He was a nice enough guy that used to hang out at Fast Eddies Sports Bar in Fairfax, VA. I saw him there often just tending a beer and minding his own business.
If you can believe it, he was an optometrist at a Wal-Mart that just measured eyeballs and wrote prescriptions. If he was a bookie (as alleged) then I never saw anything that gave him away.
I followed his story in the paper and was surprised to hear that a 17-year veteran of the Fairfax County Police was the one that shot him. Apparently, he said he was bumped and accidentally discharged his gun DIRECTLY INTO SAL'S CHEST.
The police department eventually settled with the family for negligent homicide. That was only after they fought tooth and nail to protect a cop that didn't know how to control a deadly weapon.
In the end, I think the cop got a 3 week suspension. AFAIK, he's still on the FCPD.
It's shit like this that flies in the face of all those "but most cops are not bad guys" arguments.
If an organization fights to protect bad guys, I don't care how much good they do: they are complicit in furthering criminal behavior. And they're in a position of trust, at that!
It's an open secret that cops lie to protect other cops.
Why do we allow this? Any other person in a special position of trust and responsibility that contravenes their duty gets _extra_ punishment.
Lon Horiuchi was an FBI sniper that shot Vicki Weaver in the back while holding her infant daughter in her arms: case dismissed. That cop that pepper sprayed those protesting kids at UC Davis, John Pike, was never even charged for "lack of evidence" (nevermind that video of him doing so was on every news show in the country that week). The FBI and BATFE set the Branch Davidians' home on fire, burning up the children inside.
Instead of meaningful outrage, we simply let cops get away with murder, literally.
I was trying to find out more about this case and was surprised not to find any direct Wikipedia mention for it, after digging a little bit, I found out that this case was removed from Wikipedia entry 'List of cases of police brutality' about 3 weeks ago, under the comment "no evidence that this belongs as a brutality case"
Although I don't know anything about the facts, and it might have been technically correct by that Wikipedia editor, this just feels as the opposite of justice.
The article mentions one case where a judge refused to issue a search warrant for a narcotics investigation and instead the police brought representatives from the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and raided the place with a swat team to conduct an alcohol inspection. What did they find?
Two sample bottles of beer that weren't labeled as samples and a bottle of vodka in the office. The fourth circuit court of appeals upheld the search. According to the article: 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.
Sadly, yes, it is the America that America wants, as far as I can tell.
I think this is where efforts to fight these problems fall down. They're almost all based on the assumption that the populace doesn't want this stuff to happen, but that the government pushes it through by abusing power, subverting democracy, etc.
But from what I see, this is not the case. Most Americans want this. Whether it's gun-wielding maniacs, drug dealers, or international terrorist masterminds, they feel unsafe, and want the government to help. They like heavily-armed SWAT teams available at a moment's notice. They like the government spying on every communication they can get their hands on. They like x-ray machines and body scanners in airports.
There is a sizable minority where sanity remains, but it is a minority. I think that efforts to fight these problems need to recognize this, and realize that you have to convince the people as your primary action. Fighting the government won't help, because the people will insist that these things be done, as long as the majority feels this way.
Americans vote for those who are tough on crime. I think CATO estimated (on the high end) about 40,000 SWAT/paramilitary raids a year and the public perception is that the targets are all criminals. To them this is just "acceptable collateral damage."
No, of course it's not the America we want. It's the America we get though due to our longstanding apathy and inability to curb special interest groups and corporate control of politics. I think things will change though. Things have been pretty nice in the US for a while. We're now seeing the dark side of apathy and people are starting to care again (in my opinion). It had been pretty easy to shrug off politics as corrupt and not care when we still had relative normalcy. But a lot of Americans have awoken in recent weeks to find themselves living in a sci-fi dystopia that we were warned about in the classics of literature, the kind that had always been eerily similar to our lives but never quite reached. We're now in full on 1984 and Americans won't accept that, I guarantee it (we're the country that ended slavery and celebrate our roots as rebels: we shall overcome).
It's the America you paid for. Three trillion dollars on a decade of war does not just vanish, it does not stay abroad. Demobbed soldiers, private training and supply companies, attitudes and expectations - they have to go somewhere, do something, affect someone.
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.
Oh, it goes much, much farther than that.
