Cops Gone Wild
August 15, 2014| Categories: Articles & Columns| Tags: militarized police, Police, police state, | Print This Article
Paul Craig Roberts
Update: I have received four or five emails from readers who complain that the person in the photo, which is a photo taken from media accounts, is not the person who the cops murdered in Ferguson.
Why does it matter? The photo shows three oversized cops pointing military weapons at point blank range at a black kid with his hands up. Any one of the cops unarmed could have restrained the kid. The photo demonstrates that the police are trained to use excessive force.
The emails I received demonstrate the inability both emotionally and rationally of many Americans to deal with reality. They try to hide from reality by claiming that Ferguson’s size threatened the police, who were justified in shooting him. Hiding from reality is the refuge of no-think Americans. Most of the “exceptional people” can be found hiding there.
The right-wing Republican “law and order” conservatives who are defending the police murder deeply believe that they are threatened not by the federal governments destruction of their constitutional protections, but by dark-skinned “minorities.” They believe, unlike America’s founding fathers, that the government and its police force are what makes them safe.
This belief dooms Americans.
Ferguson, Mo. is a small overwhelmingly black town whose government and police are white. The Ferguson police murdered an 18 year old black male who had his hands over his head. If you take a look at the photo of the three goon thugs pointing military rifles at point blank range at the kid with his hands up, when any one of the over-sized goons unarmed could have restrained the kid, you can understand how excessive police force results in abuse and murder of citizens.
There is no question that the black community in Ferguson regards Michael Brown’s death as murder. But will it be covered up by the white government and the white police force if protests are limited to the black small town population of Ferguson? As this report suggests, there is good reason to fear a coverup in Ferguson:
http://rt.com/usa/180680-ferguson-henry-davis-blood/
There is another astonishing aspect to the murder. Unarmed protesters in Ferguson are confronting a small town police force that is as well or better armed than America’s combat troops on battlefields in countries invaded by Washington. The only reason there is any trouble in Ferguson is that the cops murdered in cold blood a person without cause or justification, and the black community thinks that the white murderer will be given a pass by the white government. The part-time black US Attorney General, Eric Holder, has not sent in the Feds to investigate.
It is not only in Ferguson that goon thug cops murder people and they don’t murder only blacks. Whites get it also. There are a huge number of murders by police in “the home of liberty and democracy.” During the course of Washington’s war in Iraq, American police murdered more innocent American civilians than America lost troops in the war!
The American police murder so many civilians that it would take several thick volumes to record the police atrocities. The ones mentioned in this article are merely among the most recent that are reported.
The Atlanta-Journal Constitution reports that a white 37-year old woman having a reaction to prescribed medication tried to call 911 for help but got instead a police goon thug who shot her dead up against the wall in her own bedroom. The police have put out the fake story that the woman in medical distress threatened the goon thug with a weapon.
The newspaper reports that the woman’s husband also called 911, but fails to report that the husband said that he was headed home and would see that the emergency was dealt with only medically and not to send any police. But the goon thugs couldn’t miss the opportunity to murder another innocent American civilian.
Police victims have no rights, and in the vast majority of cases neither do the families of the murdered police victims. Compensation to the families of murdered police victims is rare as is accountability for the police murderers. In America a police badge is a license to murder.
During the past decade, perhaps longer, the federal government has systematically militarized local and state police forces in all 50 states. The police have been trained by federally contracted trainers to regard the American public as the enemy. The police are trained that they must not take the risk of encountering members of the public on a trusting basis, but must regard the public as armed and determined to murder the police.
I have observed on a number of occasions fully militarily equipped police training by 30 of them lining up and emptying high capacity magazines at the same target. Like most small towns in America, Doraville, Georgia, population 8,500, has a SWAT team armed with the weapons of the US military.
Congress should hold hearings to determine which federal budget was used to train state and local police to murder Americans. America has been at war for 13 years at vast costs against Muslims deemed to be a threat to our safety; yet American police have murdered more Americans than we lost in the Iraq war.
We need to discover who trained our police to murder us, and we must hold both the criminals responsible for the “training” and the criminals in the government who financed the “training.”
