How Cops Get Away With Murder.

former-cop-guns-3x2

GQ has an in-depth interview with Raeford Davis, a former South Carolina cop (until 2006). It’s good reading, I recommend it. Just a bit here:

When you first became a police officer, what sort of training did you get for de-escalating a potentially violent encounter?

Very little. My academy manual was approximately 1,500 pages long. Of that, maybe 10-20 pages cover effective communication and verbal de-escalation techniques. It wasn’t really until you got out with your field training officer that they would say, “Look you’ve got to talk to people and settle things without getting worked up.” In a lot of ways, when you got on the street you were unlearning a lot of the worst case scenario training that you learned at the academy.

I don’t think the disgrace of so-called police training here in uStates is much of a mystery to most people anymore, but I really wonder if any cops are actually unlearning that garbage anymore.

Were there any mechanisms in place to weed out people who weren’t suited for the job?

Most people wash out based on academic issues and obvious physical issues, like a bad knee, that would prevent them from performing their duties than anything else. As far as spotting over-aggressive or mentally unstable red flags, no, I didn’t see where that would come up and it certainly didn’t with my group. How people washed out from the academy beyond that would be off-campus problems, like getting a DUI or, as happened to one guy, getting into a road rage incident and flashing his badge and gun at people. But it’s the barrel that’s bad, regardless of the apples.

So, what are some of the things you learned about how to behave in those worst case scenarios?

We have this “use of force” continuum. It changes depending on the agency, but there’s a basic format. You can increase your level of response based on the reaction of the individual. You start off with your mere presence, then you have verbal commands, and if that doesn’t work you can put your hands on someone. If they pull back, then you can maybe use a pressure point technique. If they take a swing at you, then you can escalate to a baton. The main takeaway I got from my training concerning individuals armed with a knife or similar weapon was the “21 foot rule.” Basically if you confront anyone with a knife and they get within 21 feet, you can shoot them.

The full interview is at GQ.  Via Black Lives Matter.

Cool Stuff Friday.

It’s Posing for Pixels time again! 

 
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Acclaimed authors Jim C. Hines, Chuck Wendig, and Tee Morris have bravely volunteered to do custom gender-flipped cover poses to encourage the Science Fiction & Fantasy community to help The Pixel Project‘s Read For Pixels 2016 Indiegogo fundraiser reach our $5,000 fundraising goal (and beyond) this October! The Pixel Project is a 501(c)3 nonprofit that combines the power of the internet, social media, and pop culture/the arts to raise awareness, funds, and volunteer power to end violence against women.

READ FOR PIXELS: Operation Cover Pose 2016 To Help End Violence Against Women.

 

READ FOR PIXELS 2016: FALL EDITION.

The Fuzziness of the Army Corps.

Major General Donald Jackson.

Major General Donald Jackson. Mary Annette Pember.

As with most issues between Indian country and the federal government, the important bits are steeped in legalese and long numerical references to laws and regulations. The very stuff of life and its protection, however, is referenced and hidden within these dryly-worded documents.

A set of regulations created by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) called Appendix C is one such example, and it may determine the future of the Dakota Access Pipeline project as well as other projects for which the Army Corps is responsible for issuing federal permits.

It turns out that tribes have been complaining about the legality of Appendix C for a very long time, and with good reason. Appendix C spells out how the Corps will meet its obligation to fulfill Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), created to protect places of historic, architectural and/or cultural significance.

Part of the NPHA’s Section 106 requires that agencies carry out the process in consultation with Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (THPO) and identify and assess impacts to properties of traditional religious and cultural significance to tribes. Although all federal agencies are allowed to create their own means by which they fulfill the requirements of Section 106, the Army Corps chose to streamline the process by creating its own regulations that tribes and other federal agencies argue not only fail to meet the requirement of the NHPA’s Section 106, but are also in direct conflict with the law.

The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) is an independent federal agency charged by Congress with overseeing implementation of the NHPA. The Corps contradicts several of ACHP’s regulations through use of its own process spelled out under Appendix C.

The differences between Section 106 regulations and Appendix C are substantial. Chief among these differences includes the Corps’ decision in the Standing Rock case to review each river crossing of the Dakota Access pipeline as a separate project rather than consider the entire pipeline as one project.

“This allows the Corps to dismiss the potential for effects to historic properties that may be located within the broader project area of an undertaking,” according to an August 2, 2016 letter from the ACHP to the Corps.

The full story is at ICTMN.

First Baby Born at Standing Rock Camp.

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The first baby was born at one of the Standing Rock camps earlier in the week. A woman’s healthcare center has been put together at the No DAPL camp, focusing on Indigenous ways regarding family, pregnancy, parenting, birthing, and childcare. There’s a video and transcript at Democracy Now.