The US Supreme Court has ruled (see Raich) that the federal government is justified in sending an armed raid into a terminally ill old lady's home because she allegedly was growing six marijuana plants under her doctor's supervision & approval for her sole personal use in accordance with state law. The "justified" rationale? Her home-grown state-legal personal-use herbs decreased demand in illegal inter-state commerce, therefor affected inter-state commerce, therefor was subject to federal regulation. I kid you not.
(Consequential tangent: if the court had not ruled that way, a pending related case (Stewart) would have permitted felons to home-build their own machine-guns. The court was faced with bizarre rulings whichever way they went with Raich.)
1. Don't buy sparkling water if you're a college student
2. Don't bet with friends because an arbitrary threshold of about $2k warrants your execution
3. Don't tell American citizens that their government abuses its power, or you'll be charged with espionage
4. It's probably a bad idea to bear arms these days, because saying "Officer, I have a weapon in the trunk of my car" might give him reason to shoot you in self defense
5. You don't actually have free speech anymore, so be careful about that. If you threaten to shoot up a school, even jokingly and totally within your rights, you will be incarcerated for half a year before your trial. And who knows if the judge will let you off? You just have to pray for one who knows and abides by the constitution.
Again and again we see questionable or outright illegal police shootings of dogs and people and nothing ever comes of it. The responsible parties are never charged with manslaughter or even fired. I want to support the police, but the thin blue line bullshit has to stop!
I get that police work is often dangerous but individuals that have shown poor judgement are retained on the force. That police officer that shot the dog 4 times had already shot and killed a developmentally disabled guy who was brandishing a knife but could have been tazed or bean-bagged.
These are not the sorts of people to be handing out guns to.
Police shoot dogs because black and brown people own dogs.[0]
The developmentally disabled guy was black.
Of the people raided by SWAT teams in the article, the ones who did not go to court (regardless of whether or not they won excessive force settlements) and had a violent or lethal encounter were all black or in that one case, hispanic.
Police officers aren't punished because the victims of police brutality are overwhelmingly nonwhite. It's not that the victims are poor, or of mysterious sexual orientation. It's really because they are black and hispanic.
To get a good grip on how segregated U.S. cities are, here is the Census rankings of "dissimilarity," or measure of how unmixed the population is geographically[2], of every metro area.[1] The lowest of all metro areas is 32%, which suggests that about 1/3 of black people would have to move to white parts of town to achieve balance.
Routine brutality against blacks, as opposed to routine brutality against protesters (an equally heinous but different problem), is ignored because the victims don't live next to us.
That police officer that shot the dog 4 times had already shot and killed a developmentally disabled guy who was brandishing a knife but could have been tazed or bean-bagged.
It gets worse. The person being arrested already had a lawsuit filed for police brutality. According to his lawyer on NBP, he recognized the police officer who killed his dog - that was one of the officers who had been part of giving him the beating that his lawsuit was about.
I think the thing that frustrates me the most is that in situations like the one you describe where developmentally disabled guy is killed and there were 100 ways to avoid it. Those ways simply are ignored after the fact because people feel such a need to defend the cop that they can't even acknowledge that they might have done something wrong. It creates a situation where improvement is pretty much impossible, because to improve one generally has to admit that there is a problem.
Are there any reliable statistics quantifying this? I found some numbers for Germany on Wikipedia [1] but not for the US. The article states that per year for the period of 2007 to 2011 the German police fired between 36 and 57 bullets at humans killing between 6 and 12 of them. Older numbers are less reliable but similar regarding the number of people killed (peak since 1970 24 in 1983) but with a larger number of bullets fired where reported. Are the numbers for the USA way worse after compensating for the difference in population?
We have to ask ourselves: where is the money? Our rights aren't being lost to a sprawling military-police state just because there's a Big-Brother wannabe conspiring to destroy the constitution. Police departments grow the same way our project departments grow in engineering companies: by managers arguing for bigger budgets and spending more, sometimes wastefully, to justify bigger budgets come next fiscal year.
These hyped-up (sometimes roided-up) SWAT teams do what they do to justify their existence....no manager wants to preside over a shrinking department. It takes a lot of thinking and long-term policy making to reduce this perverse yet basic economic incentive
Don't forget all the war-on-terror funding and politics that have provided even rural police departments with armored personnel carriers and the like.[1] Or outfitting police departments with tons of equipment in advance of protests planned there which then filters down into daily use. In some cities, there is so little for the "anti-terror" cops to do that they have been conscripted into arresting drunk people and pot smokers.[2]
A lot of the funding comes from seizures of cars, houses, cash, anything that can be grabbed. Then it's up to the citizen to "prove" it isn't ill-gotten goods.
