A police officer was relieved of duty after he was caught on video kicking a man"s head like a soccer ball, while the man was handcuffed and being restrained on the ground.
The post Cop Fired After Video Shows Him Kick Handcuffed Man’s Head Like a Soccer Ball appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
A video was posted online that showed police officers repeatedly hitting and punching a homeless man after they found him sleeping under a bridge.
The post Residents Outraged As Video Shows Cops Hold Homeless Man Down, Savagely Beat Him appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
A family is claiming that after shooting and killing a man during a traffic stop over illegal window tint, officers visited the funeral home and demanded access to his dead body so that they could unlock his phone with his fingerprint.
The post Cops Kill Unarmed Dad Over Window Tint, Use His Dead Finger To Unlock His Phone appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
A shocking report from the Florida Times-Union has revealed that in just a three-month time frame, thousands of innocent women were subject to invasive practices in which they were strip-searched just to visit a family member in jail.
The post In Just 3 Months Cops Strip-Searched Thousands of Innocent Women for Visiting Family in Jails appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
A teenage boy committed suicide after he was left paralyzed and in chronic pain by a police officer who targeted him and shot him in the back 6 times.
Courts in two states are finally admitting that dangerous early-morning raids conducted by SWAT teams searching for cannabis are illegal and unwarranted.
Surveillance footage shows a police sergeant lying about why he was reserving a hotel room for a mentally ill woman, before using it to sexually assault her.
A Broward County sheriff"s deputy faces felony charges after he was caught having an abusive sexual relationship with a teen girl.
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
—William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
Things are falling apart.
How much longer we can sustain the fiction that we live in a constitutional republic, I cannot say, but anarchy is being loosed upon the nation.
We are witnessing the unraveling of the American dream one injustice at a time.
Day after day, the government’s crimes against the citizenry grow more egregious, more treacherous and more tragic. And day after day, the American people wake up a little more to the grim realization that they have become captives in a prison of their own making. No longer a free people, we are now pushed and prodded and watched over by twitchy, hyper-sensitive, easily-spooked armed guards who care little for the rights, humanity or well-being of those in their care.
The death toll is mounting. The carnage is heartbreaking. The public’s faith in the government to do its job—which is to protect our freedoms—is deteriorating.
With alarming regularity, unarmed men, women, children and even pets are being gunned down by police who shoot first and ask questions later, and all the government does is shrug and promise to do better.
Things are not getting better.
Justine Damond is dead. The 40-year-old yoga instructor was shot and killed by Minneapolis police, allegedly because they were startled by a loud noise in the vicinity just as she approached their patrol car. Damond, clad in pajamas, had called 911 to report a possible assault in her neighborhood.
Ismael Lopez is dead. The 41-year-old auto mechanic was shot and killed by Mississippi police who went to the wrong address looking for a suspect in connection with an aggravated domestic violence case. Police also shot the man’s dog, which had raced out of the house ahead of him.
Mary Knowlton is dead. The 73-year-old retired librarian was shot and killed by Florida police during a “shoot/don’t shoot” role-playing scenario when police inadvertently used a loaded gun intended for training.
Sam DuBose is dead. The unarmed 43-year-old rapper was shot in the head and killed by a University of Cincinnati police officer during a traffic stop over a missing front license plate.
Andrew Scott is dead. Although the 26-year-old homeowner had committed no crime and never fired a single bullet or lifted his firearm against police, he was gunned down by Florida police who were investigating a speeding incident by engaging in a middle-of-the-night “knock and talk” in Scott’s apartment complex.
Richard Ferretti is dead. The 52-year-old chef was shot and killed by Philadelphia police while trying to find a parking spot. Police had been alerted to investigate a purple Dodge Caravan that was driving “suspiciously” through the neighborhood.
Fritz Severe is dead. The 46-year-old homeless man was shot five times and killed by Miami police in front of more than 50 schoolchildren attending a nearby summer camp merely because he was seen holding a metal pipe.