Coming Full Circle: Tending The Wild.

Courtesy KCET.

Courtesy KCET.

Indigenous Peoples are increasingly being seen as having the keys to save our habitat from human-induced destruction.

A new series on KCET explores several aspects of Traditional Knowledge and the ways in which the most effective methods of caretaking this land we call Turtle Island originated with those who originally inhabited these lands. Tending the Wild began airing on Monday October 3 with “Fire” and had its second episode, “Salmon,” on October 17.

The series centers on tribes based in what is today California. Episode 1, subtitled “Cultural Burning,” explores “how Native California communities use fire as a natural resource to promote a healthy ecosystem and how plants and animals have evolved to need fire disturbances to survive,” according to a KCET statement. “Additionally, this episode will explore how fire is used in various cultures; and the negative effects of fire suppression, a western concept initially promoted by National Parks and Forest Services.”

Indeed, the theme of not only restoring but also

The second episode, subtitled “Keeping the River,” became available online on October 18 at KCET.org and LinkTV.org. This segment looks at dam removals, fishing restrictions and the controlling of runoff from agriculture and industry into the waters. Key members of the Yurok, Karuk and Hupa tribes appear in this one, KCET said.

Basketry takes up the third episode, set to air on October 31, in a story about using “Plants as Materials” and what that entails by viewing the process of basket weaving from the cultivation of the proper plants, to the end product.

Viewers will learn about the “decolonized diet” in Episode 4, “Plants as Medicine” in Episode 5, and how to love the desert in Episode 6. The series continues through mid-December.

Oh, I want to watch everything right now, but work calls. The importance of traditional ecological knowledge can’t be emphasised enough. Via ICTMN.  Tending the Wild at KCET.

Do Not Resist.

(AFP Photo/Justin Sullivan).

(AFP Photo/Justin Sullivan).

Officers with assault rifles, backed by a huge armored grenade launcher, square up to a crowd furiously denouncing the killing of a young black neighbor.

It is a scene which could have been taken from archive footage of Mogadishu in 1990s Somalia or countless other battles, but this conflict is closer to home — the streets of small-town America.

The images, captured in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, open “Do Not Resist” — a disturbing documentary charting the transformation of police across the US into forces that look like military units.

The explosive film is set to fuel an already bitter debate raging in America over heavy-handed law enforcement, following a litany of police killings of black men that have sparked protests from Ferguson and Charlotte to Chicago.

Director Craig Atkinson, whose movie is opening across the US having won best documentary feature at the Tribeca Film Festival, says the American law enforcement ethos has changed “from a mentality of peacekeepers to that of an occupying army.”

Another eye-opening scene shows officers in black fatigues firing volley after volley of automatic rounds at cardboard targets, as if they were preparing for war rather than to “protect and serve.”

A khaki-clad instructor explains that security forces must prepare for all kinds of attacks, “including the Islamic State.”

MRAPs, the armored trucks that protect troops from roadside bombs planted along the dusty roads of Iraq and Afghanistan, are now ubiquitous across the US.

[…]

In another shocking scene, a SWAT team arrives in an MRAP at a tree-lined street in Columbia, South Carolina, to execute a search warrant in a drug case.

The officers, whose equipment looks barely distinguishable from that of an infantry division, end up badly damaging a family home in a raid that nets a small amount of loose cannabis.

Atkinson’s father, a retired policeman from Detroit, Michigan, spent over a decade in one such SWAT team, the New York-based filmmaker explains.

“In his time, his team intervened 29 times in 13 years. Now they are taking part in 200 raids a year,” Atkinson tells AFP.

[…]

Campaigners against police militarization accept that SWAT teams and their heavy-duty hardware have a vital role in combatting the rare instances of terrorism in the US.

But they point out that, due to prolonged mission creep, this is no longer how these resources are used.

Peter Kraska, a criminology professor at the University of Eastern Kentucky, says there are now at least 50,000 SWAT raids a year, up from 3,000 in the 1980s.

Most of the activities of these highly specialized units have little to do with the reasons for their inception, such as dealing with hostage situations, terrorist attacks and drug cartels.

According to Atkinson, one of the architects of the “warrior culture” is a hugely successful police trainer named Dave Grossman, head of a consulting firm called the Killology Research Group.

“We are at war and you are the frontline troops in this war. What do you fight violence with? Superior violence,” Grossman hollers at an audience of mesmerized police in one session filmed for the documentary.

The retired army lieutenant colonel has lectured throughout the US, according to his website, and Atkinson believes his influence has spread to every American law enforcement agency.