Reposting this from the killed-dog-thread. It certainly won't help when the SWAT team is already in your home, but for the creeping sense of out of control cops everywhere:
"Most of us carry video cameras in our pockets now. Filming police needs to become ubiquitous. There should be no police officer in the United States that doesn't know that at any time they could be being filmed and held accountable for their actions by the public they are paid to protect and serve. It is one case where I think constant citizen surveillance could be useful. After a few years of it and constant court rulings that it is protected, perhaps cops would stop yelling at people and arresting them for doing nothing wrong. Yes, I'm talking to everyone on this site. If you are walking back from grabbing a burrito and see the cops "talking to" a homeless person on the street, or pulling over a driver for running a red light or detaining someone, /you/ need to stop for 5-10 minutes, get out your camera phone, and start filming. Please. For the love of a police state run amuck."
By the way, my father recalls from when my country was a dictatorship that "you couldn't take photos of police or military, or you were arrested". Democratic U.S.A. is doing the same..
Is there a service to record live streams online (easily, cheap/free) from phones? The key is to send the live stream out for storage. Common "we'll sync after the video is recorded" services are no good if you get your phone destroyed half way through trying to record.
It seems like every day, more and more political posts about the US are made here. It's getting to the point that it seems that 35% of the point of HN is about getting opportunities to make political statements about the US. There are so many, so so many, places to have on-going political arguments.
I'm of the mind that any place that allows free commentary ultimately becomes a political discussion board, and HN is proving this well. It used to be that HN was a place to get away from that - but it looks like these days it's becoming not much different than the comment section on any political newspaper.
The article's photo is from the 2012 RNC in Tampa, FL. Despite an army of police with all the equipment a paramilitary outfit could wish for, there were almost no arrests. In total for the week there were 2, far fewer than there would have been in a normal week.
A year later and they're still riding around in their RNC purchased bicycles, cruising in RNC speed boats and zipping around in RNC bobcats. The high-tech CCTV system is also still in use (and has yet to actually solve a single crime). It's bizarre.
End of the day, swat teams exist because the guys on the department like cool toys, and the Feds pay for them via grant programs.
My local police department has a "command center" rv and telescopic lookout post that the Feds paid like $3M for. The machine guns are usually bought with seized drug money, and tactical training paid for try the Feds. Most cities don't need paramilitary squads, so they end up using them for stupid stuff because they get to have fun, or they get extra overtime for a detail.
Fire departments are similar. A local volunteer fire department near me got a $1M state grant for some insane fire truck with all sorts of gizmos and an aerial platform that can reach 5 stories up -- in a town with no buildings higher than 2 stories and about 70 total calls per year. (I think they had to call in another department for a fire because the thing is so big that it cannot make it down roads) Total waste of taxpayer resources, but at least the firemen won't kill you!
Sorry if this is off topic, but: I think that taking reasonable steps for both protecting our rights as citizens and not screwing up the environment are sort-of the same topic: making sure that future generations have life as good as our generation (or my generation, I am in my early 60s) have it.
Native American Indians have a philosophy that our actions should be guided by what is best for future generations. Being apathetic and sleep-walking into a less free future society, and screwing up the environment are selfish acts.
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.
All the more reason to never speak to the police. Ever. What happened to 'protect AND serve'? The police have made their jobs harder by systematically turning every citizen into a criminal and forcing every person to not trust them. If I were ever to witness a crime I would hesitate to contact the police at this point out of fear that I would somehow be blamed/included/railroaded/etc... I starting to see how in other police states throughout history the citizens did and said nothing.
Entrapment seems to be a common tactic. The details of most of the arrests of would-be terrorists that they catch in the US are clear cases of entrapment. The FBI/NYPD/some paid informant finds some antisocial/inept guy who's floundering in his life and try to radicalize him and then give him a plan and tools to carry out some terrorist act.
Pay attention to the details next time you read about a foiled terror plot in the US. A couple of them seem to have been legit but most follow the pattern.
[Edit] I became curious about what happened to this guy so I Googled him and found this: http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2013/04/26/alleged-taliban-sy... looks like they threw the book at him and sent him to prison for 8 years for having fired a gun at a firing range. [/Edit]
I think we can just call it murder. "Entrapment" implies that the end result was that he was punished in what would have been a lawful way if he had committed the crime of his own accord.