Jordan Edwards is dead. The 15-year-old high school freshman was sitting in the passenger seat of a car driving away from a house party when Dallas police, claiming to have heard gunshots, smashed in the window of the moving car and shot the teenager in the head. Edwards’ two brothers, also in the car, watched him die. No weapons were found.
Charleena Lyles is dead. The pregnant, 30-year-old mother of four had called the police to report a stolen Xbox video game unit. She was shot and killed by Seattle police after they arrived at her home to find her holding a knife.
In every one of these scenarios, police could have resorted to less lethal tactics.
They could have acted with reason and calculation instead of reacting with a killer instinct.
They could have attempted to de-escalate and defuse whatever perceived “threat” caused them to fear for their lives enough to react with lethal force.
That police instead chose to fatally resolve these encounters by using their guns on fellow citizens speaks volumes about what is wrong with policing in America today, where police officers are being dressed in the trappings of war, drilled in the deadly art of combat, and trained to look upon “every individual they interact with as an armed threat and every situation as a deadly force encounter in the making.”
Remember, to a hammer, all the world looks like a nail.
We’re not just getting hammered, however.
We’re getting killed, execution-style.
It no longer matters whether you’re innocent of any wrongdoing or guilty as sin: when you’re dealing with police who shoot first and ask questions later, due process—the constitutional assurance of a fair trial before an impartial jury—means nothing.
All the individuals who have been shot and killed by police—fired at three and four and five times in a split second—have already been tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. And in that split second of deciding whether to shoot and where to aim, the nation’s police officers have appointed themselves judge, jury and executioner over their fellow citizens.
In this way, we’re seen as nothing more than animals and treated as such.
In fact, we’re being gunned down like dogs.
Consider that a dog is shot by a police officer “every 98 minutes.”
The Department of Justice estimates that at least 25 dogs are killed by police every day. ?
Spike, a 70-pound pit bull, was shot by NYPD police when they encountered him in the hallway of an apartment building in the Bronx. Surveillance footage shows the dog, tail wagging, right before an officer shot him in the head at pointblank range.
Arzy, a 14-month-old Newfoundland, Labrador and golden retriever mix, was shot between the eyes by a Louisiana police officer. The dog had been secured on a four-foot leash at the time he was shot. An independent witness testified that the dog never gave the officer any provocation to shoot him.
Seven, a St. Bernard, was shot repeatedly by Connecticut police in the presence of the dog’s 12-year-old owner. Police, investigating an erroneous tip, had entered the property—without a warrant—where the dog and her owner had been playing in the backyard, causing the dog to give chase.
Dutchess, a 2-year-old rescue dog, was shot three times in the head by Florida police as she ran out her front door. The officer had been approaching the house to inform the residents that their car door was open when the dog bounded out to greet him.
Yanna, a 10-year-old boxer, was shot three times by Georgia police after they mistakenly entered the wrong home and opened fire, killing the dog, shooting the homeowner in the leg and wounding an investigating officer.
Here’s the point: when you train police to shoot first and ask questions later—whether it’s a family pet, a child with a toy gun, or an old man with a cane—they’re going to shoot to kill.
This is the fallout from teaching police to assume the worst-case scenario and react with fear to anything that poses the slightest threat (imagined or real). This is what comes from teaching police to view themselves as soldiers on a battlefield and those they’re supposed to serve as enemy combatants. This is the end result of a lopsided criminal justice system that fails to hold the government and its agents accountable for misconduct.
Whether you’re talking about police shooting dogs or citizens, the mindset is the same: a rush to violence, abuse of power, fear for officer safety, poor training in how to de-escalate a situation, and general carelessness.
This is the same mindset that sees nothing wrong with American citizens being subjected to roadside strip searches, forcible blood draws, invasive surveillance, secret government experiments, and other morally reprehensible tactics.
