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Post by Stephen on Feb 13, 2010 11:08:48 GMT -5
This is really unrelated to the topic of police violence, so I'll respond in a different thread rather than distract from the post.
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Post by Stephen on Feb 13, 2010 11:09:11 GMT -5
And from Texas, where cops find it necessary to assault a 72-year-old Great Grandmother with deadly weapons...
Fox News has obtained police dashboard video of the tasering of a 72 year old great grandmother in Travis County, TX.
The police claim that after Kathryn Winkfein was stopped for driving 15 miles over the speed limit in a construction zone, she disobeyed an order to sign the speeding ticker, used profane language, and became "violent." They say the officer who taserer her and took her to be booked for resisting arrest was completely justified.
However, Winkfein says that's a lie, and the video appears to back her up.
It shows Constable Richard McCain screaming, "Get over here now!" Winkfein replies, "Give [the ticket] to me and I'll sign it." Instead, the officer reaches out and pushes her, and she starts complaining, "Oh, you're going to shove me? You're going to shove a seventy-two year old woman?"
McCain then tases her. As Winkfein lies on the ground screaming, he orders, "Now put your hands behind your back. Put your hands behind your back or you're going to be tasered again."
Fox's Brian Kilmeade commented after running the video, "Officers insisted they acted by the book."
What book is that?
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Post by Stephen on Feb 17, 2010 17:53:39 GMT -5
COPS ASSAULT FATHER WHILE SON IS NEAR DEATH
James Rourke was living out a parent’s worst nightmare when two Pennsylvania State Troopers arrived and promptly made matters much worse.
A little after 6:00 p.m. on January 28, Rourke, a 59-year-old man widely respected among residents of Doylesburg for his generosity and service to others, learned of a car crash involving his 19-year-old son Freddy.
James and his wife Betty rushed to the scene on Path Valley Road, where the car — which was driven by a family friend — had collided with a utility pole. Freddy and his friend, Chad O’Donel, were trapped inside, and live power lines snaked across the wreckage.
At the request of emergency personnel, Mr. Rourke — who had been sitting in a van across the street — walked to an emergency vehicle in the middle of the road to provide a brief medical history on his son. He was accompanied by his daughter, Betty Barrick.
As the medical discussion took place, a police vehicle pulled up and decanted two truculent troopers — Elmer Hertzog and James Erne — who were apparently looking to drum up business for themselves.
Eyewitnesses described Hertzog and Erne as “rude and disrespectful, using profanity in addressing Rourke and calling him a vulgar name” as they ordered him away from the emergency vehicle. The verbal abuse took place before Rourke and his daughter had a chance to leave — as did the ensuing assault by Hertzog.
By his own admission, Hertzog was the first to lay hands on Rourke, grabbing him by the front of his coat and pushing him backwards. This was an act of criminal battery. Rourke, a 59-year-old man with a heart condition, grabbed Hertzog’s jacket in what his daughter described as an effort to keep from falling backward to the pavement.
A local newspaper account twice uses the expression “deliberate attack on the trooper” to describe one possible description of Rourke’s action. Both he and his daughter deny that Rourke did anything more than act out of an understandable defensive reflex. However, given that Hertzog had committed an act of criminal violence against him, Rourke was entirely within his rights to counter-attack, if necessary and possible, irrespective of the official costume worn by his tax-devouring assailant.
Trooper Erne, Hertzog’s cohort in official crime, didn’t exactly “have his partner’s back.” Instead, in a fashion familiar to students of bullying tactics Erne ganged up on the victim by attacking him from the back, striking him in the small of the back with a knee and then piling on when Hertzog took Rourke to the ground.
Rourke’s daughter, frantic for her father’s safety, demanded that his assailants leave him alone, only to be given an abrupt reminder of how members of the state’s coercive caste perceive the rest of us: “You don’t ever touch a cop,” one of them snarled at her.
“I told them they didn’t need to do this, but it was as if they had to show their authority,” she later remarked.
Eventually the uniformed bullies allowed the victim to stand. But as eyewitness Timothy McMillen recalls, the harassment “didn’t just stop at the scene after they took him to the ground, but continued at Chambersburg Hospital,” where Freddie was flown for treatment.
By that time, a horde of donut-grazers had gathered to show solidarity with Hertzog and Erne. “There were four carloads of cops there when we got there,” continues McMillen. The stalwart defenders of public order apparently had no better use of their time than to intimidate and persecute a father whose son was in critical condition.
One of them, apparently stranded in perpetual adolescence, was playing the familiar bully’s game of bumping into Rourke in an attempt to antagonize him, and then lying by claiming that Rourke had bumped into him. While this was happening, doctors were telling Rourke that his comatose son might not survive.
