First of all, what sort of hellish transformation is taking place
in this country. Today we have been divided, conquered and classified
so much so that we can't recognize ourselves as human beings. How can we
be so fragmented as representing ourselves as Democrats, Republicans,
Libertarians, and Progressives before anything else? How can we see
injustice on a mass scale and ignore it while repeating some
talking-point that we heard on television? Oh, that guy he was resisting
arrest, well he deserved what he got. It's easy to say when it is
someone else but when your day comes the television networks will show
your beating/murder/etc with some imaginative editing and angles and
make you look like Charles Manson. Your jury will not be of your peers
and the jury fears police reprisals and so police get off scot free.
The Wall Street Journal makes an excellent point that not even the Feds are aware of the true number of people who are killed by police:
An analysis from The Wall Street Journal found that more than 550
police killings between 2007 and 2012 weren't included in the FBI's
national tally. The report looked at data from 105 of America's largest
police agencies and found that it is "nearly impossible to determine how
many people are killed by the police each year." FBI numbers about
police killings vary greatly from those provided by the Centers for
Disease Control and by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Americans have become desensitized to the violence via televisions
networks which makes is very easy for them to step over people who lay
dying on the street. Having empathy for your fellow man and woman has
reached an all new low. I don't care about your excuses or your Twitter
'activism'. This must change right now! Justice is blind and she hasn't
noticed that the scales have been tipped. The authorities are deathly
afraid of the people and that is why the national guard was deployed so
quickly in Ferguson. That is why police shoot to kill instead of using
pepper spray, tasers or a baton. When a police officer fires their gun
12 times they aren't trying to stop someone, they are trying to murder
them.
The Atlantic has an expose on “How Police Unions and Arbitrators Keep Abusive Cops on the Street”:
There are, of course, police officers who are fired for egregious
misbehavior by commanding officers who decide that a given abuse makes
them unfit for a badge and gun. Yet all over the U.S., police unions
help many of those cops to get their jobs back, often via secretive
appeals geared to protect labor rights rather than public safety. Cops
deemed unqualified by their own bosses are put back on the streets.
Their colleagues get the message that police all but impervious to
termination.
Let's begin in Oakland, California, where the San Jose Mercury News
reports that "of the last 15 arbitration cases in which officers have
appealed punishments, those punishments have been revoked in seven cases
and reduced in five others."
Hector Jimenez is one Oakland policeman who was fired and reinstated.
In 2007, he shot and killed an unarmed 20-year-old man. Just seven
months later, he killed another unarmed man, shooting him three times in
the back as he ran away. Oakland paid a $650,000 settlement to the dead
man's family in a lawsuit and fired Jimenez, who appealed through his
police union. Despite killing two unarmed men and costing taxpayers all
that money, he was reinstated and given back pay.
Media celebrities and paid tragedy pimps turned the Ferguson story
into one that was foremost about race when it is really about class and
the mentality of a militarized police. Police obviously won't give a
second thought about killing people in poor neighborhoods because they
don't have elite lawyers on retainer. The real story is about the
militarization of Mayberry. Homeland Security and the Pentagon have
started to give away and sell military surplus to police at cost. Does
the psyche of a police force change when they have what looks like tanks
and other military weaponry at their disposal? The citizens become
insurgents and the police behave more like an occupying force.
As Karl Bickel, a senior policy analyst with the Justice Department’s
Community Policing Services office, observes, police across America are
being trained in a way that emphasizes force and aggression. He notes
that recruit training favors a stress-based regimen that’s modeled on
military boot camp rather than on the more relaxed academic setting a
minority of police departments still employ. The result, he suggests, is
young officers who believe policing is about kicking ass rather than
working with the community to make neighborhoods safer.
This authoritarian streak runs counter to the core philosophy that
supposedly dominates twenty-first-century American thinking:community
policing.
Take the 1033 program. The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) may be an
obscure agency within the Department of Defense, but through the 1033
program, which it oversees, it’s one of the core enablers of American
policing’s excessive militarization. Beginning in 1990, Congress
authorized the Pentagon to transfer its surplus property free of charge
to federal, state, and local police departments to wage the war on
drugs. In 1997, Congress expanded the purpose of the program to include
counterterrorism in section 1033 of the defense authorization bill. In
one single page of a 450-page law, Congress helped sow the seeds of
today’s warrior cops.
The amount of military hardware transferred through the program has
grown astronomically over the years. In 1990, the Pentagon gave $1
million worth of equipment to U.S. law enforcement. That number had
jumped to nearly $450 million in 2013. Overall, the program has shipped
off more than $4.3 billion worth of materiel to state and local cops,
according to the DLA.
Today in Smallville, USA your friendly neighborhood police officer is no more. There is a push in police departments to
hire the ignorant aggressive
mouth-breathing variety. They are Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans
suffering from PTSD injected into your home town to protect newly
gentrified properties being turned into gated communities. In their eyes
you are just taking up valuable real estate. If you want this madness
to come to an end you must first stand up for your fellow citizens, next
you must be willing to bring commerce in your town to a halt and lastly
refuse to give your state and property taxes. Hit them in their fat
budgets, that is the only way to get anything done. Empty rhetoric and
Twitter rage is a waste of time especially when lives are at risk.
Mike Vail is a US based investigative journalist, geopolitical analyst, and publisher of StratRisks.com. You can read Michael's articles on BlacklistedNews.com, and follow him on Twitter @MichaelVail
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