Unfortunately, this is a mindset that is flourishing within the corporate-controlled, military-driven American police state.
So what’s to be done about all of this?
Essentially, it comes down to training and accountability.
It’s the difference between police officers who rank their personal safety above everyone else’s and police officers who understand that their jobs are to serve and protect. It’s the difference between police who are trained to shoot to kill and police trained to resolve situations peacefully. Most of all, it’s the difference between police who believe the law is on their side and police who know that they will be held to account for their actions under the same law as everyone else.
Unfortunately, more and more police are being trained to view themselves as distinct from the citizenry, to view their authority as superior to the citizenry, and to view their lives as more precious than those of their citizen counterparts. Instead of being taught to see themselves as mediators and peacemakers whose lethal weapons are to be used as a last resort, they are being drilled into acting like gunmen with killer instincts who shoot to kill rather than merely incapacitate.
As a result, we’re approaching a breaking point.
This policing crisis is far more immediate and concerning than the government’s so-called war on terror or drugs.
This is no longer a debate over good cops and bad cops.
It’s a tug-of-war between the constitutional republic America’s founders intended and the police state we are fast becoming.
So how do we fix what’s broken, stop the senseless shootings and bring about lasting reform?
For starters, stop with the scare tactics. In much the same way that American citizens are being cocooned in a climate of fear by a government that knows exactly which buttons to push in order to gain the public’s cooperation and compliance, police officers are also being indoctrinated with the psychology of fear. Despite the propaganda being peddled by the government and police unions, police today experience less on-the-job fatalities than they ever have historically.
Second, level the playing field. Police lives are no more valuable than any other citizen’s. Whether or not they wield a gun, police officers are public servants like all other government officials, which means that they work for us. While police are entitled to every protection afforded under the law, the same as any other citizen, they should not be afforded any special privileges. They certainly should not be shielded from accountability for misconduct by the courts and the legislatures.
Third, require that police officers be trained in non-lethal tactics. According to the New York Times, the training regimens at nearly all of the nation’s police academies continue to emphasize military-style exercises, with the average young officer made to undergo 58 hours of firearms training and 49 hours of defensive tactical training, but only eight hours of de-escalation training. If police officers are taking classes in how to shoot, maim and kill, shouldn’t they also be trained in non-lethal force, crisis intervention training on how to deal with the mentally ill, de-escalation techniques to use the lowest level of force possible when responding to a threat, and how to respect their fellow citizens’ constitutional rights?
Fourth, ditch the quasi-military obsession. Police forces were never intended to be standing armies. Yet with police agencies dressing like the military in camouflage and armor, training with the military, using military weapons, riding around in armored vehicles, recruiting military veterans, and even boasting military titles, one would be hard pressed to distinguish between the two. Still, it’s our job to make sure that we can distinguish between the two, and that means keeping the police in their place as civilians—non-military citizens—who are entrusted with protecting our rights.
Fifth, demilitarize. There are many examples of countries where police are not armed and dangerous, and they are no worse off for it. Indeed, their crime rates are low and their police officers are trained to view every citizen as precious.
Sixth, stop making taxpayers pay for police abuses. Some communities are trying to require police to carry their own professional liability insurance. The logic is that if police had to pay out of pocket for their own wrongdoing, they might be more cautious and less inclined to shoot first and ask questions later.
Seventh, support due process for everyone, not just the people in your circle. Remember that you no longer have to be poor, black or guilty to be treated like a criminal in America. All that is required is that you belong to the suspect class—a.k.a. the citizenry—of the American police state. As a de facto member of this so-called criminal class, every U.S. citizen is now guilty until proven innocent.
You could be the next person who gets shot by a police officer for moving the wrong way during a traffic stop, running the wrong way in the vicinity of a police officer, or defending yourself against a home invasion when the police show up at the wrong address in the middle of the night.
People have been wrongfully shot and killed for these exact reasons.