An EMT, giving adult guidance to the overgrown playground tormentor and his playmates, told the police to let the Rourke family leave and to let the doctors get on with the task of saving Freddy’s life.
Freddy was still in a coma when Rourke was informed that he was being charged with aggravated assault, simple assault, and “failure of disorderly persons to disperse upon official order” — for the supposed crime of refusing to allow himself to be thrown to the ground for no reason by an officious prig in a government-issued costume.
Freddy, an honor roll student planning to major in (of all things) criminal justice, will require extensive hospitalization and rehabilitative therapy. When he returns to his home, notes local crime reporter Vicky Taylor, Freddy “will probably find major changes, not only in his life, but also in his parents’ lives. The aggravated assault charge James Rourke faces carries a state prison sentence of as long as 10 years.”
The only role played by the police in this tragedy was to insert themselves where they didn’t belong, assert “authority” they didn’t possess, assault a man who had done nothing wrong, and charge their victim with crimes he didn’t commit.
All of this offers a compelling case for the proposition that we would be much better off without the state’s armed enforcers. And it’s difficult to think of two bullies more richly deserving of getting their backs dirty than Troopers Elmer Hertzog and James Erne of the Pennsylvania State Police.
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Post by Stephen on Feb 18, 2010 11:43:42 GMT -5
ATLANTA COPS ASSAULT WOMAN FOR DARING TO ASK QUESTION
Minnie Carey, a 61-year-old Atlanta resident, was peaceably assembled with three of her friends on a sidewalk outside a convenience store, discussing funeral plans for a friend, when two heroic guardians of public order pulled up next to them.
“Move it,” grunted Officer Brandy Dolson of the Atlanta Police Department. Despite the fact that Carey and her friends were not blocking the sidewalk or otherwise causing problems for anybody, three of them complied with Dolson’s imperious demand.
Carey herself, however, asked why they were being ordered to vacate a public sidewalk.
“Because I said so,” Dolson declared, as if that were a good and sufficient reason. It was neither, of course, as Carey pointed out to the tax-supported armed functionary.
“I’m a citizen and a taxpayer and I have a right to be here,” she explained, according to police records cited by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I’m merely tring to find out about a sister’s funeral.”
Within seconds, Dolson and his cohort in state-sanctioned crime, Officer Jamie Nelson, had Carey “cuffed and stuffed” in their patrol car. After being held with her hands cuffed behind her back for 45 minutes, Carey was transferred by her abductors to a poorly ventilated paddy wagon in which she was held for another 45 minutes.
“I was very upset and very angry,” Carney recalled to the Journal-Constitution. “Here I am being treated as if I’m not human, not a citizen of this country. I was in this little hot box. There was no air. I was perspiring so much my glasses were sliding off my face.”
The middle-aged woman, a diabetic, was kept from eating for several hours. Wearing the handcuffs for an hour and a half left her with dangerous swelling in her hands.
Carey was cited for “disorderly conduct,” a cover charge preferred by uniformed bullies seeking an excuse to intimidate and harass Mundanes who are considered insufficiently docile. She endured three court hearings before the spurious charge was withdrawn. Officer Dolson didn’t deign to appear in court to press the charge.
Atlanta’s Civilian Police Review Board recently sustained Carey’s false arrest complaint against Officer Dolson, who has racked up 18 citizen complaints since 2001. As with every other Atlanta PD officer summoned by the Civilian Review Board, Dolson refused to cooperate with the inquiry.
The Board was resurrected following the 2006 police murder of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston, who was gunned to death in her home by a wolf pack of corrupt narcotics officers (but then, I repeat myself). Three of the officers involved in the murder of Mrs. Johnston are serving prison terms for charges arising from the killing and the attempted cover-up of the crime.
Despite the fact that the police department is required, by municipal ordinance, to provide the Review Board with “full access” to documents relevant to misconduct inquiries, the department — and, of course, the local donut-grazers’ union – has done everything possible to obstruct the Board’s work.
Sgt. Scott Kreher, president of the Atlanta chapter of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, insists that the Review Board “shouldn’t be doing these investigations,” reported the Journal-Constitution last August 26. A more suitable approach, he told the paper, would be to have the APD conduct its own reviews, perhaps aided by the Fulton County DA’s office, the FBI, or the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
The problem with civilian oversight, Sgt. Kreher maintains, is that the board “cannot assure officers their `Garrity rights,’” reported the Journal-Constitution. This can only be done by the agency employing them, according to Kreher.