For those who are woke, none of this will come as a surprise, but I’d say this is necessary viewing for us all, and this ongoing militarization not only must be stopped, it needs to be revoked. It’s time to take all those shiny toys away from all the bully boys out there. If cops want to continue playing military, I suggest they quit being a cop, and join up.

Via Raw Story.

George Takei: There Is Hope.

George Takei (MSNBC).

George Takei (MSNBC).

George Takei has an open letter at The Daily Beast, and a message many of us sorely need to hear. Just an excerpt from the middle here:

You see, I am ever an optimist. A poll taken in August of voters aged 18-34 showed that the vast majority favored Clinton over Trump—64 percent to 29 percent. That split tells me the same thing that the polls for same-sex marriage told us years ago: Over time, reason and fairness will win out, while bigotry and hatred literally would die off. In 20 years, you will all be in charge, and demonstrate far less appetite or patience for Trump’s brand of nativist rhetoric and race baiting. Trump and his supporters understand they are on borrowed time, and while they may seem resurgent today, this in fact could be their last chance to take control. Our country is rapidly moving on from their discredited and archaic worldview. Perhaps that is why the death throes of their campaign are so spectacular.

You are in many ways wiser to the world than your older counterparts. You came of age in a time where there was greater cause for skepticism, and you’re accustomed to the non-stop barrage of social media. Unlike your parents, you understand that we all live in an echo chamber, and that it is up to each of us to depart from it to hear alternative points of view. You are more likely to place your trust in science and embrace diversity, to reject hate while celebrating love in all its manifestations. You are more focused on racial justice and equality of opportunity than the two generations before you. And contrary to common myth, you are not disengaged. In this election cycle, millions of young voters made their concerns heard and very nearly succeeded in realigning the entire election. Nor are you impractical; even when your favored candidate did not succeed, you stuck by your convictions and goals, and in overwhelming numbers now support the party that will best advance them.

Full article at The Daily Beast.

The Only Way Out.

A drawing by a 16-year-old girl from Iran on Nauru. CREDIT: Amnesty International.

A drawing by a 16-year-old girl from Iran on Nauru. CREDIT: Amnesty International.*

Most people will have a passing awareness of what’s been happening to refugees attempting to reach Australia. To say the Australian government has a lot to answer for is one hell of an understatement. This is open, unapologetic torture, and right now, it doesn’t look like anyone much cares that the main effect of this “open air camp” is suicide. When death becomes a preferable option, you get an idea of just how bad things are. These people, already carrying heavy burdens of trauma, are being treated as untouchable, nasty things, and as Esme Weatherwax pointed out, all the ills in the world begin there, with treating people like things. Although reading, it seems to me they are more being treated like inconvenient garbage that someone littered about. This is a terribly ugly story, filled with terribly ugly people, who cannot manage to dredge up the smallest sliver of concern. All around the world, we human beings are failing at being human, in a most spectacular way.

Refugees and asylum seekers who attempt to reach Australia by boat are turned away and detained in refugee processing centers on the Pacific island of Nauru or Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. The Australian government has argued that the policy acts as a good deterrence against human smugglers and people who might choose to undertake the journey to its shores. But those who wind up on these offshore detention sites face indefinite and unlawful detention, an ordeal so disastrous that refugees and asylum seekers are turning to self-harm to cope, according to a new human rights organization report released Monday.

The Amnesty International report found that it was not uncommon for detainees to try and kill themselves, based on field and desk research that happened between July and October 2016. One man failed to kill himself twice in a span of ten weeks. Another Iranian refugee who tried to kill herself multiple times every week was eventually put in a medical ward. And a man found his pregnant wife in the bathroom with rope marks on her neck.

[…]

Some service-providers at the detention center described practices that made refugees and asylum seekers feel less than human. One guard forcibly took away candy from a girl. Some asylum seekers were taken from showers after two minutes, with shampoo in their hair. Others had to wait weeks or months for basic necessities like underwear and shoes.

In a conversation with a seven-year-old boy from Iran, a service-provider told Amnesty International that the child would keep asking him questions. “He’d say ‘I don’t understand this place. Prisons are for bad people, right? Bad people are the men who hurt my father [in Iran]. Why am I in prison? Does that mean I am a bad person?’”

Nauru’s refugee processing center is described as an “open” center meaning that once people are recognized as refugees, they are moved into accommodation outside the refugee processing center on the same island, roughly one-third the size of Manhattan. But much of the island is uninhabitable, now environmentally ravaged by generations of phosphate mining.