Entrapment laws are a defense from prosecution, and they're different in every state. Normally it's only entrapment if the cop is enticing someone to break a law he wouldn't have broken otherwise. In this case if the guy was betting on games every Sunday the jury probably would have taken a dim view of an entrapment defense.
The shooting is another issue. The cop is saying it wasn't deliberate, and that's probably true.
Police forces seem to be totally exempt from, say, the ban on assault weapons or such in some of the States. Possibly a law that limits the weaponry that police forces can carry along with a reduction in civilian-owned guns might help curb some of these incidents involving trigger-happy cops.
>Since Seattle, this had become the template. At the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, police conducted peremptory raids on the homes of protesters before the convention had even started. Police broke into the homes of people known to be activist rabble-rousers before they had any evidence of any actual crime. Journalists who inquired about the legitimacy of the raids and arrests made during the convention were also arrested. In all, 672 people were put in handcuffs.
And people question why the government collecting intelligence on innocent civilians is a problem.
Excellent article but it fails to ask the question why. Why is this happening? Who benefits? Why isn't the people's will being realized politically? Why do the courts no longer protect our Constitutional rights?
There's a critical piece missing in these discussions- the global banking cartel that has corrupted all of our political and social institutions. Until their agenda and activities are included in the scope of our analysis, things will just keep getting worse.
It almost sounds like the situation in unstable Central American or Arab nations where the police are hated by the people, while the military is seen as their protectors.
So Shaq, Matt Damon and Steven Seagal participated in SWAT raids. Is this for celebrities only or anyone can sign up?
Not that I would like to participate though.
Wow that was some article. If these kind of things happened in my country, I would get the fuck out of my country.
Actually, I didn't like the way the UK was going, so when the opportunity came about, I moved.
[+] [-] Nrsolis|12 years ago|reply
He was a nice enough guy that used to hang out at Fast Eddies Sports Bar in Fairfax, VA. I saw him there often just tending a beer and minding his own business.
If you can believe it, he was an optometrist at a Wal-Mart that just measured eyeballs and wrote prescriptions. If he was a bookie (as alleged) then I never saw anything that gave him away.
I followed his story in the paper and was surprised to hear that a 17-year veteran of the Fairfax County Police was the one that shot him. Apparently, he said he was bumped and accidentally discharged his gun DIRECTLY INTO SAL'S CHEST.
The police department eventually settled with the family for negligent homicide. That was only after they fought tooth and nail to protect a cop that didn't know how to control a deadly weapon.
In the end, I think the cop got a 3 week suspension. AFAIK, he's still on the FCPD.
[+] [-] sneak|12 years ago|reply
If an organization fights to protect bad guys, I don't care how much good they do: they are complicit in furthering criminal behavior. And they're in a position of trust, at that!
It's an open secret that cops lie to protect other cops.
Why do we allow this? Any other person in a special position of trust and responsibility that contravenes their duty gets _extra_ punishment.
Lon Horiuchi was an FBI sniper that shot Vicki Weaver in the back while holding her infant daughter in her arms: case dismissed. That cop that pepper sprayed those protesting kids at UC Davis, John Pike, was never even charged for "lack of evidence" (nevermind that video of him doing so was on every news show in the country that week). The FBI and BATFE set the Branch Davidians' home on fire, burning up the children inside.
Instead of meaningful outrage, we simply let cops get away with murder, literally.
Fuck the police.
[+] [-] eranation|12 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_cases_of_p...
Although I don't know anything about the facts, and it might have been technically correct by that Wikipedia editor, this just feels as the opposite of justice.
[+] [-] beedogs|12 years ago|reply
And this is why I don't trust cops at all.
[+] [-] Ovid|12 years ago|reply
The article mentions one case where a judge refused to issue a search warrant for a narcotics investigation and instead the police brought representatives from the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and raided the place with a swat team to conduct an alcohol inspection. What did they find?
Two sample bottles of beer that weren't labeled as samples and a bottle of vodka in the office. The fourth circuit court of appeals upheld the search. According to the article: 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.
[+] [-] mikeash|12 years ago|reply
I think this is where efforts to fight these problems fall down. They're almost all based on the assumption that the populace doesn't want this stuff to happen, but that the government pushes it through by abusing power, subverting democracy, etc.