As previously explained in this space, the so-called “Garrity Rule” provides police with a specially enhanced protection against self-incrimination: The instant the word “Garrity” falls from the tax-devouring lips of an officer caught in prosecutable misconduct, everything he says can be used only for the purpose of internal discipline, rather than criminal court.
In one recent case, a police officer who had just finished the literal execution of an intoxicated driver immediately started to blubber, “I want my Garrity!”
“We support citizen oversight,” insists Kreher, “but where the line is drawn is when the Citizen Review Board violates the officer’s due process rights” — which supposedly includes special immunities against prosecution they alone enjoy.
Given the abnormally high rate of Atlanta police academy graduates with criminal records, the immunities defended by Kreher and his ilk have the effect of turning the Atlanta PD into a haven for the community’s criminal element.
In an ideal world, as envisioned by the coercive caste, just as ordinary “citizens” like Minnie Carey have no right to question arbitrary orders issued by their uniformed superiors, the actions of the state’s armed enforcers wouldn’t be aren’t subject to official review by mere Mundanes in positions of political authority.
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Post by Stephen on Feb 20, 2010 22:08:52 GMT -5
COP THREATENS, INTIMIDATES COLLEGE FOR OBSERVING TRUTH
Like many others in the fraternity of armed tax-feeders, Mercer County, New Jersey Sheriff Kevin Larkin is “douple-dipping”: He is drawing a salary and a pension for the same job, sucking down money earned by productive people to the tune of $215,000 a year.
Recently Larkin removed his snout from the public trough long enough to engage in Brownshirt-style classroom intimidation of a professor who dared to speak his name in a tone other than that of chastened reverence.
During a February 1 political science class, Michael Glass, an associate professor at Mercer County Community College, “was conducting a discussion of what changes students would propose to the state budget to avoid the expected $2 billion shortfall,” reported Dmirty Gurvits in the college newspaper. “Some students suggested cutting the salaries of what they felt were overpayed [sic] state administrators.”
After Glass mentioneded officials who “double-dip,” the students asked for an example. He cited “several law enforcement officers, including Sheriff Larkin, who collects a Police and Fire Retirement System Pension as well as a government salary” — an $85,000 annual “retirement” pay-out, as well as a $129,634 salary.
When one of his students commented that he didn’t know what he would do with that much money, Glass reportedly commented: “In the case of the Sheriff, it’s not that much. He has [to pay] child support and alimonies.” (Of course, many people in the productive sector deal with similar problems without getting more than 200K in money plundered from others at gunpoint.)
Glass wasn’t aware that one of his students, a Mercer County Clerk named 26-year-old Brooke Seidl, had — in the fashion of a secret police informant — relayed the Sheriff of Glass’s comments via text message.
Shortly thereafter, campus security received a message from Larkin saying that he needed “to reach Prof. Michael Glass.” When the note was delivered to the instructor during class break, he dismissed it as a joke and returned to his lecture.
About a half-hour before the class ended, “Sheriff Kevin C. Larkin, dressed in a trenchcoat, opened the door to Prof. Glass’s classroom,” continues Gurvits’s account. The Sheriff, accompanied by a female aide, summoned the teacher to a brief conversation outside the classroom.
When they returned to the room, the professor — with the Sheriff looming no more than “six inches from him,” according to one eyewitness — apologized for “making disparaging comments” about the stainless public servant who had barged into his class.
“This isn’t over,” growled Larkin as his swagged from the classroom, leaving the choking stench of bullying arrogance in his wake. Just before the doors shut, the sheriff fired off a parting contemptuous salvo: “You’re a terrible teacher, you should get your facts from a book.”
Not content to pollute Glass’s classroom, Larkin on the following day made a phone call to Jose Fernandez, executive director of the college’s Human Resources department, to complain about Glass’s “conduct.”
Dr. Robin Schire, Dean of the Liberal Arts Division at Mercer Community College, offered an apt summary of the episode: “The idea of having a police presence challenging a professor and taking him out of class is something seen in a police state.”
It is also a likely harbinger of what we can expect from the coercive caste as it protects its perquisites amid an accelerating economic collapse.
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Post by Stephen on Feb 26, 2010 10:12:57 GMT -5
COPS PLAN TO ASSASSINATE FELLOW POLICEMAN WHO DARED TO SPEAK TRUTH
When he opened his locker at the NYPD’s 42nd Precinct, Officer Frank Palestro was greeted with a symbolic death threat: A mousetrap with his name on it.
Palestro, who was one of three elected precinct delegates to the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, had been outed as a “rat” for reporting acts of official corruption ordered by Lt. Susana Seda, a former midnight platoon commander who is mired in scandal.
