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Re: COPWATCH

Postby Freitag » Sun Feb 17, 2013 2:22 am

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Re: COPWATCH

Postby Freitag » Mon Jul 08, 2013 12:57 am

“Why did you shoot me? I was reading a book”: The new warrior cop is out of control

SWAT teams raiding poker games and trying to stop underage drinking? Overwhelming paramilitary force is on the rise

By Radley Balko

Sal Culosi is dead because he bet on a football game — but it wasn’t a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit.

Several months earlier at a local bar, Fairfax County, Virginia, detective David Baucum overheard the thirty-eight-year-old optometrist and some friends wagering on a college football game. “To Sal, betting a few bills on the Redskins was a stress reliever, done among friends,” a friend of Culosi’s told me shortly after his death. “None of us single, successful professionals ever thought that betting fifty bucks or so on the Virginia–Virginia Tech football game was a crime worthy of investigation.” Baucum apparently did. After overhearing the men wagering, Baucum befriended Culosi as a cover to begin investigating him. During the next several months, he talked Culosi into raising the stakes of what Culosi thought were just more fun wagers between friends to make watching sports more interesting. Eventually Culosi and Baucum bet more than $2,000 in a single day. Under Virginia law, that was enough for police to charge Culosi with running a gambling operation. And that’s when they brought in the SWAT team.

On the night of January 24, 2006, Baucum called Culosi and arranged a time to drop by to collect his winnings. When Culosi, barefoot and clad in a T-shirt and jeans, stepped out of his house to meet the man he thought was a friend, the SWAT team began to move in. Seconds later, Det. Deval Bullock, who had been on duty since 4:00 AM and hadn’t slept in seventeen hours, fired a bullet that pierced Culosi’s heart.

Sal Culosi’s last words were to Baucum, the cop he thought was a friend: “Dude, what are you doing?”

In March 2006, just two months after its ridiculous gambling investigation resulted in the death of an unarmed man, the Fairfax County Police Department issued a press release warning residents not to participate in office betting pools tied to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The title: “Illegal Gambling Not Worth the Risk.” Given the proximity to Culosi’s death, residents could be forgiven for thinking the police department believed wagering on sports was a crime punishable by execution.

In January 2011, the Culosi family accepted a $2 million settlement offer from Fairfax County. That same year, Virginia’s government spent $20 million promoting the state lottery.

The raid on Sal Culosi was merely another red flag indicating yet more SWAT team mission creep in America. It wasn’t even the first time a Virginia SWAT team had killed someone during a gambling raid. In 1998 a SWAT team in Virginia Beach shot and killed security guard Edward C. Reed during a 3:00 AM raid on a private club suspected of facilitating gambling. Police said they approached the tinted car where Reed was working security, knocked, and identified themselves, then shot Reed when he refused to drop his handgun. Reed’s family insisted the police story was unlikely. Reed had no criminal record. Why would he knowingly point his gun at a heavily armed police team? More likely, they said, Reed mistakenly believed the raiding officers were there to do harm, particularly given that the club had been robbed not long before the raid. Statements by the police themselves seem to back that account. According to officers at the scene, Reed’s last words were, “Why did you shoot me? I was reading a book.”

As the Texas Hold ’Em craze picked up momentum in the mid-2000s, fans of the game started hosting tournaments at private clubs, bars, and residences. Police in many parts of the country responded with SWAT raids. In 2011, for example, police in Baltimore County, Maryland, sent a tactical unit to raid a $65 buy-in poker game at the Lynch Point Social Club. From 2006 to 2008, SWAT teams in South Carolina staged a number of raids to break up poker games in the suburbs of Charleston. Some were well organized and high-stakes, but others were friendly games with a $20 buy-in. “The typical police raid of these games . . . is to literally burst into a home in SWAT gear with guns drawn and treat poker players like a bunch of high-level drug dealers,” an attorney representing poker players told a local newspaper. “Using the taxpayers’ resources for such useless Gestapo-like tactics is more of a crime than is playing of the game.”

In 2007 a Dallas SWAT team actually raided a Veterans of Foreign Wars outpost for hosting charity poker games. Players said the tactics were terrifying. One woman urinated on herself. When police raided a San Mateo, California, poker game in 2008, card players described cops storming the place “in full riot gear” and “with guns drawn.” The games had buy-ins ranging from $25 to $55. Under California law, the games were legal so long as no one took a “rake,” or a cut of the stakes. No one had, but police claimed the $5 the hosts charged players to buy refreshments qualified as a rake. In March 2007, a small army of local cops, ATF agents, National Guard troops, and a helicopter raided a poker game in Cary, North Carolina. They issued forty-one citations, all of them misdemeanors. A columnist at the Fayetteville Observer remarked, “They were there to play cards, not to foment rebellion. . . . [I] wonder . . . what other minutiae, personal vices and petty crimes are occupying [the National Guard’s] time, and where they’re occupying it. . . . Until we get this sorted out, better not jaywalk. There could be a military helicopter overhead.”

Police have justified this sort of heavy-handedness by claiming that people who run illegal gambling operations tend to be armed, a blanket characterization that absurdly lumps neighborhood Hold ’Em tournaments with Uncle Junior Soprano’s weekly poker game. And in any case, if police know that people inside an establishment are likely to be armed, it makes even less sense to come in with guns blazing. Police have also defended the paramilitary tactics by noting that poker games are usually flush with cash and thus tend to get robbed. That too is an absurd argument, unless the police are afraid they’re going to raid a game at precisely the same moment it’s getting robbed. Under either scenario, the police are acknowledging that the people playing poker when these raids go down have good reason to think that the men storming the place with guns may be criminals, not cops.

Indeed, that’s exactly what happened to seventy-two-year-old Aaron Awtry in 2010. Awtry was hosting a poker tournament in his Greenville, South Carolina, home when police began breaking down the door with a battering ram. Awtry had begun carrying a gun after being robbed. Thinking he was about to be robbed again, he fired through the door, wounding Deputy Matthew May in both arms. The other officers opened fire into the building. Miraculously, only Awtry was hit. As he fell back into a hallway, other players reporting him asking, “Why didn’t you tell me it was the cops?” The raid team claimed they knocked and announced several times before putting ram to door, but other players said they heard no knock or announcement. When Awtry recovered, he was charged with attempted murder. As part of an agreement, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison. Police had broken up Awtry’s games in the past. But on those occasions, they had knocked and waited, he had let them in peacefully, and he’d been given a $100 fine.

The poker raids have gotten bad enough that the Poker Players Alliance, an interest group that lobbies to make the game legal, has established a network of attorneys around the country to help players who have been raided and arrested.

But the mission creep hasn’t stopped at poker games. By the end of the 2000s, police departments were sending SWAT teams to enforce regulatory law. In August 2010, for example, a team of heavily armed Orange County, Florida, sheriff’s deputies raided several black-and Hispanic-owned barbershops in the Orlando area. More raids followed in September and October. The Orlando Sentinel reported that police held barbers and customers at gunpoint and put some in handcuffs, while they turned the shops inside out. The police raided a total of nine shops and arrested thirty-seven people.

