. But the real fight will happen at the local level, if it happens at all. And it will take more than paper and a Sharpie to fix this mess. Open thread.
This post is in: Post-racial America, Shitty Cops
Another black man was killed by police in Atlanta yesterday- apparently drunk in his car and passed out in line at the Wendy’s. Cops were called, they talked for a while, a struggle ensued, he was tazed, ran, and they shot him in the back:
A 27-year-old man was shot and killed by police in Atlanta, Georgia, on Friday after resisting arrest, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigations (GBI). The GBI said it was asked by the Atlanta Police Department to investigate the incident.
A press release from the agency said Atlanta police were called to a Wendy’s drive-thru late Friday night after receiving a complaint that the driver of a vehicle in the drive-thru had fallen asleep, forcing customers to drive around him. When police arrived around 10:30 p.m. they performed a sobriety test on the man, later identified as Rayshard Brooks.
According to police, Brooks failed the test and then resisted arrest. He allegedly struggled with officers outside the fast-food restaurant.
“A field sobriety test was performed on the male subject. After failing the test, the officers attempted to place the male subject into custody,” reads the press release. “During the arrest, the male subject resisted and a struggle ensued. The officer deployed a Taser.”
Brooks was allegedly shot after he took an officer’s taser. The officer who fired the fatal shot has not been identified.
Why? Why not just let him run away? You have his fucking name. You have his fucking car and license plate. You were arresting him for being drunk and asleep- it’s not like he was on a murder spree. Just call more cops, follow him, and get him when he sobers up or passes out again. What the fuck is there to be gained from this?
The same with Breonna Taylor. The entire reason the cops broke down her door was because she and her boyfriend were under surveillance because GUYS DOWN THE HALL were suspected of selling drugs. Breonna and her boyfriend sometimes accepted packages for them, AS NEIGHBORS FUCKING DO, so they got pulled into the dragnet. If they had them under surveillance, then they had to know WHEN they went to work and WHEN they would not be there, so they could go search the apartment either when they were not there and apprehend them in the broad daylight on their way to work. There literally was no fucking reason to do a no-knock raid and come in guns blasting other than that the VIOLENCE IS THE FUCKING POINT.
Qualified immunity has got to go, and the police have got to be retrained and priorities have to be set straight.
This post is in: 2020 Elections, Open Threads, Shitty Cops, Trump Crime Cartel
The White House was unable to produce answers as to why Dallas’ police chief, sheriff, and district attorney- ALL of whom are African American – were not invited to Trump’s address on the police, and Injustice, in their city, Dallas. pic.twitter.com/HtaIehMw9t
— Rula Jebreal (@rulajebreal) June 12, 2020
… Because he had a $10 million private fundraiser scheduled at the home of “the CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, one of the nation’s largest pipeline companies” — and he certainly wasn’t gonna pay for the flight down there himself.
In this clip you can see the difference in the crowds that are out here today. pic.twitter.com/z1Ma7q1L8V
— Brian Lopez 🏡 (@Brian_L8) June 11, 2020
So far so anodyne, according to the Dallas News:
At a discussion in Dallas on race and policing, President Donald Trump recommitted himself Thursday to a policy that police should “dominate the streets,” a stance that has alarmed minority advocates fighting to tamp down the use of force after a police killing in Minneapolis.
The White House took heat for excluding the county’s three top law enforcement officials, who are all black, from an event that at times felt much like a campaign rally, albeit far smaller than usual for Trump…
The president drew cheers time and again from hundreds of supporters at Gateway Church as he forcefully rejected complaints about widespread police brutality and mocked “radical efforts to defund, dismantle and disband the police.”
“You always have a bad apple. No matter where you go you have bad apples, and there are not too many of them … in the police department,” he said. “What happens late at night when you make that call to 911 and there’s nobody there? What do you? What are you doing, whether you’re white or black or anybody else? … There is no opportunity without safety.”…
Hundreds of guests attended the event at Gateway Church’s campus in North Dallas, in one of the city’s more affluent areas.
Gateway is a conservative evangelical megachurch, one of the nation’s largest, with half a dozen campuses in the area and a mostly white congregation. A senior White House official rejected the suggestion that it was a strange choice for a conversation on “disparities” and “underserved communities.”
“Everyone cares about these communities. And this is about bringing people together from all walks,” the official said.
Outside the church, police barricades separated several hundred Black Lives Matter supporters from a few dozen Trump supporters. Shouts and vitriolic insults crossed the divide in both directions…
The (more than usually) scary part was the tangle of words emerging from the Squatter-in-Chief:
just like the coronavirus! https://t.co/Ii4kNiJiZu
— kilgore trout, potato thief (@KT_So_It_Goes) June 11, 2020
If this isn’t senile dementia, it’ll do until a more granular explanation emerges…
Trump: Sometimes you’ll see a building that costs less money than another building that costs more because the one that built the one that costs more, this one looks better. The one that’s cheaper looks better. They say how much more did you spend for that building. pic.twitter.com/xFfybBg4J2
— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) June 11, 2020
Earlier today, Trump described the brutalizing of peaceful protestors as “beautiful”.
None of this is beautiful. We need to get rid of this #UglyPresident
— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) June 12, 2020
Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: The ‘President’ Went to Dallas…Post + Comments (62)
by Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix| 37 Comments
This post is in: Shitty Cops
With the proviso that it’s not clear that it was really written by a cop, this Medium post, Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop, is worth a read. It sounds pretty believable to me:
To understand why all cops are bastards, you need to understand one of the things almost every training officer told me when it came to using force:
“I’d rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6.”
Meaning, “I’ll take my chances in court rather than risk getting hurt”. We’re able to think that way because police unions are extremely overpowered and because of the generous concept of Qualified Immunity, a legal theory which says a cop generally can’t be held personally liable for mistakes they make doing their job in an official capacity.
When you look at the actions of the officers who killed George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, David McAtee, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, or Freddie Gray, remember that they, like me, were trained to recite “I’d rather be judged by 12” as a mantra. Even if Mistakes Were Made™, the city (meaning the taxpayers, meaning you) pays the settlement, not the officer.
Once police training has – through repetition, indoctrination, and violent spectacle – promised officers that everyone in the world is out to kill them, the next lesson is that your partners are the only people protecting you. Occasionally, this is even true: I’ve had encounters turn on me rapidly to the point I legitimately thought I was going to die, only to have other officers come and turn the tables.
The whole thing is worth reading. ACAB is another catchphrase that sounds overly radical but you might change your mind about that after you read this.