But from what I see, this is not the case. Most Americans want this. Whether it's gun-wielding maniacs, drug dealers, or international terrorist masterminds, they feel unsafe, and want the government to help. They like heavily-armed SWAT teams available at a moment's notice. They like the government spying on every communication they can get their hands on. They like x-ray machines and body scanners in airports.
There is a sizable minority where sanity remains, but it is a minority. I think that efforts to fight these problems need to recognize this, and realize that you have to convince the people as your primary action. Fighting the government won't help, because the people will insist that these things be done, as long as the majority feels this way.
No, I don't know how....
[+] [-] akiselev|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] logn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|12 years ago|reply
You have the America you paid for.
[+] [-] ctdonath|12 years ago|reply
Oh, it goes much, much farther than that.
The US Supreme Court has ruled (see Raich) that the federal government is justified in sending an armed raid into a terminally ill old lady's home because she allegedly was growing six marijuana plants under her doctor's supervision & approval for her sole personal use in accordance with state law. The "justified" rationale? Her home-grown state-legal personal-use herbs decreased demand in illegal inter-state commerce, therefor affected inter-state commerce, therefor was subject to federal regulation. I kid you not.
(Consequential tangent: if the court had not ruled that way, a pending related case (Stewart) would have permitted felons to home-build their own machine-guns. The court was faced with bizarre rulings whichever way they went with Raich.)
[+] [-] alexvr|12 years ago|reply
1. Don't buy sparkling water if you're a college student
2. Don't bet with friends because an arbitrary threshold of about $2k warrants your execution
3. Don't tell American citizens that their government abuses its power, or you'll be charged with espionage
4. It's probably a bad idea to bear arms these days, because saying "Officer, I have a weapon in the trunk of my car" might give him reason to shoot you in self defense
5. You don't actually have free speech anymore, so be careful about that. If you threaten to shoot up a school, even jokingly and totally within your rights, you will be incarcerated for half a year before your trial. And who knows if the judge will let you off? You just have to pray for one who knows and abides by the constitution.
[+] [-] wavefunction|12 years ago|reply
I get that police work is often dangerous but individuals that have shown poor judgement are retained on the force. That police officer that shot the dog 4 times had already shot and killed a developmentally disabled guy who was brandishing a knife but could have been tazed or bean-bagged.
These are not the sorts of people to be handing out guns to.
[+] [-] doctorpangloss|12 years ago|reply
The developmentally disabled guy was black.
Of the people raided by SWAT teams in the article, the ones who did not go to court (regardless of whether or not they won excessive force settlements) and had a violent or lethal encounter were all black or in that one case, hispanic.
Police officers aren't punished because the victims of police brutality are overwhelmingly nonwhite. It's not that the victims are poor, or of mysterious sexual orientation. It's really because they are black and hispanic.
To get a good grip on how segregated U.S. cities are, here is the Census rankings of "dissimilarity," or measure of how unmixed the population is geographically[2], of every metro area.[1] The lowest of all metro areas is 32%, which suggests that about 1/3 of black people would have to move to white parts of town to achieve balance.
Routine brutality against blacks, as opposed to routine brutality against protesters (an equally heinous but different problem), is ignored because the victims don't live next to us.
[0] http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=police+shoot+dog [1] http://www.censusscope.org/us/rank_dissimilarity_white_black... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_dissimilarity
[+] [-] btilly|12 years ago|reply
It gets worse. The person being arrested already had a lawsuit filed for police brutality. According to his lawyer on NBP, he recognized the police officer who killed his dog - that was one of the officers who had been part of giving him the beating that his lawsuit was about.
Let's just say there is a history there.
[+] [-] ryguytilidie|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danbruc|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffengebrauch_der_Polizei_in_D...
[+] [-] codyb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgaither|12 years ago|reply
These hyped-up (sometimes roided-up) SWAT teams do what they do to justify their existence....no manager wants to preside over a shrinking department. It takes a lot of thinking and long-term policy making to reduce this perverse yet basic economic incentive
[+] [-] llamataboot|12 years ago|reply
1) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/12/police-militarizati...