By all appearances, these raids were drug sweeps. Shop owners told the Sentinel that police asked them where they were hiding illegal drugs and weapons. But in the end, thirty-four of the thirty-seven arrests were for “barbering without a license,” a misdemeanor for which only three people have ever served jail time in Florida.
The most disturbing aspect of the Orlando raids was that police didn’t even attempt to obtain a legal search warrant. They didn’t need to, because they conducted the raids in conjunction with the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation. Despite the guns and handcuffs, under Florida law these were licensure inspections, not criminal searches, so no warrants were necessary.

That such “administrative searches” have become an increasingly common way for police to get around the Fourth Amendment is bad enough. More disturbing is the amount of force they’re opting to use when they do. In the fall of 2010, police in New Haven, Connecticut, sent a SWAT team to a local bar to investigate reports of underage drinking. Patrons were lined up at gunpoint while cops confiscated cell phones and checked IDs. There have been similar underage drinking SWAT raids on college fraternities. The Atlanta City Council recently agreed to pay a $1 million settlement to the customers and employees of a gay nightclub after a heavy-handed police raid in which police lined up sixty-two people on the floor at gunpoint, searched for drugs, and checked for outstanding warrants and unpaid parking tickets. Police conducted the September 2009 raid after undercover vice cops claimed to have witnessed patrons and employees openly having sex at the club. But the police never obtained a search warrant. Instead, the raid was conducted under the guise of an alcohol inspection. Police made no drug arrests, but arrested eight employees for permit violations.

Federal appeals courts have upheld these “administrative searches” even when it seems obvious that the real intent was to look for criminal activity as long as the government can plausibly claim that the primary purpose of the search was regulatory. In the case of the Orlando raids, simply noting the arrests of thirty-four unlicensed barbers would be enough to meet the test.

But the Fourth Amendment requires that searches be “reasonable.” If using a SWAT team to make sure a bar isn’t serving nineteen-year-olds is a reasonable use of force, it’s hard to imagine what wouldn’t be. At least a couple of federal appeals courts have recognized the absurdity. In 2009 the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit struck a small blow for common sense, allowing a civil rights suit to go forward against the sheriff’s department of Rapides Parish, Louisiana, after a warrantless SWAT raid on a nightclub thinly veiled as an administrative search. And in 1995 the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit made an even broader ruling, finding that having probable cause and a warrant for the arrest of one person in a club did not justify a SWAT raid and subsequent search of the entire club and everyone inside.

But other legal challenges to paramilitary-style administrative searches have been less successful. Consider the bizarre case of David Ruttenberg, owner of the Rack ‘n’ Roll pool hall in Manassas Park, Virginia. In June 2004, local police conducted a massive raid on the pool hall with more than fifty police officers, some of whom were wearing face masks, toting semi-automatic weapons, and pumping shotguns as they entered. Customers were detained, searched, and zip-tied. The police were investigating Ruttenberg for several alleged drug crimes, although he was never charged. The local narcotics task force had tried unsuccessfully to get a warrant to search Ruttenberg’s office but were denied by a judge. Instead, they simply brought along several representatives of the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and claimed that they were conducting an alcohol inspection. Ruttenberg was cited only for three alcohol violations, based on two bottles of beer a distributor had left that weren’t clearly marked as samples, and a bottle of vodka they found in his private office.

In June 2006, Ruttenberg filed a civil rights suit alleging that, among other things, using a SWAT team to conduct an alcohol inspection was an unreasonable use of force. (The town’s vendetta against Ruttenberg stretched on for years and is one of the strangest cases I’ve ever encountered. He eventually sold his bar and moved to New York.) In 2010, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit denied his claim. So for now, in the Fourth Circuit, sending a SWAT team to make sure a bar’s beer is labeled correctly is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
By the end of the decade, state and local SWAT teams were regularly being used not only for raids on poker games and gambling operations but also for immigration raids (on both businesses and private homes) and raids on massage parlors, cat houses, and unlicensed strip clubs. Today the sorts of offenses that can subject a citizen to the SWAT treatment defy caricature. If the government wants to make an example of you by pounding you with a wholly disproportionate use of force, it can. It’s rare that courts or politicians even object, much less impose consequences.

Another example is the use of these tactics on people suspected of downloading child pornography.

[More at link.]
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Re: COPWATCH

Postby fruhmenschen » Fri Jul 26, 2013 11:59 pm

see link for full story

http://www.sfgate.com/news/crime/articl ... 690120.php


CHP officer arrested, accused of sexual battery
PFriday, July 26, 2013
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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A California Highway Patrol officer has been arrested on suspicion of inappropriately touching a disabled man in a shopping mall bathroom while off-duty.

Sacramento police Officer Doug Morse said 47-year-old Jeffery Closson was booked into jail Friday for investigation of sexual battery and disorderly misconduct. He was released on $5,000 bail.
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Re: COPWATCH

Postby fruhmenschen » Sat Jul 27, 2013 12:00 am

see link for full story

http://www.sfgate.com/news/crime/articl ... 690120.php


CHP officer arrested, accused of sexual battery
July 26, 2013

A California Highway Patrol officer has been arrested on suspicion of inappropriately touching a disabled man in a shopping mall bathroom while off-duty.

Sacramento police Officer Doug Morse said 47-year-old Jeffery Closson was booked into jail Friday for investigation of sexual battery and disorderly misconduct. He was released on $5,000 bail.
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Re: COPWATCH

Postby fruhmenschen » Mon Jul 29, 2013 10:17 am

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http://www.courthousenews.com/2013/07/29/59753.htm