Yet as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, there can be no justice in America when Americans are being killed, detained and robbed at gunpoint by government officials on the mere suspicion of wrongdoing.
Unfortunately, Americans have been so propagandized, politicized and polarized that many feel compelled to choose sides between defending the police at all costs or painting them as dangerously out-of-control.
Nothing is ever that black and white, but there are a few things that we can be sure of: America should not be a battlefield.
Police officers are not soldiers.
And “We the People: are not the enemy.
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“It is often the case that police shootings, incidents where law enforcement officers pull the trigger on civilians, are left out of the conversation on gun violence. But a police officer shooting a civilian counts as gun violence. Every time an officer uses a gun against an innocent or an unarmed person contributes to the culture of gun violence in this country.”—Journalist Celisa Calacal
Legally owning a gun in America could get you killed by a government agent.
While it still technically remains legal to own a firearm in America, possessing one can now get you pulled over, searched, arrested, subjected to all manner of surveillance, treated as a suspect without ever having committed a crime, shot at and killed.
This same rule does not apply to government agents, however, who are armed to the hilt and rarely given more than a slap on the wrists for using their weapons to shoot and kill American citizens.
According to the Washington Post, “1 in 13 people killed by guns are killed by police.”
Just recently, for example, a Minnesota jury acquitted a police officer who shot and killed 32-year-old Philando Castile, a school cafeteria supervisor, during a routine traffic stop merely because Castile disclosed that he had a gun in his possession, for which he had a lawful conceal-and-carry permit. That’s all it took for police to shoot Castile four times as he was reaching for his license and registration. Castile’s girlfriend and her 4-year-old daughter witnessed the entire exchange.
Earlier this year, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Florida police will not be held accountable for banging on the wrong door at 1:30 am, failing to identify themselves as police, and then repeatedly shooting and killing the innocent homeowner who answered the door while holding a gun in self-defense.
Continuing its own disturbing trend of siding with police in cases of excessive use of force, a unanimous Supreme Court recently acquitted police who recklessly fired 15 times into a backyard shack in which a homeless couple—Angel and Jennifer Mendez—was sheltering. Incredibly, the Court ruled that the shooting was justified because Angel was allegedly seen holding a BB gun that he used for shooting rats.
What these cases add up to is a new paradigm in which legally owning a gun turns you into a target for government sharp-shooters.
Ironically, while America continues to debate who or what is responsible for gun violence—the guns, the gun owners, or our violent culture—little has been said about the greatest perpetrator of violence in American society: the U.S. government.
Violence has become the government’s calling card, starting at the top and trickling down, from the more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans by heavily armed, black-garbed commandos and the increasingly rapid militarization of local police forces across the country to the drone killings used to target insurgents.
You want to reduce gun violence? Start with the government.
The government’s arsenal of weapons makes the average American’s handgun look like a Tinker Toy. Under the auspices of a military “recycling” program, which allows local police agencies to acquire military-grade weaponry and equipment, more than $4.2 billion worth of equipment has been transferred from the Defense Department to domestic police agencies since 1990.
In the hands of government agents, whether they are members of the military, law enforcement or some other government agency, these weapons have become accepted instruments of tyranny, routine parts of America’s day-to-day life, a byproduct of the rapid militarization of law enforcement over the past several decades.
This lopsided, top-heavy, authoritarian state of affairs is not the balance of power the founders intended for “we the people.”
The Second Amendment, in conjunction with the multitude of prohibitions on government overreach enshrined in the Bill of Rights, was supposed to serve as a clear shackle on the government’s powers.
To founders such as Thomas Jefferson, who viewed the government as a powerful entity that must be bound “down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution,” the right to bear arms was no different from any other right enshrined in the Constitution: it was intended to stand as a bulwark against a police state.
As I explain in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, without any one of those freedoms, we are that much more vulnerable to the vagaries of out-of-control policemen, benevolent dictators, genuflecting politicians, and overly ambitious bureaucrats.