Even refugees and asylees living outside detention grounds face Nauru police who fail to adequately investigate their complaints. One father, who told the police about a man who tried to rape his daughter, was told that the judge was “off duty.” An Iranian refugee who tried to report a robbery got the run-around from police who said that “their computer was broken.” When he offered to give handwritten testimony, he was told that they didn’t have paper.

[…]

Many of the abuses that Neistat found are consistent with previous accounts of abuse detailed by other refugees and asylum seekers. In late April, at least two refugees tried setting themselves on fire. One died from the self-immolation, while the other refugee suffered critical injuries. In August, The Guardian reported on 2,000 reports of abuse and neglect, which found that children were “vastly overrepresented in the reports.”

People set themselves on fire. On fire, for fuck’s sake. If this does not break your heart, if this does not make you ask questions, if this does not make you angry, something is very, very wrong.

The Australian government spends $419,425 per person, per year on offshore processing. In comparison, the U.S. government spends about $59,860 per person, per year on detention. Yet as the allegations show, the costs do not reflect the care that refugees and asylum seekers receive.

After clicking all the links, and doing all the reading, I would really like to know just where in the hell all that money is going, because it most certainly is not going into care of and for refugees and asylum seekers. The stench of corruption is wafting about.

* I probably have nothing to worry about here, but if  you’re the type of asshole who thinks it would be pertinent to comment about how your two year old could draw better than that 16 year old, you’ll be banned so fast you’ll end up with whiplash.

The full story is at Think Progress.

American Creativity.

Americans, so gosh darn fun and creative, right? Yes, well, they certainly excel at being nasty, hateful, awful asshole bigots, who often wouldn’t be able to figure their way out of a wet paper bag. Isn’t much room for thought when you have a head full of toxic hate. I have no doubt whatsoever that every person involved would describe themselves as good, patriotic, Christian Americans, who aren’t at all bigoted, oh no. There’s yet another black mark on the blight that is Christianity. How these fucking people can even claim it, I don’t know. It does continue to confirm that their god is every bit as horrible as they are. Let’s see what these gosh darn fun and creative Americans are up to, shall we?

Shirts with a rifle scope trained on Colin Kaepernick selling for $10 outside of Ralph Wilson stadium. [One shirt has Wanted Notorious Disgrace to America on it, with a photo of Kaepernick and a rifle scope superimposed; the other shirt pictured has a stylized Kaepernick kneeling, with the text Shut Up and Stand Up! Kaeperdick.]

Isn’t that just wacky and adorable? Those are such wonderful American ideals to show off to your family, friends, and all the children everywhere, especially those little brown children, because they had best know to grow up and keep their damn proper place, right? Might as well be sure you let them know they have absolutely no business whatsoever going around thinking they are full human beings, with full human rights or anything. Without making sure they won’t be uppity, why one of them might grow up to think the constant and continual extrajudicial killings of people of colour are something to protest and fight against. Those damn uppity…well, you know.

We have not yet plumbed the depths of said American creativity. Let’s have a look at what else is available:

For $5, you can get a white T-shirt, with an image of Kaepernick kneeling, with the text “Hey Colin… While You’re Down There, in red. What’s more American than comparing a man to the absolute worst possible creature, a woman? Because it really wouldn’t be that exceptional American evil without tossing in some misogyny, and making sure there’s at least a slight diss towards all those women, y’know, the gay dudes. Also, in case you can’t make it out, one of the sellers of this garbage is wearing a Chick-fil-a T-shirt, so Christian LGBTIAQ hater confirmed.

This is not in the least unexpected. That does not lessen the absolute sickness of it, the evil of it, which so many Americans have happily embraced in these particularly troubled times. To say this is deplorable is not enough. To say this is disgusting is not enough. This is evil, in all its banality, proffered and taken by Americans who are more than ready to proclaim their goodness. I’d spit on them, but it would be a waste of spit. These people are worth less than shit on a shoe, and they are doing absolutely nothing except spreading shit everywhere they go, and with that shit, the disease of hatred.

If you read this, and bristle over being tarred with a broad brush, examine how complicit you are in the current wave of toxicity. Do you see such things and speak out? Do you hear friends, family, co-workers, acquaintances spilling this poison, and start to examine the floor? Do you turn away? Are you outraged because you are one of the good Christians? Once again, I ask, where are you? Why are you not speaking out? Where is the outcry of Not Acceptable?

Via Think Progress.

That Language Not Allowed in This Neighborhood.

Last Wednesday, a black man was walking down a street in suburban Edina, Minnesota, when a plain clothes officer grabbed him and refused to let go.

The officer’s conduct drew the attention of a bystander, who took out her phone and started filming.

As the officer forcibly pulls the man toward his police car, he yells, “For what?… You can’t just put your hands on me like this!”