Cops Sicced Dog on Sleeping Woman, She Says
After police watched their attack dog Vortex rip apart a dozing woman's leg, the cops told its handler, "Severe trauma to the leg? ... Awesome ... you deserve a Slurpee," the woman claims in court.
Katie Hess sued Salt Lake County, the Unified Police Department of Greater Salt Lake, Police Chief James Winder and Officer Kevin Barrett, in Federal Court.
Hess claims that she was attacked by the "vicious and aggressive" police dog Vortex, after a night out in suburban Holladay in May 2012.
Hess claims that and a friend, nonparty Gavin DeGraw, called for a taxi from an Arby's restaurant after one of their bicycles broke down. She says the taxi dispatcher told them they could take their bikes in a cab.
But when the cab came, the driver "indicated that he would not allow plaintiff and Gavin DeGraw to put their bikes in the back," according to the complaint.
DeGraw and the driver argued, and "as the taxi driver was leaving, Gavin DeGraw made a derogatory racial comment about the taxi cab driver that appeared to be of foreign and/or Arabian descent," Hess says in the lawsuit.
She adds: "That immediately upon hearing the comment, the driver turned his SUV around and headed towards Gavin DeGraw. Katie Hess describes the taxi driver as a very, very large Arab man.
"The taxi driver thereafter left his vehicle and physically pursued Gavin DeGraw. Both DeGraw and the taxi driver began to exchange blows. During this time, Katie Hess yelled at both men to stop fighting."
The driver got the better of DeGraw and refused to let him up, until "Hess yelled that she was going to take the taxi cab to go get the cops if the taxi driver did not stop," she says in the complaint. "At this point, the taxi driver did get off of DeGraw and released him."
DeGraw told Hess to head home and he would take care of the bikes. But Hess says she heard sirens and decided to wait for DeGraw near a high school.
She adds: "That due to the lateness of the hour, plaintiff became very tired.
"Katie Hess believes she sat waiting for Gavin DeGraw for 20 to 30 minutes.
"According to plaintiff, the next thing she remembers after sitting down and waiting was that a dog barked. Plaintiff noted that almost immediately, a dog came over a wall and attacked her, chewing on her right leg, breaking her leg and ripping her leg apart and opening large gaping wounds.
"Katie Hess screamed at the dog to stop and began using her free leg to try and push the dog away from her. Plaintiff was not initially aware that the dog biting her leg was a police dog.
"At the same time that plaintiff was attacked by the dog, plaintiff recalls that three to four police officers appeared at the area and watched the attack.
"That the officers of the Unified Police of Greater Salt Lake did not immediately request that the dog stop the attack.
"Plaintiff began to yell for the dog to stop and for the officers to stop the dog. That several moments passed before the police officers which were present responded.
"Finally, one of the officers responded by telling plaintiff to lie still.
"Due to the pain and the dog still gripping her leg, plaintiff had a hard time holding still.
"That finally one of the officers came and physically got the dog off Hess.
"Immediately after the dog attack, an officer went to Katie Hess and grabbed her arm, ordering her to stand up. Katie Hess was able to get up onto her left leg and attempted to get up onto her right leg which had been broken, but was in so much pain that she could not bare to put weight on the right leg.
"After plaintiff was not able to stand, due to problems with plaintiff's leg, one of the officers for the Salt Lake County Sheriff and/or the Unified Police of Greater Salt Lake became enraged and yelled at plaintiff to stand up.
"Plaintiff did tell the police officer that 'I am trying to but something is very wrong with my leg.'
"The officer did then grab Hess by her hair and yanked her up on her feet, drug [sic] her up on the grass close to the street, threw her on her stomach, and handcuffed her hands behind her back. ...
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Re: COPWATCH

Postby fruhmenschen » Fri Aug 02, 2013 10:28 pm

another lawsuit

see link for full story


a species that hires mercenaries to protect them loose the ability
to protect themselves and are doomed to extinction


see link for full story

O.C. deputy charged with pepper spraying teen's pizza



http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-m ... 2339.story

Pepper spray pizza

An Orange County deputy is accused of pepper-spraying a teen's pizza
By Anh Do

August 2, 2013

A sheriff's deputy in Orange County will be arraigned Monday for allegedly pepper-spraying a teenager's pizza during a traffic stop.

The teen, authorities said, and a group of friends later became sick after eating the pepper-spray tainted pizza.

Authorities charged Juan Tavera, 30, with one misdemeanor count of assault or battery by a public officer. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of one year in jail, according to the Orange County district attorney's office....
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Re: COPWATCH

Postby fruhmenschen » Sun Aug 25, 2013 12:08 am

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Re: COPWATCH

Postby fruhmenschen » Tue Nov 05, 2013 11:31 pm

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Former appraiser, wife of DEA agent sentenced to 19 months in prison
October 31, 2013 6:16 PM




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By Rich Lord / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette


http://www.post-gazette.com/local/south ... 1310310267


A former appraiser who committed fraud and later spooked the Drug Enforcement Administration into providing her with round-the-clock security was sentenced today to 19 months in prison.

Kimberly Baldwin, 46, of Jefferson Hills, inflated appraisals in order to justify loans from 2003 through 2006, costing banks more than $1 million.

Last year, while facing resulting charges of wire fraud conspiracy, she told her husband, a DEA special agent, that people in a gold Buick sedan had watched their house and menaced her. She later wrote two fake threat notes -- including one on a dollar bill -- which were presented to the DEA as indications that someone was harassing her family.
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Re: COPWATCH

Postby Freitag » Mon Dec 02, 2013 1:03 pm

http://www.courthousenews.com/2013/11/27/63281.htm

AUSTIN (CN) - A high school student suffered a brain injury and is in a coma after a Texas sheriff's deputy Tasered him without cause in a school hallway, the boy's mother claims in court.
Maria Acosta sued Bastrop County, its school district and Randy McMillan, a Bastrop County sheriff's officer who works as a school resource officer.
Acosta's son suffered "a severe brain hemorrhage" when McMillan Tasered him after the boy had successfully intervened to stop two girls fighting at Cedar Creek High School a week ago, the mother claims in her federal lawsuit.
Acosta's son, N.N., "stepped in to break up the fight" on Nov. 20, to stop it from escalating before police could arrive, the mother says.
School officials called McMillan and another security officer to break up the fight.
Acosta claims that her son had "diffused the situation" by the time the officers arrived.
McMillan told him to step back, and he did so, with his hands in the air, but McMillan Tasered him anyway, the mother says.
Her son struck his head on the floor as he fell, and McMillan then put the unconscious boy in handcuffs. Acosta claims school officials "delayed in calling for medical assistance even though N.N. was in an obvious emergency medical situations."

[...]
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Re: COPWATCH

Postby fruhmenschen » Fri Dec 13, 2013 2:01 am

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/12/ ... he-police/

December 12, 2013
Where’s the Body Count from Shootings by the Police?
by JAMES BOVARD

President Barack Obama, calling for new gun control legislation earlier this year, appealed to “all the Americans who are counting on us to keep them safe from harm.” He also declared, “If there is even one life we can save, we’ve got an obligation to try.” But some perils are not worth registering on Obama’s scorecard.

While the president frequently declaims on the dangers of privately-owned guns, his administration is scorning a mandate to track how many Americans are shot and killed each year by government agents. The same 1994 law that temporarily banned the sale of assault weapons also required the federal government to compile data on police shootings nationwide. However, neither the Justice Department nor most local police departments have bothered to tally such occurrences.

Instead, the Justice Department relied on the National Crime Survey of citizens to gauge the police use of force. But as Prof. James Fyfe, one of the nation’s foremost experts on police shootings, observed in 2001, that survey relies on “questions about how often the respondents have been subjected to police use of force. Since dead people can’t participate in such a survey, this work tells us nothing about how often police kill.”

Many police shootings involve self-defense against violent criminals or protection of people against dangerous culprits in the act of wreaking havoc. However, killings by police are not a negligible proportion of the nation’s firearms death toll. Shootings by police accounted for almost 10 percent of the homicides in Los Angeles County in 2010, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Jim Fisher, a former FBI agent and criminal law professor, compiled a database of police shootings and estimated that in the United States in 2011 police shot more than 1,100 people, killing 607. Fisher relied on the Internet to track the casualties, and the actual toll may be significantly higher. (Many police departments are secretive about their shootings and succeed in withholding either numbers or key details from the public.) Fisher’s numbers do not include cases of off-duty police who shoot acquaintances, such as the recent case of the married veteran D.C. policeman convicted of murdering his girlfriend and leaving their 11-month-old baby to die in an overheated SUV to avoid paying child support.