Writing for Counterpunch, journalist Kevin Carson warns that prohibiting Americans from owning weapons would “lead to further erosion of Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure, further militarization of local police via SWAT teams, and further expansion of the squalid empire of civil forfeiture, perjured jailhouse snitch testimony, entrapment, planted evidence, and plea deal blackmail.”
This is exactly what those who drafted the U.S. Constitution feared: that laws and law enforcers would be used as tools by a despotic government to wage war against the citizenry.
Now don’t get me wrong.
I do not believe that violence should ever be the answer to our problems. Still there’s something to be said for George Orwell’s view that “that rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer’s cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.”
The Second Amendment serves as a check on the political power of the ruling authorities. It represents an implicit warning against governmental encroachments on one’s freedoms, the warning shot over the bow to discourage any unlawful violations of our persons or property.
Certainly, dictators in past regimes have understood this principle only too well.
As Adolf Hitler noted, “The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing.”
It should come as no surprise, then, that starting in December 1935, Jews in Germany were prevented from obtaining shooting licenses, because authorities believed that to allow them to do so would “endanger the German population.”
In late 1938, special orders were delivered barring Jews from owning firearms, with the punishment for arms possession being 20 years in a concentration camp.
The rest, as they say, is history. Yet it is a history that we should be wary of repeating.
Fort Pierce, FL — For the majority of people who see those red and blue lights turn on behind them as they drive down the highway, your adrenaline spikes, your heart races, and the last thing going through your mind is, “I am being protected right now.” While most of these stops end with a promissory note of extortion for a victimless crime, sometimes, especially for women, things can get quite dangerous.
As the Free Thought Project has reported countless times, all too often, police officers will abuse their authority to force unwilling victims into performing sexual favors in exchange for leniency. Also, many times, there is no quid pro quo and police officers will simply rape people they pull over — case in point, Daniel Holtzclaw.
A young Florida woman has learned the hard way about police rape last week when she was stopped by St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Deputy, Evan Cramer, 28.
According to Sheriff Ken Mascara, Cramer pulled over his latest victim last Tuesday night for a minor traffic violation. However, instead of simply writing a ticket and moving on, Cramer proceeded to use his authority to rape this woman.
Cramer is accused of telling the victim she had multiple warrants out for her arrest and said she could avoid jail time if she granted sexual favors, Mascara said.
According to police, Cramer then kidnapped his victim, threw her in the back of his cruiser, drove her to a vacant car lot, and raped her.
Immediately after it happened, his frightened victim then went to the local hospital to report she’d been raped.
READ MORE: Cops Beat This Father of Three to the Point of Hospitalization. "Oh Sorry Wrong Guy"
“She was terrified,” said Sheriff Ken Mascara. “You could hear it in her voice. You could see it. It was palpable.”
Cramer was arrested the next morning after a brief investigation. He was charged with sexual assault/battery and unlawful compensation, the sheriff’s department said. He is currently being held on a $850,000 bond.
Mascara told the media last week that it is, indeed, likely, that Cramer had done this before and urged any potential victims to come forward.
“He made comments to this victim that support that he’s done this in the past,” the sheriff said. “He actually compared her to other victims. It’s apparent there are some other victims out there, based on his own statements.”
“During a time in our nation when respect for law enforcement is at an all-time high, incidents such as this quickly erode that trust and respect,” Mascara said. “I want to apologize to our community and other members of the law enforcement family for the dishonorable actions of this one person.”
While this apology sounds okay, perhaps Mascara should apologize for hiring this officer with such a troubled past in the first place. After the arrest, WPBF looked into Cramer’s past — what they found was trouble.
As WPFB reports:
We’ve obtained Cramer’s personnel file for when he worked for the Sandford Police Department. He started there in March of 2015 and in January of 2016, three of his superiors recommended to the chief that Cramer be fired.
A Lieutenant in the department cited multiple reasons for the recommendation, including “using inappropriate language in public” and “using his authority to gain compliance.”