The officer accuses the man of walking down a part of the street he shouldn’t have been walking on. The man insists he did nothing wrong. The man becomes agitated by the officer not letting go of him, repeatedly swears at the cop, and is arrested.

“You could’ve just shown him where to walk very kindly,” the bystander tells the officer as she continues to film. “You’re the one who incited this.”

“He’s scared,” she adds. “People die in these situations. It’s scary.”

On YouTube, the woman provided more context:

I witnessed and videoed this earlier today. I passed by a man who was walking on the white line of the shoulder of the street. There was construction and it was obvious that the sidewalk was not available right there so he was hugging the right side as far as he could go. I went around him and noticed in my rearview mirror that an unmarked SUV turned on police lights. The officer pulled in front of the pedestrian to cut him off and proceeded to accuse him of walking in the middle of the street.

Edina is about 18 miles from where Philando Castile was murdered by cops. The Edina cop shop has responded, but they have not done well in that regard “why of course that black man was wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong, and we have all manner of justifications, and it’s not what it seemed!” The cop in this video was not in uniform, but apparently, he just could not cope with the sight a black man walking, and not walking in just the precise manner he wanted. If this cop just had to have a control freak moment here, all that was necessary was to briefly stop, identify himself, and say “okay, can you walk over there, because the way you are doing now isn’t safe, okay?” and then took off to do whatever it is cops do. But no, there had to serious man handling and full court asshole cop behaviour, down to a reprimand that certain language wasn’t allowed in that neighborhood. Really? I’d like to know where Officer Asshole lives. Is it that neighborhood? Can he provide evidence that that specific neighborhood in Edina has an ordinance which states that no one can say the word fuck? Yet more evidence that the only thing cops care about is just how far you can get down on your knees, in absolute compliance. Hey, Officer Asshole, have a fuck you! from me.

Think Progress has the full story.

Pitchforks and Torches Time.

Yesterday, we took a look at the frightening views of Trump fanatics, who believe absolutely that every single journalism source is lying, that voter fraud is not just for real, but happening before any voting, and these believers are happily talking about assassination and bloodshed. This is a continuation of that story. Now that singular ass Sheriff Dave Clarke is on board, hollering for a mob. I am feeling physically stunned at this point, as if someone whacked me with a bat, attempting to recover my wits and make sense of the scene in front of me. How in the hell can most of us just be sitting here, an audience to this absolute insanity happening in front of our faces? No, I don’t know what to do either, but I am frightened. I grew up in the counter-culture, in a tumultuous time of great change, but for the most part, it was change for the better. The better of all people. The same cannot be said now. We have people who want to go backwards, and indulge in full scale colonial assault, again.

Most of the grumblings and musings of rebellion have come from everyday Trump voters, but on Saturday, Trump surrogate and Milwaukee Sheriff David A. Clarke, an elected law official, tweeted that it’s “pitchforks and torches time” with a (stock) photo of an angry mob.

I guess Clarke figures he’ll be one of the “good negroes” who will be happily accepted by Trump and the mob he’s trying to incite. A Sheriff calling for riots. Are we sure this isn’t 1984?

Via ThinkProgress.

From the Dakotas to the Desert.

A youthful supporter of the campaign to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. cool revolution via Flickr.

A youthful supporter of the campaign to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. cool revolution via Flickr.

Chris Clarke has an excellent article at ICTMN, covering the broad scope of how Indigenous people pay when energy enters the picture. To be truly mindful, you need to understand the big picture, and you also need to be able to see and understand when cleaner and greener energy is as much of a problem as the dirty type.

Commentary: An energy company plans a project that would destroy land Native people hold as sacred. Despite Native protests, neither state nor federal agencies intervene to protect those cultural sites. The project proceeds. The land is forever altered. Hundreds of Native people and their supporters converge on the site to protest and to grieve their loss.

Given recent news, not to mention the choice of photo at the top of this story, you could be forgiven for assuming I’m describing current events at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota. That’s where the company Energy Transfer Partners is trying to push the new Dakota Access Pipeline through burial grounds and medicine wheels sacred to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The project has already destroyed important sacred sites, and threatens to pollute the Missouri River and local groundwater if it’s built and the inevitable spills ensue.

But I’m actually describing a gathering four years ago in the southernmost parts of the California desert. There, near the little desert town of Ocotillo, hundreds of Native people from across the southwestern United States gathered on June 24, 2014. They were there to mark the destruction of ancient cremation sites, ceremonial locations and other important cultural resources by Pattern Energy, which built the Ocotillo Express wind power facility in Imperial County.

Click on over to ICTMN to read the full story.