According to the FBI, 323 people were killed nationwide by rifles in 2011 — less than 4 percent of the total deaths by firearms. The official statistics are not broken down by the type of rifle, so it is impossible to know how many of the victims were slain with the type of weapons that Sen. Dianne Feinstein and presumably Obama classify as assault weapons. Nationwide, 10 percent of the killings with rifles were committed by law enforcement officers, according to the FBI. Ironically, the raw numbers of killings by police are tossed into the firearm-fatality totals that some politicians invoke to drum up support for confiscating privately owned guns.

Protecting killers

Not only do government agencies fail to track official violence against Americans; they also sometimes preemptively exonerate all such attacks. A 2001 Justice Department report, “Policing and Homicide, 1976–1998,” labeled everyone in the nation who perished as a result of a police shooting as “felons justifiably killed by police.” There were hundreds, if not thousands, of people shot unjustifiably by the police in those decades, but their innocence vanished in the flicker of a federal label. The Justice Department was so embarrassed by the report’s “lack of distinction between justifiable police shootings and murders, that it did not send out its usual promotional material announcing the report,” according to the New York Times.

The odds of an honest, thorough investigation of a police killing are the same as the odds that a politician’s campaign speech will be strictly assessed for perjury. At the state and local level the deck is often stacked to vindicate all police shootings. Police unions have strong- armed legislation that guarantees their members sweeping procedural advantages in any post-shooting investigation.

For instance, Maryland police are protected by a Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights that prohibits questioning a police officer for 10 days after any incident in which he or she used deadly force. “A lawyer or a police union official is always summoned to the scene of a shooting to make sure no one speaks to the officer who pulled the trigger,” the Washington Post noted in an exposé of the Prince George’s County, Maryland, police. “Between 1990 and 2001 Prince George’s police shot 122 people…. Almost half of those shot were unarmed, and many had committed no crime.”

Forty-seven people were killed by the P.G. police in that time. Among the shootings the P.G. police department ruled as justified: “An unarmed construction worker was shot in the back after he was detained in a fast-food restaurant. An unarmed suspect died in a fusillade of 66 bullets as he tried to flee in a car from police. A homeless man was shot when police mistook his portable radio for a gun. And an unarmed man was killed after he pulled off the road to relieve himself.”

The situation in Clark County, Nevada, which had one of the highest rates of police-committed homicides in the nation, is equally perverse. An excellent Las Vegas Review-Journal series in late 2011 noted, “In 142 fatal police shootings in the Las Vegas Valley over a little more than the past 20 years, no coroner’s jury has returned a ruling adverse to police.” But that nonconviction rate actually convicts the entire system. “The deck is stacked in favor of police well before the case gets to the [coroner’s] jurors. That’s because the ‘neutral arbiter of the facts’ is the deputy district attorney who already believes that no crime has been committed. In a comparison of inquest transcripts, evidence files, and police reports dating to 1990, the Review-Journal found that prosecutors commonly act more like defense attorneys, shaping inquest presentations to cast officers in the most positive light.”

Another problem is that, as Nevada lawyer Brent Bryson observed, “Frequently in fatal shootings, you just have officers’ testimony and no other witnesses. And most people just don’t want to believe that a police officer would behave wrongly.”

Investigations of shootings by police in Las Vegas were stymied in 2010 and 2011 because “police unions balked at inquest reforms, first by advising members not to testify at the hearings and then helping officers file a lawsuit challenging the new system’s constitutionality,” according to the Review-Journal. Las Vegas is so deferential to police that, in cases “where an officer shoots but only wounds or misses entirely … the district attorney looks at the case only if the shooting subject is being prosecuted,” the Review-Journal noted.

Federal cops

Federal agents who kill Americans enjoy similar legal privileges. The Justice Department’s view of the untouchability of federal lawmen is clear from its action in the Idaho trial of FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi. Horiuchi gained renown in 1992 after he shot and killed 42-year-old Vicki Weaver as she stood in the door of her cabin holding her 10-month-old baby. Horiuchi had shot her husband in the back moments earlier, though Randy Weaver posed no threat to federal agents at the time. The FBI initially labeled its Ruby Ridge operation a big success and indicated Vicki Weaver was a fair target; later the agency claimed that her killing was accidental.

Boundary County, Idaho, prosecutor Denise Woodbury filed manslaughter charges against Horiuchi in 1997. FBI Director Louis Freeh was outraged that a local court would attempt to hold an FBI agent legally responsible for the killing. He declared that Horiuchi had an “exemplary record” and was “an outstanding agent and continues to have my total support and confidence.” Freeh added, “The FBI is doing everything within its power to ensure [Horiuchi] is defended to the full extent and that his rights as a federal law-enforcement officer are fully protected.” Justice Department lawyers persuaded a judge to move Horiuchi’s case from a state court to a federal court, where federal agencies have far more procedural advantages. Although a confidential Justice Department report concluded that Horiuchi acted unconstitutionally, Justice Department lawyers argued vigorously that he was exempt from any state or local prosecution because he was carrying out federal orders at the time he gunned Vicki Weaver down.

Federal judge Edward Lodge found in 1998 that the state of Idaho could not prosecute Horiuchi for the killing, in a ruling focusing on Horiuchi’s “subjective beliefs”: As long as Horiuchi supposedly did not believe he was violating anyone’s rights or acting wrongfully, then he could not be tried.

The judge blamed Vicki Weaver for her own death, ruling that “it would be objectively reasonable for Mr. Horiuchi to believe that one would not expect a mother to place herself and her baby behind an open door outside the cabin after a shot had been fired and her husband had called out that he had been hit.” Thus, if an FBI agent wrongfully shoots one family member, the government somehow becomes entitled to slay the rest of the family unless they run and hide.

The greater the automatic presumption that government shootings are justified, the more arbitrary power police will have over Americans. And this growing sense of legal inferiority to officialdom will naturally make gun owners ever more attached to their own firearms. According to Obama and other anti-gun politicians, this is simply evidence of paranoia — and another reason to take away people’s guns before they do harm.