Cramer resigned from the department in January before he was fired.
Less than four months later, he was hired at the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office.
Effectively annihilating law enforcement claims writing tickets and arresting people are matters of public safety, a Florida police department has been caught red-handed holding a contest offering a “reward” to the officer who generated the most citations and arrests.
Last month, as an internal memo obtained by Channel 9 revealed, the Winter Springs Police Department held this reward-based citation-production contest, likely to generate a bit of extra revenue by commandeering people as often as possible through legal state extortion.
Winter Springs police insisted in a statement to Channel 9 the memorandum was “meant to promote teamwork and camaraderie,” and should not be equated with any sort of “quota” system.
As Channel 9 reported, “More than 100 citations, warnings and arrests were made during the weekend of Sept. 10. A handwritten memo titled ‘Delta Shift Weekend Competition’ offered ‘points’ for everything from a written warning to DUI arrests that weekend. The ‘winner’ would get to float for a pay period and also a ‘surprise.’”
Jeff Lotter, a former Orange County Sheriff’s deputy and a Florida Highway Patrol trooper who now works as a traffic attorney, admitted to the station officer discretion would likely be affected by the promise of a reward.
“I think a quota has a negative connotation: Meet this standard or you’re punished,” Lotter explained. “This is the inverse of that. The winner gets a reward, but it has the same effect.”
Quotas are, in fact, illegal in the State of Florida — but are often imposed in surreptitious methods to ensure ‘productivity’ and, as mentioned, increased revenue for a department.
“Does it happen in some places? Yeah, I’m sure it does,” Chuck Wexler, Police Executive Research Forum executive director told NPR of quota systems last year.
“On the one hand, there is an understandable desire to have productivity from your officers. But telling them that you want to arrest x number of people, you have to cite x number of people, it just encourages bad performance on the part of officers.”
Or, more accurately, bad behavior.
As Lotter noted of the Winter Park contest, some of the contest-induced September citations might have otherwise been mere warnings — in other words, for the duration of the contest, the police officers probably victimized only marginally guilty individuals.
“There are multiple citations issued to one driver,” he explained. “Generally you think about a major violation being issued, and warnings after that, so it definitely raises some questions.”
Channel 9 reported a single driver was issued a “$206 ticket for speeding, a separate $116 fine for failing to change his address on his license and a third fine of $166 for open container.”
Another received a $116 ticket for lacking proof of insurance and one for $131 for speeding — after having exceeded the speed limit by just 9 miles per hour.
Such ordinarily-illegitimate — or at least highly questionable — fines don’t lend to confidence in policing, especially given the current evaporation of trust between law enforcement and the American public.
“If citizens believe that tickets are being issued or arrests are being made for reasons other than the goal of law enforcement, which is about public safety, then their trust in the legitimacy of the system is really eroded,” co-chairwoman of President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, Laurie Robinson, told NPR.
In the statement justifying the contest to Channel 9, the Winter Park Police Department said:
“After receiving your inquiry, we discovered the document in question was drafted during the period of one weekend in September by a sergeant as a way to promote teamwork within her individual squad. The context of the document was meant as a way to encourage camaraderie among her officers. It does not amount to an enforcement quota.
“Even despite statutory prohibitions, the Winter Springs Police Department has not and will not sanction enforcement quotas of any kind. In addition to crime prevention programs, proactive traffic enforcement is just one goal of reducing crime within any jurisdiction and we are continually committed to that cause. We will investigate this matter further and take remedial action as deemed necessary through that investigation.”
So, essentially this Florida police department recognizes quotas as illegal, has found a way to thwart the law, and will investigate itself for any wrongdoing — undoubtedly finding nothing untoward in the arbitrary increase in tickets and arrests, even of potentially innocent people.
“I think they know they’re in the gray area,” Lotter said, “and I would encourage them to dismiss these violations.”