The whistleblower “was transferred to another command for his safety,” reports the February 24 New York Daily News.
“There’s a handful of guys on the job who say they’ve got my back, but there are also people who won’t answer my calls,” Palestro laments. “My reputation is shot, but I know I did the right thing.”
His reputation is “shot” and his life is in danger from those who supposedly uphold the law because he acted in defense of the truth, rather than out of tribal loyalty to the Brotherhood in Blue. Those who doubt that such choices involve danger to life and limb should discuss the matter with Frank Serpico.
Despite the fact that it is all but unheard of for a union rep to “do things like this” — that is, report incidents of official corruption to Internal Affairs — Palestro explains that he considered himself duty-bound to act on behalf of young police officers who had been ordered to perjure themselves by Lt. Seda.
Among other things, the cops had been required to issue summonses for traffic violations they hadn’t witnessed and to tamper with a gun at a crime scene. After agonizing over the allegations, Palestro made three confidential phone calls to the Internal Affairs Board between September and December. The document logging those “confidential” calls was stuffed into Palestro’s locker next to the personalized mousetrap.
Lt. Seda, according to Palestro, “told everybody I was a `f****** rat’” because he acted in the interests of the public and conscientious street officers, rather than corrupt figures further up the chain of command. Accordingly, the nine-year police veteran and union rep is being offered protection akin to that extended to defectors from criminal syndicates.
The 42nd Precinct is hardly the only one in the Five Boroughs plagued with official corruption of this sort. Brooklyn’s 81st Precinct is currently being investigated by the NYPD “for manipulating statistics to make its cops look like better crimefighters,” the Daily News recently reported.
Officers were reportedly told to record felonies as misdemeanors and to ignore complaints from crime victims in order to massage official statistics. One lieutenant has been given the sobriquet “The Shredder” because of his penchant for destroying documents.
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KevinR
Group Commander
2003, 2009 Indy Squadron Champion
Posts: 753
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Post by KevinR on Feb 27, 2010 18:18:48 GMT -5
These stories are all one-sided. I've looked up some of them and find that often they reference back to the same one or two websites and are just cut and pasted all over the internet from that anti-government source.
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KevinR
Group Commander
2003, 2009 Indy Squadron Champion
Posts: 753
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Post by KevinR on Feb 27, 2010 18:22:44 GMT -5
I spent quite some time trying to find some corroboration for the story below. Almost everywhere I found it on the internet it was cut and pasted from another site. www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/50610.htmlAnd the author gives no sources. NONE. We have no proof ANYWHERE that James Rourke or the cops in question even exist. And if they do, who was the source of the info? There are always at LEAST two sides to every story. COPS ASSAULT FATHER WHILE SON IS NEAR DEATH James Rourke was living out a parent’s worst nightmare when two Pennsylvania State Troopers arrived and promptly made matters much worse. A little after 6:00 p.m. on January 28, Rourke, a 59-year-old man widely respected among residents of Doylesburg for his generosity and service to others, learned of a car crash involving his 19-year-old son Freddy. James and his wife Betty rushed to the scene on Path Valley Road, where the car — which was driven by a family friend — had collided with a utility pole. Freddy and his friend, Chad O’Donel, were trapped inside, and live power lines snaked across the wreckage. At the request of emergency personnel, Mr. Rourke — who had been sitting in a van across the street — walked to an emergency vehicle in the middle of the road to provide a brief medical history on his son. He was accompanied by his daughter, Betty Barrick. As the medical discussion took place, a police vehicle pulled up and decanted two truculent troopers — Elmer Hertzog and James Erne — who were apparently looking to drum up business for themselves. Eyewitnesses described Hertzog and Erne as “rude and disrespectful, using profanity in addressing Rourke and calling him a vulgar name” as they ordered him away from the emergency vehicle. The verbal abuse took place before Rourke and his daughter had a chance to leave — as did the ensuing assault by Hertzog. By his own admission, Hertzog was the first to lay hands on Rourke, grabbing him by the front of his coat and pushing him backwards. This was an act of criminal battery. Rourke, a 59-year-old man with a heart condition, grabbed Hertzog’s jacket in what his daughter described as an effort to keep from falling backward to the pavement. A local newspaper account twice uses the expression “deliberate attack on the trooper” to describe one possible description of Rourke’s action. Both he and his daughter deny that Rourke did anything more than act out of an understandable defensive reflex. However, given that Hertzog had committed an act of criminal violence against him, Rourke was entirely within his rights to counter-attack, if necessary and possible, irrespective of the official costume worn by his tax-devouring assailant. Trooper Erne, Hertzog’s cohort in official crime, didn’t exactly “have his partner’s back.” Instead, in a fashion familiar to students of bullying tactics Erne ganged up on the victim by attacking him from the back, striking him in the small of the back with a knee and then piling on when Hertzog took Rourke to the ground. Rourke’s daughter, frantic for her father’s safety, demanded that his assailants leave him alone, only to be given an abrupt reminder of how members of the state’s coercive caste perceive the rest of us: “You don’t ever touch a cop,” one of them snarled at her. “I told them they didn’t need to do this, but it was as if they had to show their authority,” she later remarked. Eventually the uniformed bullies allowed the victim to stand. But as eyewitness Timothy McMillen recalls, the harassment “didn’t just stop at the scene after they took him to the ground, but continued at Chambersburg Hospital,” where Freddie was flown for treatment. By that time, a horde of donut-grazers had gathered to show solidarity with Hertzog and Erne. “There were four carloads of cops there when we got there,” continues McMillen. The stalwart defenders of public order apparently had no better use of their time than to intimidate and persecute a father whose son was in critical condition. One of them, apparently stranded in perpetual adolescence, was playing the familiar bully’s game of bumping into Rourke in an attempt to antagonize him, and then lying by claiming that Rourke had bumped into him. While this was happening, doctors were telling Rourke that his comatose son might not survive. An EMT, giving adult guidance to the overgrown playground tormentor and his playmates, told the police to let the Rourke family leave and to let the doctors get on with the task of saving Freddy’s life. Freddy was still in a coma when Rourke was informed that he was being charged with aggravated assault, simple assault, and “failure of disorderly persons to disperse upon official order” — for the supposed crime of refusing to allow himself to be thrown to the ground for no reason by an officious prig in a government-issued costume. Freddy, an honor roll student planning to major in (of all things) criminal justice, will require extensive hospitalization and rehabilitative therapy. When he returns to his home, notes local crime reporter Vicky Taylor, Freddy “will probably find major changes, not only in his life, but also in his parents’ lives. The aggravated assault charge James Rourke faces carries a state prison sentence of as long as 10 years.” The only role played by the police in this tragedy was to insert themselves where they didn’t belong, assert “authority” they didn’t possess, assault a man who had done nothing wrong, and charge their victim with crimes he didn’t commit. All of this offers a compelling case for the proposition that we would be much better off without the state’s armed enforcers. And it’s difficult to think of two bullies more richly deserving of getting their backs dirty than Troopers Elmer Hertzog and James Erne of the Pennsylvania State Police.
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Post by Stephen on Feb 27, 2010 18:22:50 GMT -5
Does that make them false?
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KevinR
Group Commander
2003, 2009 Indy Squadron Champion
Posts: 753
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Post by KevinR on Feb 27, 2010 18:24:10 GMT -5
Does that make them false? No it doesn't. But just because they are anti-government or anti-police why believe them lock stock and barrel?
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KevinR
Group Commander
2003, 2009 Indy Squadron Champion
Posts: 753
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Post by KevinR on Feb 27, 2010 18:25:06 GMT -5
If you ask any criminal he's always innocent. There are tons of "innocent" brutal killers sitting on death row.
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KevinR
Group Commander
2003, 2009 Indy Squadron Champion
Posts: 753
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Post by KevinR on Feb 27, 2010 18:25:33 GMT -5
And the evil cops ruined their day by arresting them or detaining them.
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KevinR
Group Commander
2003, 2009 Indy Squadron Champion
Posts: 753
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Post by KevinR on Feb 27, 2010 18:27:05 GMT -5
If you ask any criminal he's always innocent. There are tons of "innocent" brutal killers sitting on death row. Ok maybe not ANY criminal. Some are honest and confess.
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Post by Stephen on Feb 27, 2010 18:39:20 GMT -5
Does that make them false? No it doesn't. Very well then. Let's confine our comments to specific and factual corrections of individual errors within the stories. That is a presumptive question which accuses me of believing only the information which validates my current position, and believing it with no discretion whatsoever. It also implies that I do not research the information given to me but merely accept it at face value. Please re-phrase the question in a manner that we can both find acceptable.
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KevinR
Group Commander
2003, 2009 Indy Squadron Champion
Posts: 753
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Post by KevinR on Feb 27, 2010 18:41:19 GMT -5
Fine, lets take that story as an example. About the cops. I'd like to see the corroborating evidence. I looked for over an hour last night and could find none. Just links to the same word for word article posted at a hundred anti-government websites across the web.
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