The federal government has no credibility condemning vast numbers of private gun owners as long as it refuses to compile the casualty count from government agents. Washington has deluged state and local law-enforcement agencies with billions of dollars in aid in recent years but will not even ask the recipients for honest body counts. No amount of political tub-thumping can change the fact that Americans are far more likely to be killed by police than by assault weapons.
GOP dislikes sitting congressman, eyes DWI pol with secret family
http://nypost.com/2013/12/11/gop-dislik ... et-family/
December 11, 2013 | 5:21pm
Republicans are so nervous about Staten Island Rep. Michael Grimm’s re-election chances that they’ve quietly reached out to former GOP Congressman Vito Fossella — who quit five years ago after confessing to having a secret second family — to make a comeback for his old seat, The Post has learned.
Grimm is currently the subject of an ongoing Justice Department probe that centers on whether his campaign solicited illegal donations from foreigners during his 2010 campaign.
Grimm, an ex-Marine and FBI agent, denies any wrongdoing.


see link for full story
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/12 ... t-website/
Homeland Security department fires employee over racist website
December 11, 2013
The Homeland Security Department has fired an employee who runs a website predicting and advocating a race war, about four months after he was put on paid administrative leave.
Ayo Kimathi was an acquisitions officer for Immigration and Customs Enforcement who dealt with small businesses. He also runs the website War on the Horizon, which includes descriptions of an "unavoidable, inevitable clash with the white race." Kimathi is black


see link for full story



http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/d ... an-missing

Former FBI agent missing in Iran was working for the CIA – report
• Robert Levinson went missing in March 2007 in Iran
• CIA alleged to have paid £2.5m to family to prevent lawsuit
Thursday 12 December 2013 19.37 EST


Robert Levinson Robert Levinson went missing in Iran nearly six years ago. Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images

A retired FBI agent missing for seven years after disappearing in Iran was on an unauthorized mission for the CIA, according to an explosive new report on Thursday that contradicted the official explanation that he was on private business.

see link for full story

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... le/282287/

Ex-CIA, NSA, FBI, and GCHQ Employees Urge Former Colleagues to Blow the Whistle
Daniel Ellsberg and other former leakers plead for current staffers to follow Edward Snowden's example.
Dec 12 2013


An open letter published in The Guardian features seven signatories—including Daniel Ellsberg, who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers, as well as ex-employees of the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and GCHQ—urging their former colleagues to follow Edward Snowden's example and blow the whistle on ongoing crimes and misconduct within the national-security state.

One portion of the letter says:

Hidden away in offices of various government departments, intelligence agencies, police forces and armed forces are dozens and dozens of people who are very much upset by what our societies are turning into: at the very least, turnkey tyrannies.

One of them is you.

You're thinking:

Undermining democracy and eroding civil liberties isn't put explicitly in your job contract.
You grew up in a democratic society and want to keep it that way
You were taught to respect ordinary people's right to live a life in privacy
You don't really want a system of institutionalized strategic surveillance that would make the dreaded Stasi green with envy—do you?

Still, why bother? What can one person do? Well, Edward Snowden just showed you what one person can do. He stands out as a whistleblower both because of the severity of the crimes and misconduct that he is divulging to the public—and the sheer amount of evidence he has presented us with so far—more is coming. But Snowden shouldn't have to stand alone, and his revelations shouldn't be the only ones.

You can be part of the solution; provide trustworthy journalists—either from old media (like this newspaper) or from new media (such as WikiLeaks) with documents that prove what illegal, immoral, wasteful activites are going on where you work.

There IS strength in numbers. You won't be the first—nor the last—to follow your conscience and let us know what's being done in our names. Truth is coming—it can't be stopped. Crooked politicians will be held accountable. It's in your hands to be on the right side of history and accelerate the process.

Courage is contagious.


see link for full story
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/1 ... story.html
Very few shockers in John Silber’s FBI files

December 12, 2013
Background checks were done in 1983 and 1987 on John R. Silber, who was appointed to three separate commission posts during the Reagan administration.
John R. Silber led a very public life, overseeing the transformation of Boston University, nearly becoming governor of Massachusetts, and getting into so many verbal scrapes with critics that his penchant for provocative rejoinders even had a name, the “Silber shocker.”
But FBI agents who did background checks on Silber in the 1980s managed to unearth a few secrets, sort of: In 1947, for example, Silber got a B in Old Testament history and literature at Yale Divinity School, and two years later he failed a graduate course at the University of Texas at Austin.
A 516-page FBI file, compiled when Silber was appointed to three presidential panels during the Reagan administration, is packed with testimonials to the irascible Silber’s patriotism, work ethic, dedication to family, and even his legendary stubbornness. Unlike another BU luminary, Martin Luther King Jr., who was the subject of a controversial 17,000-page FBI file, Silber’s dossier is downright flattering.
“The appointee is of very, very fine character, a great scholar, very patriotic . . . and a strong supporter of national defense and this nation’s present administration,” an FBI interviewer wrote in paraphrasing the opinion of Arthur Metcalf, chairman of BU’s board of trustees, in 1983. “The only criticism [Metcalf] has concerning the appointee is the appointee’s lack of patience with ‘suffering fools.’ ”
Of course, the file suggests that agents did not speak with many Silber critics, such as leftist historian and BU faculty member Howard Zinn, who twice helped lead faculty votes that unsuccessfully attempted to oust Silber as president. Silber once called Zinn a prime example of teachers “who poison the well of academe.” About the only substantive concern the FBI raises about Silber is that he may have strong-armed BU personnel to support then-Boston Mayor Kevin White in the 1970s.
But
the file, released to the Boston-based public records group MuckRock after a formal records request, provides an unusual window into what associates of Silber, who died in 2012, said about him when they could have faced serious consequences for not telling the truth.
The FBI conducted the extensive checks on Silber in 1983 and again in 1987 when President Ronald Reagan appointed Silber to three different commissions, including the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America.
FBI agents checked credit databases, arrest records, and court files from Boston to San Francisco for any derogatory information. Agents also conducted dozens of interviews with Silber’s neighbors, friends, and employees.
see link for full story
How dumb are American voters?
This FBI Perp is still in office.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/governme ... 12-12.html

The FBI 's point man in Congress


Dec. 12, 2013
House Intelligence Committee chair discusses support for NSA spying laws
SUMMARY
President Obama has two panels reviewing NSA policy, with recommendations for possible changes expected by year's end. Margaret Warner talks to Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, for his perspective on U.S. spying laws and rebuilding trust with the American public and abroad.
MARGARET WARNER: Chairman Rogers, thanks for joining us.
REP. MIKE ROGERS, R-Mich.: Thanks for having me.
MARGARET WARNER: As you know, the president is reviewing NSA surveillance policy. Whatever changes are going to happen are coming out later this month.
If he were seeking your counsel, what is the most profound thing you think he needs to address?
MIKE ROGERS: Part of the problem with where we're at is that we're fighting perception about what people think is happening vs. what's actually happening.
And so that's been our biggest challenge on the education piece. So, I think the first round, we all want to agree that these programs have kept Americans safe. They have kept our allies safe. There are multiple levels of oversight that no other intelligence service in the world has, like the United States intelligence oversight, between the courts and the Congress and the inspector general, and then the FBI, the Department of Justice. I mean, you name it. It has it all.
So I think what we can do is have some confidence-builders for the American people to look at this and understand, ah, one person can't run off and listen your phone call or read your e-mail. None of that is happening.
MARGARET WARNER: So, are you saying the president needs to maybe bring more transparency, do exactly what's being done, who is doing it, and what the safeguards are?
MIKE ROGERS: I think that would be incredibly helpful for the president to do that.
MARGARET WARNER: But isn't there then a tension between that and how much you want to divulge or he wants to divulge?
MIKE ROGERS: Well, absolutely.