The most fatal mistake that any American can make is to call the police.
With permission I republish my contribution to the summer issue of Gerald Celente’s Trends Journal:
Police Violence Against The Public Soars
In the 1960s, there was an effort in New York City to establish a civilian police review board. Complaints about police violence and harassment of black New Yorkers had grown to the point that the reality of the problem was obvious. New York Mayor John Lindsay was amenable, but conservatives led by William F. Buckley and the police rose up in arms. The conservative media called the police review board “the property of bleeding hearts and cop-haters.” Fear-mongering was used to rally white voters, who were told that the review board would coddle criminals, demoralize the police, and lead to an upsurge in crime.
Mayor Lindsay established a review board by executive order, but rising opposition forced the supporters of the review board to put it to a vote. Fear had done its job, and the review board was abolished by a vote of 63 percent against and 36 percent in favor. This from “liberal New York.”
In the half-century that has passed, gratuitous police violence has spread to the public in general. Today it is not only blacks and Hispanics who experience police brutality. Everyone suffers from it. Being white is no longer a protection. In a recent column, “Call the Cops at Your Peril,” I reported a few of the recent atrocities police have committed against the public. Ninety-three-year-old Pearlie Golden was shot down in her front yard in Hearne, Texas. In Miami, 23 police officers fired 377 bullets, literally blowing away two men trapped inside a wrecked car. The police were under no threat whatsoever from the 93-year-old woman or from the two men trapped inside a wrecked car. In Cornelia, Georgia, a SWAT team made a no-knock entry at 3 a.m. and threw a concussion grenade into a baby’s crib. The grenade blew up in the baby’s face, leaving him disfigured, unable to breathe without a ventilator, and with a 50 percent chance of survival. According to the Atlanta Constitution-Journal, the raid produced no drugs, no weapons, no bundles of cash, and no suspected drug dealer. It was just another of the thousands of mistakes routinely made by SWAT goons who put American citizens at risk every time they break unannounced into a home, usually a wrong address.
New tactic: Kill the dog
A police favorite is to murder the family’s pets. When the Middletons, ranchers in Rains County, Texas, called the sheriff’s department to report a burglary of their home and the theft of firearms, the first thing the deputy did when he arrived was to shoot the Middleton’s three-year-old, 40-pound Australian cattle dog, Candy, in the head. In Prince George’s County, Maryland, cops on a mistaken drug raid broke into the mayor’s home and murdered his two non-aggressive black Labradors while holding the mayor and his mother-in-law at gun point.
Another police favorite is to humiliate their arrested victim, especially women, by stripping them naked. The abuse of women has become routine. In a recent case, a 31-year-old white mother of four in New Albany, Indiana, was arrested for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest after a fight with her estranged husband. In police parlance, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest mean that the woman protested the false arrest and raised her voice. As most Americans have no idea about the police, they are shocked and disbelieving when they experience a police encounter. Until they have an encounter with the police, they are big supporters of the police. Unable to believe what was happening to her, she was stripped of her clothing by two male and two female cops, paraded around the jail naked in front of the police, and thrown naked into a cell. She became hysterical as a result of this treatment. Enjoying their torment of their victim, the cops pepper sprayed her. The county sheriff said that he does not believe jail policies or procedures were violated. In other words, the sheriff admitted that abuse, humiliation and excessive use of force are routine.
http://www.infowars.com/cops-strip-parade-pepper-spray-woman-and-lock-her-in-cell-for-7-hours/ Also:
http://www.policestateusa.com/2014/tabitha-gentry/
As I write, I googled “videos of US police brutality” and 7,660,000 results appeared in 0.31 seconds. There are more cases of gratuitous police violence, almost always against the innocent, than a person can absorb in a lifetime. Police body slam elderly infirm people, taser cripples in wheel chairs, pepper spray, taser, and mace kids, young women, and mothers with babes in their arms. Just the other day police shot and killed a 13-year-old kid who was walking down the street with a toy rifle doing no harm to anyone. Only the goon cops regarded the 13-year-old as a threat. The goon cops simply couldn’t let the opportunity pass to experience the thrill of killing a person.