2) http://www.startribune.com/local/209811381.html
[+] [-] greedo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaius|12 years ago|reply
"Yes we scan"
[+] [-] timmaah|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] llamataboot|12 years ago|reply
"Most of us carry video cameras in our pockets now. Filming police needs to become ubiquitous. There should be no police officer in the United States that doesn't know that at any time they could be being filmed and held accountable for their actions by the public they are paid to protect and serve. It is one case where I think constant citizen surveillance could be useful. After a few years of it and constant court rulings that it is protected, perhaps cops would stop yelling at people and arresting them for doing nothing wrong. Yes, I'm talking to everyone on this site. If you are walking back from grabbing a burrito and see the cops "talking to" a homeless person on the street, or pulling over a driver for running a red light or detaining someone, /you/ need to stop for 5-10 minutes, get out your camera phone, and start filming. Please. For the love of a police state run amuck."
[+] [-] GFischer|12 years ago|reply
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2008566,00.ht...
By the way, my father recalls from when my country was a dictatorship that "you couldn't take photos of police or military, or you were arrested". Democratic U.S.A. is doing the same..
[+] [-] seiji|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macspoofing|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] quantumpotato_|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ziomislaw|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drone|12 years ago|reply
I'm of the mind that any place that allows free commentary ultimately becomes a political discussion board, and HN is proving this well. It used to be that HN was a place to get away from that - but it looks like these days it's becoming not much different than the comment section on any political newspaper.
[+] [-] jonknee|12 years ago|reply
A year later and they're still riding around in their RNC purchased bicycles, cruising in RNC speed boats and zipping around in RNC bobcats. The high-tech CCTV system is also still in use (and has yet to actually solve a single crime). It's bizarre.
[+] [-] Spooky23|12 years ago|reply
My local police department has a "command center" rv and telescopic lookout post that the Feds paid like $3M for. The machine guns are usually bought with seized drug money, and tactical training paid for try the Feds. Most cities don't need paramilitary squads, so they end up using them for stupid stuff because they get to have fun, or they get extra overtime for a detail.
Fire departments are similar. A local volunteer fire department near me got a $1M state grant for some insane fire truck with all sorts of gizmos and an aerial platform that can reach 5 stories up -- in a town with no buildings higher than 2 stories and about 70 total calls per year. (I think they had to call in another department for a fire because the thing is so big that it cannot make it down roads) Total waste of taxpayer resources, but at least the firemen won't kill you!
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|12 years ago|reply
Native American Indians have a philosophy that our actions should be guided by what is best for future generations. Being apathetic and sleep-walking into a less free future society, and screwing up the environment are selfish acts.
[+] [-] wavefunction|12 years ago|reply
Otherwise I totally agree with your post.
[+] [-] matwood|12 years ago|reply
All the more reason to never speak to the police. Ever. What happened to 'protect AND serve'? The police have made their jobs harder by systematically turning every citizen into a criminal and forcing every person to not trust them. If I were ever to witness a crime I would hesitate to contact the police at this point out of fear that I would somehow be blamed/included/railroaded/etc... I starting to see how in other police states throughout history the citizens did and said nothing.
[+] [-] nnnnni|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blendergasket|12 years ago|reply
Here's one case, but there are many: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/26/taliban-sympathi...
Pay attention to the details next time you read about a foiled terror plot in the US. A couple of them seem to have been legit but most follow the pattern.
[Edit] I became curious about what happened to this guy so I Googled him and found this: http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2013/04/26/alleged-taliban-sy... looks like they threw the book at him and sent him to prison for 8 years for having fired a gun at a firing range. [/Edit]
[+] [-] mikeash|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tsotha|12 years ago|reply
The shooting is another issue. The cop is saying it wasn't deliberate, and that's probably true.
[+] [-] parennoob|12 years ago|reply
Police forces seem to be totally exempt from, say, the ban on assault weapons or such in some of the States. Possibly a law that limits the weaponry that police forces can carry along with a reduction in civilian-owned guns might help curb some of these incidents involving trigger-happy cops.
[+] [-] AnthonyMouse|12 years ago|reply
And people question why the government collecting intelligence on innocent civilians is a problem.
[+] [-] ypeterholmes|12 years ago|reply
There's a critical piece missing in these discussions- the global banking cartel that has corrupted all of our political and social institutions. Until their agenda and activities are included in the scope of our analysis, things will just keep getting worse.
[+] [-] Apocryphon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bjornsing|12 years ago|reply
http://www.restorethefourth.net/ comes to mind.
[+] [-] Lusake|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leke|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tokenadult|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Amadou|12 years ago|reply