Did FBI agents murder Luna?



see link for full story


http://www.yardbird.com/luna.htm

http://beforeitsnews.com/conspiracy-the ... 46928.html


http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle ... story.html
A decade later, prosecutor Luna’s death still a mystery
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Remembering Jonathan Luna: FBI Cover-up of a Murdered Federal Prosecutor Ties in with the DC Madam Murder
Sunday, February 27, 2011 15:05
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Re: COPWATCH

Postby fruhmenschen » Wed Jul 23, 2014 10:18 pm

Judge: Jersey police captain used FBI database to vet baseball teammates


http://www.philly.com/philly/news/new_j ... mates.html



[vimeo][test_yt][/test_yt][/vimeo]
July 23, 2014, 7:31 PM

A suspended New Jersey Human Services Police captain has been convicted of using a secure FBI database to conduct background checks on members of his minor league baseball team.

Brian Brady, 52, of Sparta, also directed subordinate officers to use the National Crime Information Center database to run a background check on a home health aide he was considering hiring for his mother, according to evidence prosecutors presented during a six-week bench trial in Mercer County Superior Court.

A judge found Brady guilty of official misconduct and computer theft, the state Attorney General’s Office announced this week.

Criminal Justice Division Director Elie Honig said in a statement that Brady “repeatedly treated a restricted law enforcement database like his personal information clearinghouse.”

“There’s no room in law enforcement for this type of rogue behavior,” Honig said.

Brady was acquitted of additional counts of official misconduct, theft by deception and tampering with public records related to allegations he used a state-issued vehicle, gas card and E-Z Pass for personal trips, then falsified time sheets to make it appear as though he was working.

Brady, who also formerly served as a councilman and mayor in Sparta, was suspended in May 2011 from his post as the third highest-ranking officer in the Human Services Police Force, which guards state-run developmental centers, psychiatric hospitals and child protection agency offices.
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Re: COPWATCH

Postby fruhmenschen » Tue Aug 19, 2014 1:14 am

http://www.9news.com/story/news/local/i ... /14271183/



Father of police brutality victim blasts governor
August 18, 2014


DENVER - The family of a man beaten by Denver police five years ago is blasting Governor John Hickenlooper on his Facebook page.

Anthony DeHerrera is the father of Michael DeHerrera, who was beaten by two Denver officers in LoDo in April 2009. Video showed that Michael DeHerrera was speaking on his phone when the officers knocked him to the ground and hit him repeatedly.

In a post on the governor's Facebook page Monday, Anthony DeHerrera posted a message:

"We tried meeting with you while you were Mayor [of Denver] and you ignored us, then when you were running for Governor you called for the FBI/DOJ to do a investigation."

DeHerrera says the federal investigation has fizzled without giving the family the conclusions they had hoped to receive. The post ends questioning Hickenloopers intentions:

"Was it really just a ploy for you to get votes while running for Governor ????"

A Hickenlooper spokeswoman tells 9Wants to Know that the case resides under the City and County of Denver jurisdiction and "it would not be appropriate for the governor to comment on or meet with anyone involved."

9Wants to Know contacted the DeHerrera family asking about the timing of their post. Anthony said the police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, has renewed the public's focus on problems of police brutality.

"My son's case made national news, too, and nothing's happened," Anthony DeHerrera told 9Wants to Know.
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Re: COPWATCH

Postby fruhmenschen » Sat Sep 06, 2014 10:53 am

see link for full story



Former top lawyer for city Public Advocate says NYPD cops roughed her up during unwarranted arrest: suit
Chaumtoli Huq, 42, says in the suit filed late Tuesday in Manhattan Federal Court that she was waiting for her husband and two young children outside a Times Square eatery when cops arrested her for no reason.



http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/law ... -1.1926329




Wednesday, September 3, 2014, 1:10 PM

A former top lawyer for Public Advocate Letitia James isn’t exactly advocating for the NYPD’s policing practices.

In a blistering lawsuit filed late Tuesday in Manhattan Federal Court, Chaumtoli Huq, 42, says NYPD officers used “unreasonable and wholly unprovoked force” when they arrested her without cause while she was leaving a pro-Palestinian protest in July.

The bust was “characteristic of a pattern and practice of the NYPD in aggressive overpolicing of people of color and persons lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights,” the suit says.

Huq, who says in her lawsuit she’d taken a leave of absence as James’ general counsel to work on factory conditions in her native Bangladesh a day before the arrest, says she believes she was targeted because she’s a Muslim woman.

Huq was wearing a traditional South Asian tunic while waiting for her husband and their 6- and 10-year-old kids to come out from a bathroom stop at Ruby Tuesday's in Times Square when she was told to leave by an officer, the suit says.

She said she explained she was waiting for her family and then the officer “without any legal basis, grabbed Ms. Huq, turned her and pushed her against the wall and placed her under arrest.”
Huq was waiting for her husband and two young children who were going to the bathroom inside the Ruby Tuesday’s in Times Square in July. Google Maps Huq was waiting for her husband and two young children who were going to the bathroom inside the Ruby Tuesday’s in Times Square in July.

When she said she was in pain, one of the officers, Ryan Lathrop, allegedly told her, “Shut your mouth.” When he found out she had a different last name than her hubby, he told her “In America, wives take the names of their husbands.”

She was held for nine hours after the officers falsely claimed she had refused instructions to move and had “flailed her arms and twisted her body” to make it hard for them to handcuff her, the suit says.

She accepted an Adjournment in Contemplation of Dismissal five days later, meaning the charges against her will be dropped if she does not got rearrested within the next few months.

Her lawyer, Rebecca Heinegg, said her client accepted the plea deal because her planned fellowship in Bangladesh made it impossible for her to fight the charges over a protracted period of time.

Huq’s suit blames the officers’ conduct on “city policies, practices and/or customs of failing to supervise, train, instruct and discipline police officers and encouraging their misconduct.” It also says the department has a “practice or custom of officers lying under oath, falsely swearing out criminal complaints, or otherwise falsifying or fabricating evidence.”
New York City Public Advocate Letitia James, left, has called for NYPD cops to be equipped with cameras to record their interactions with people. Vanessa A. Alvarez/AP New York City Public Advocate Letitia James, left, has called for NYPD cops to be equipped with cameras to record their interactions with people.

While the suit describes Huq as being “on leave” from the Public Advocate’s office, a rep for James said she no longer works there, and her last day of work was July 18 — the day before the arrest.

James didn’t comment on the suit, but has been a critic of the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk in minority communities and a proponent of body cameras for NYPD officers — which could have come in handy for this case.

Huq’s suit seeks unspecified damages for her “physical, psychological and emotional injuries, mental anguish, suffering, lost wages, humiliation and embarrassment” — and also retraining for Midtown South cops.

