#police

The infantile response from the NYPD and the unions that represent it is not worthy of it. It is hardly worthy of a schoolyard bully who can't believe he's finally been called on his bullshit.

These kinds of ethical and paradoxical questions alone could potentially make Continuum not only a good time travel show, but maybe, just maybe, a sci-fi cop show that intelligently critiques its own existence.

Dear MSM: OWS does not "clash with the police" we are unarmed, peaceful protesters who are savagely attacked by the police. #MSM #noNATO

According to law enforcement sources and police reports obtained by the Tribune, the arrests were the result of a monthlong investigation into a group suspected of making Molotov cocktails — crude bombs usually created by filling glass bottles with gasoline. But the National Lawyers Guild criticized the police raid, saying the nine NATO protesters only had beer-making equipment in their possession.

This is not better than the initial media reports. This is worse. This is an epic textbook in official-violence failure.

Let me float that the encampments are fundamentally about using government power against itself. By staking out a little ground and saying, "No, the government does not rule this space," it gets the mayors and police chiefs worked up. They deploy their increasingly militarized police officers to say, "Yes, the government does rule that space." Then, the protesters link arms and chant, and the riot cops come in with pepper spray and batons.

"I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world."—New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

“I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world. I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom’s annoyance. We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have an entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have,” Mayor Bloomberg said.

What happened at UC Davis was the inevitable result of our failure to make sure our government stayed in the business of defending our principles. When we stopped insisting on that relationship with our government, they became something separate from us.

In the name of due diligence, TPM called up UC Davis to make sure we identified the same pepper spray police used on protesters last week. It’s the same brand, though the police use a 7 percent formula. It’s not clear whether this formula matches exactly what the police used.

Another truth co-exists. At least since the Republican National Convention of 2004, our police have grown accustomed to forcibly penning, arresting, and sometimes spraying and whacking protesters and reporters. On Monday, The New York Times and 12 other organizations sent a letter of protest to the Police Department. “The police actions of last week,” the authors said, “have been more hostile to the press than any other event in recent memory.”

“This was a tough scene to walk into. This was 50 people and before you knew it, it probably grew close to 200. When you encircle a group of officers that are just trying to do their jobs, it’s kinda scary,” she said. Those poor, scared, armored and armed police officers.

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

In 1997, environmentalists were staging a sit-in against the cutting of old forest in Humboldt county. The police sprayed pepper spray directly into the protesters eyes in similar fashion to what happened in UC yesterday and then used liquified pepper spray and applied it directly to the protesters eyes with q-tips. I'm not kidding. There's video:

WASHINGTON -- On Friday, a group of University of California, Davis students, part of the Occupy Wall Street movement on campus, became the latest victims of alleged police brutality to be captured on video. The videos show the students seated on the ground as a UC Davis police officer brandishes a red canister of pepper spray, showing it off for the crowd before dousing the seated students in a heavy, thick mist.

NYPD cracking down on Occupy Wall Street protesters near the New York Stock Exchange on the November 17 Day of Action in NYC. Photograph by Jon Tayler (web), Columbia School of Journalism student, reporter, photographer. Via @katz, also as seen on The Awl.

I was there to take down the names of people who were arrested… As I’m standing there, some African-American woman goes up to a police officer and says, ‘I need to get in. My daughter’s there. I want to know if she’s OK.’ And he said, ‘Move on, lady.’ And they kept pushing with their sticks, pushing back. And she was crying. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he throws her to the ground and starts hitting her in the head,” says Smith. “I walk over, and I say, ‘Look, cuff her if she’s done something, but you don’t need to do that.’ And he said, ‘Lady, do you want to get arrested?’ And I said, ‘Do you see my hat? I’m here as a legal observer.’ He said, ‘You want to get arrested?’ And he pushed me up against the wall.

Remember when people were freaking out over the Patriot Act and Homeland Security and all this other conveniently ready-to-go post-9/11 police state stuff, because it would obviously be just a matter of time before the whole apparatus was turned against non-Muslim Americans when they started getting complain-y about the social injustice and economic injustice and income inequality and endless recession and permanent unemployment? That day is now, and has been for some time. But it’s also now confirmed that it’s now, as some Justice Department official screwed up and admitted that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated the riot-cop raids on a dozen major #Occupy Wall Street demonstration camps nationwide yesterday and today. (Oh, and tonight, too: Seattle is being busted up by the riot cops right now, so be careful out there.)

ust how bad is the civil unrest associated with the Occupy protests in some U.S. cities? This bad: There is an online petition calling on California Gov. Jerry Brown to send the National Guard to protect Occupy Oakland protesters from the city's police department.

The 25-year-old resident of San Jose, California, says he found the first one about three weeks ago on his Volvo SUV while visiting his mother in Modesto, about 80 miles northeast of San Jose. After contacting Wired and allowing a photographer to snap pictures of the device, it was swapped out and replaced with a second tracking device. A witness also reported seeing a strange man looking beneath the vehicle of the young man’s girlfriend while her car was parked at work, suggesting that a tracking device may have been retrieved from her car. I wonder what kind of hubbub it would cause if someone put a tracker in the tracker and figured out where it went when it got retrieved?

If you watch the video, you can hear Campbell repeatedly ask the police if "this is okay?". I think it's safe to assume that Campbell was verifying with the police if it was okay to film them and if he was at a proper distance from the police line. He asks this question multiple times before continuing to film. Hearing nothing back, Campbell films the rest of the police line at a respectable distance until... he gets shot by an asshole police officer. What the hell? You can see the rubber bullet (bean bag? another projectile?) being fired and hitting Campbell in the video.

This how to properly engage with police when they do suspicious things. We were riding by on bikes and noticed hes hiding his name and has no badge number. SO we decided to ask him. He did not answer, we asked a ranking officer is that policy? The LT. quickly went about fixing his attitude. This is a common practice among cops at occupy's around the US .That way he/she cannot be named or referenced if he participates in police miss-conduct . Its in most police departments policies that all officers in uniform must show some form of identification. OPD does not wear badges with #'s, how do we hold anyone accountable?

TL;DR - I handed out flyers. The bankers panicked and called their private security people, then more private security and finally the cops. That's when they found out that they didn't have a leg to stand on

The Portland (Ore.) Police Bureau is posting photos of Occupy Wall Street protesters arrested in that city onto its Facebook page, and this has got some members of the public buzzing.

JPMorgan Chase recently donated an unprecedented $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation. The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple. The money will pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops, as well as security monitoring software in the NYPD's main data center.

"Police in Warren, Ohio, have released video of a woman who was interrogated by officers with a baby squirrel in her shirt."

"During its March 30th search, police seized (among other things) the computer science major's computers, storage drives, cell phone, iPod Touch, flash drives, digital camera, and Ubuntu Linux CD. None of these items have been returned. He has been suspended from his job pending the investigation. His personal documents and information are in the hands of the state police who continue to examine it without probable cause, searching for evidence to support unsupportable criminal allegations."

"When Lester exercised his constitutional right not to sign a consent to search his house, these officers spent the next two hours torturing him."

"The university leadership, headed by newly purchased chancellor Denice D. Denton, resorted to physical violence at about 10 pm to terminate the peaceful assembly."

"But one day after Officer Wohl testified, and before the defense called a single witness, the prosecutor abruptly dropped all charges."