A rep for the city Law Department said, “We will review the lawsuit.”

Huq told the Daily News via email from Bangladesh that she had gone to the rally not “as a lawyer, but as a mom.”
Huq says in her suit that an officer who arrested told her to "shut your mouth," after she complained that she was in pain. Mohammed N. Mujumder via Facebook Huq says in her suit that an officer who arrested told her to "shut your mouth," after she complained that she was in pain.

“I was hesitant to bring a case. My job is to be behind the scenes, and help all New Yorkers,” she said, but she realized “that I can use what happened to me to raise awareness about overpolicing in communities of color. I want there to be a dialogue on policing and community relations,” she said.

DNAinfo, which first reported on Huq’s arrest, said she filed a complaint about the officers’ conduct with the Civilian Complaint Review Board.

NY1 reported last month that Lathrop is also under investigation by the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau, which is investigating an incident in which the cop allegedly confiscated the phone of someone who was taping him and then roughed him up.
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Re: COPWATCH

Postby fruhmenschen » Mon Sep 15, 2014 12:55 am

A Book for the People of Ferguson -- And Oppressed People Everywhere




September 14, 2014

Fred Ross's change-making Axioms for Organizers is updated for the Internet age, and for a new generation battling discrimination and police brutality.

http://prospect.org/article/book-people ... everywhere

Most residents of Ferguson, Missouri, have probably never heard of Fred Ross, Sr., but they could use his help now. Ferguson's population is two-thirds African American, but the mayor, almost all members of the city council and school board, and 95 percent of the police department is white, and in last year's municipal election only 7 percent of blacks came to the polls.

Ross—perhaps the most influential (but little-known) community organizer in American history—had a successful career mobilizing people to challenge police brutality, fight segregation, and organize voter registration and voter turnout campaigns. Ross taught people how to channel their anger and frustrations into building powerful grassroots organizations that can win concrete victories that change institutions and improve people's lives. He understood that while sporadic protests can draw attentions to long-neglected problems, it requires the hard day-to-day intentional work of organizing to build power and give people a real voice in the key decisions that shape their living and working conditions

Although Ross died twenty-two years ago, his influence continues in the thousands of people whom he taught the tools of organizing and in the ideas found in his powerful book, Axioms for Organizers, which has just been republished as an e-book in English and Spanish.

Those who've heard of Ross typically associate him with Cesar Chavez, the legendary founder of the United Farm Workers union. It was Ross who first identified, recruited and trained Chavez to become a leader and an activist. "Fred became sort of my hero,” Chavez recalled. “I saw him organize, and I wanted to learn." But that was only one episode in Ross's long career as a professional troublemaker.
Ross dedicated his life to fighting racism, discrimination, and other injustices by organizing working men and women to help themselves by building powerful grassroots organizations.

Ross dedicated his life to fighting racism, discrimination, and other injustices by organizing working men and women to help themselves by building powerful grassroots organizations. Over five decades he helped build the labor movement, organized voter registration drives among Latinos, trained people to mobilize issue campaigns around police brutality and segregated schools, and built bridges between labor, religious, civic, and neighborhood organizations. He was a pioneer in opening doors to women and people of color, encouraging their full participation in leadership roles.

In 1989, Ross pulled together his ideas about building successful movements in a short book (or long pamphlet), Axioms for Organizers. The forty-eight axioms encapsulate Ross's thoughts on a range of subjects, organized into six chapters called "Characteristics of an Organizer," "Fundamentals: Winning People to the Cause," "Hope, Motivation, Action," "The Long Haul—Perseverance," "Ask and Listen," and "Pitfalls."

Ross' son, Fred Ross, Jr.—also a seasoned and successful organizer—added a chapter to the e-book called "Organizing in the Internet Age," and included a short biography of his father, as well as a thoughtful introduction by former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who is now a professor at University of California-Berkeley. The book is available for $2.50 through all major e-book sellers.

The bilingual book captures a lifetime of Ross's work with disenfranchised and oppressed people and their struggle to win respect and dignity.

The book is chock full of Ross' pithy tips for troublemakers. A sampling:

"A good organizer is a social arsonist who goes around setting people on fire."
"The duty of the organizer is to provide people with the opportunity to work for what they believe in."
"To win the hearts and minds of people, forget the dry facts and statistics; tell them the stories that won you to the cause."
"90 percent of organizing is follow-up."
"If you think you can do it for people, you've stopped understanding what it means to be an organizer."
"If you are able to achieve anything big in life it's because you paid attention to the 'little' things."
"When you find 'live wires' put them to work immediately. Find something they can do—any little thing—get them started and ready to do more, or you'll lose them for the cause."
"When you are tempted to make a statement, ask a question."
"Good organizers never give up. They get the opposition to do that."

Ross was born in San Francisco, grew up in Los Angeles, and graduated from the University of Southern California in 1937, intending to become a schoolteacher. But the social and economic upheavals of the Depression led him to seek more direct ways to challenge injustice.

He organized Dust Bowlers and migrant farm workers in California's oppressive agricultural labor camps. In 1939, he became the manager of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Arvin Migratory Labor Camp near Bakersfield, the same camp John Steinbeck visited and drew on to write The Grapes of Wrath. (It was at the Arvin camp that Ross met Woody Guthrie, who was touring the camps to support union drives.) Ross was the only camp manager of 29 camps in California who challenged the accepted practice of racial segregation and agitated for the workers to run the camps themselves.

During the Second World War, when the federal government imprisoned Japanese Americans in concentration camps amid the anti-Japanese hysteria of the war period, Ross worked with the War Relocation Authority, helping thousands of residents get jobs and housing so they could get out of the camps. He helped challenge the discriminatory practices of employers against Japanese workers.

After the war, Ross spearheaded eight Civic Unity Leagues in California's conservative Citrus Belt, bringing Mexican Americans and African Americans together to battle segregation in schools, skating rinks and movie theatres. Through voter registration drives and community organizing, Ross organized parents to fight the practice of segregation in local schools. In 1946, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the segregation of Mexican and Mexican American students into separate "Mexican schools" was unconstitutional, leading to the landmark legal victory, Mendez, et al v. Westminster School District. It set the precedent that foreshadowed the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, overturning legal segregation in American schools.
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In 1947, Saul Alinsky hired Ross to helped build a community organization in the Latino barrio of East Los Angeles. Ross eventually helped form chapters of the Community Service Organization (CSO), a civil rights and civic improvement group, in a number of cities in California and Arizona. The founding leaders of the CSO included members of the steelworkers, clothing workers, meat cutters, and other unions. They formed the core of CSO's early leadership who built a powerful coalition that included the NAACP, the Japanese American Citizens League, the Catholic Church, and the Jewish community. Together they fought for fair housing, employment and working conditions.

One of CSO's biggest victories came in the wake of a severe beating of seven men (five of them Latinos) by Los Angeles police on December 25, 1951, known as "Bloody Christmas," leaving the victims with broken bones and ruptured organs. Pressure from CSO forced the LA Police Department—which routinely harassed and abused blacks and Latinos—to investigate the incident. The CSO helped build the case against the abusive cops by documenting complaints and keeping up public pressure in the media. This eventually resulted in the unprecedented indictment of eight police officers—the first grand jury indictments of LAPD officers and the first criminal convictions for use of excessive force in the department's history. In addition, the LAPD suspended thirty-nine cops and transferred another fifty-four officers.

It was through his work with CSO that Ross encountered and trained many of the individuals who went on to play important roles in American political and civic life. In 1949, after building a powerful voter registration effort among Latinos and whites—adding 14,000 new voters—the CSO helped elect one of its leaders, Ed Roybal, to the L.A. City Council, the first Hispanic elected to that body. In 1962, Roybal was the first Latino from California elected to Congress, where he served with distinction for 30 years.

In 1952, while Ross was building the CSO chapter in San Jose, a public health nurse told him about Cesar Chavez, a young Navy veteran who lived with his wife in a barrio known as Sal Si Puedes ("Get Out If You Can"). Chavez at first avoided Ross, thinking he was just another white social worker or sociologist curious about barrio residents' exotic habits. But he finally agreed to meet with Ross, who trained Chavez (who eventually become CSO's statewide director) as well as a young teacher named Dolores Huerta, and Gilbert Padilla, a spotter in a dry cleaning establishment. In the 1960s, this trio joined forces to build the United Farm Workers (UFW) union.

"Fred Ross, Sr. changed my life,” Huerta recalled. “He inspired and taught me how to organize. He had so much faith in the power of ordinary people to make history."

During his fifteen-year tenure with the UFW, Ross trained 2,000 organizers who led worker strikes and consumer boycotts in every major U.S. and Canadian city, leading to major gains for farm workers and to the 1975 California Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which remains the strongest labor law in the nation today.

In the 1980s, Ross joined his son, Fred Jr., at Neighbor to Neighbor to train yet another generation of organizers to challenge U.S. aid to Nicaragua's right-wing contras, and to stop aid to the brutal Salvadoran military.

Ross's behind-the-scenes activism influenced Eleanor Roosevelt, Woody Guthrie, Bobby Kennedy, Jerry Brown, and many other notable public figures and every-day activists, including current labor leaders Eliseo Medina (former SEIU secretary-treasurer) and Maria Elena Durazo (head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor).

One reason that most Americans haven't heard about Ross is that he followed one of his most important axioms: "An organizer is a leader who does not lead but gets behind the people and pushes." Ross generally avoided the limelight and the headlines. He viewed his job as teaching others to take leadership and engage in public campaigns. In most of his jobs, he remained behind the scenes.

Carey McWilliams, author of Factories in the Fields and Southern California Country: An Island on the Land, and longtime editor of The Nation, described Ross as an "unsung hero" and called him "a man of exasperating modesty, the kind that never steps forward to claim his fair share of credit for any enterprise in which he is involved."

Ross' role as a mentor to the UFW founder was depicted in the recent Hollywood film, Cesar Chavez, with Ross played by Mark Moses. Writer and organizer Gabriel Thompson is working on a biography of Ross that will be published next year. Earlier this summer, Governor Jerry Brown—who had worked closely with Chavez during his first stint as governor in the 1970s—inducted Ross into the California Hall of Fame. For the past year, a diverse coalition of activists, clergy, and public officials has waged a campaign to encourage President Barack Obama (a one-time community organizer) to award Ross posthumously the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian award.

"We need to celebrate the unsung heroes and every day activists who've made America a better society," said Maria Elena Durazo, who grew up in a farmworker family and now heads the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. "Fred Ross Sr. dedicated his life to helping ordinary people help themselves and give them the confidence to challenge injustice. He and the legions of organizers he inspired continue to have a profound impact on the labor movement, the Latino community, and all efforts to change society for the better."

Many people who recognize Ross' remarkable legacy are now part of the Presidential Medal of Freedom crusade on his behalf. These include House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, former Secretaries of Labor Hilda Solis and Robert Reich, governors Jerry Brown of California, Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, and John Hickenlooper of Colorado, the mayors of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Houston, Portland, Sacramento, Denver, Boston, Berkeley, and Oakland.

Although Ross was invisible to the general public, he was well-known to the FBI, who followed him closely for much of his career. In 1946, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent a memo to the agency's San Diego office asking for details about Ross' activities. An index card uncovered in FBI files, from 1952, reported on Ross' work with CSO, the National Mexican American Association, the American Council of Spanish-Speaking People, and "Attorney Carey McWilliams and other radicals." The FBI agent or informant noted that Ross "[a]ttended meetings recently to protest police brutality and persecution of minority groups."

Hoover correctly viewed Ross as a threat to the establishment and the status quo. But the radical ideas of one generation are often the common sense of subsequent generations, so now Ross is finally getting the attention he deserves.






About the Author

Peter Dreier, who teaches politics at Occidental College, is the author of The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (Nation Books, 2012).
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Re: COPWATCH

Postby fruhmenschen » Wed Sep 17, 2014 12:29 am

http://www.courthousenews.com/2014/09/16/71423.htm



Tuesday, September 16, 2014Last Update: 11:06 AM PT

Cameras Ain't Illegal, Observer Tells Cops


PHILADELLPHIA (CN) - Philadelphia police roughed up a psychotherapist and "trained legal observer" for photographing an arrest of an anti-fracking demonstrator at the Philadelphia Convention Center, she claims in court.
Amanda Geraci sued Philadelphia and four named police officers on Monday in Federal Court.
It is the fifth lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Pennsylvania since 2013 concerning unlawful apprehension of citizens photographing police officers.
Until Monday, the most recent came in July when a Temple University student was handcuffed after photographing police officers arrest partygoers near the university.
Geraci claims she was observing a protest against hydraulic fracking at the convention center when a man was taken inside because officers said he had struck one of them with a wooden spoon he was using to play an improvised instrument.
Defendant Officer Dawn Brown yelled at Geraci not to interfere with the arrest, then pinned her against a pillar supporting the convention center, Geraci says.
"Ms. Geraci responded to defendant Officer Brown in a calm, professional tone which she is trained to use to de-escalate tense situations and attempted to minimize defendant Officer Brown's aggression," the complaint states.
Other officers surrounded Geraci and Brown to prevent further photographing.
Geraci says that when Brown released her, she had red marks on her neck where Brown had restrained her.
"The defendant officers' actions were motivated by their efforts to retaliate against Ms. Geraci for her actions in attempting to photograph other Philadelphia police officers conducting an arrest of a political demonstrator," the complaint states.
Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey has sent numerous memoranda to police officers informing them of citizens' right to photograph officers in the course of their jobs, but has not implemented proper training, according to the complaint.
Geraci seek damages for First Amendment retaliation and unlawful use of force.
She is represented by Molly Tack-Hooper with the ACLU of Pennsylvania.
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