Video compiled from leaked police video of events on November 15th 2011 when police violently evicted protesters from liberty square in NY. Media was not allowed to cover the event, several journalists were arrested during the event, their video and equipment being damaged or destroyed in blatent police attempts at media repression. Journalists were told they could not be anywhere near the park as the eviction took place… removing any sense to the officers involved that they would be held accountable for their actions.
Police Dog Let Loose on a Crowd of Peaceful Civilians, Including Women and Children After Shooting an Unarmed Man Twice in the Back
The video below marks a new low in police conduct. The final horrific incident on display allegedly was sparked by the suspicious killing of a man who witnesses say did nothing more than turn to run from police.
After “an unruly crowd” — as the reporter below conveniently states — gathered to ask questions and express anger at what was perceived to be a senseless killing, the officers further proved that those who were gathered had valid concerns about their local police force. The police rioted in response, police quickly opened fire with rubber bullets, and even set a dog loose on a woman with a baby stroller. The woman was able to grab her baby before the dog arrived, but she was slightly injured, while a man can be seen in the video [below] having his arm bitten. Read the rest of this entry →
SFPD Shoot Unarmed Man In The Back While Handcuffed
Witnesses tell the tale of a handcuffed #OccupySF protestor being shot twice in the back by a member of the San Francisco Police Department.
As the police state continues to intensify, instances where members of the citizenry are being treated like second-class citizens and either spied on, wrongfully targeted and arrested, tazed and/or shot also continues to increase.
Such was the case Wednesday morning as eye-witness video, via #OccupySF Repressed Media and uploaded to Youtube, captured the victim, in what appears to be downtown San Francisco, being loaded into an ambulance, lying motionless and still in the handcuffs.
While asking what took place, one witness explained the circumstance, prompting the videographer to gain a better view, allowing him to see the victim being loaded onto the ambulance.
Based on the video statement, the incident took place around 10:30 AM PST, in front of the “Federal” Reserve building at 101 Market Street. According to the statement,
A man had just been shot and killed by SFPD by the SAFEWAY near Sue Bierman Park. OccupySF Repressed Media responded and witnessed paramedics and SFFD moving a body into an ambulance. Eyewitnesses report SFPD shot and killed an apparently unarmed Asian or Hispanic man twice in the back WHILE HE WAS ALREADY IN HANDCUFFS. WTF? #FTP We later discovered that the witness in this video actually saw the incident. #OccupySF Repressed Media was the first camera on the scene. (video below) Read the rest of this entry →
At the Chicago NATO Summit, after the rally off Cermak and Michigan, May 20th 2012. Police surrounded protesters and box off one group from the rest of the rally. Without any dispersal order, the police leading with batons and violence, started pressing thousands of protesters through a narrow exit. Towards the end of the video a independant journalist is attacked after filming police violence, his camera broken in the incident.
Thousands of marchers gathered in Chicago today to continue a week of criticism directed at the arms industry, NATO, and the austerity measures carried out against social service providers on the local level.
The first of three marches on Saturday focused attention on the closures of half of the city of Chicago’s neighborhood mental health clinics as 2-3 thousand people congregated in front of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s home at 4228 N. Hermitage.
Around 3:30pm, Saturday, approximately 1,000 marchers gathered at Daley Plaza to protest the raid of a Bridgeport home and terrorism charges levied against three anti-NATO activists — a group dubbed the NATO 3, inspiring a currently trending campaign on twitter with the keyword #NATO3.
A third march, the Anti-Capitalist march, had been called to meet at the statue commemorating the international labor movement in Haymarket Square at Randolph and Desplaines on the Near West Side.
Several hundred people from the #NATO3 group marched to the South Loop, and in attempting to meet the “Anti-Capitalist” march at Haymarket were divided and redirected by the Chicago Police Department into several smaller groups. By the time the disparate marches converged near Randolph and Desplaines around 6:30pm, the police department had repeatedly stopped the marchers at intersections as the different groups attempted to reach each other, walking through the closed-off downtown streets in 90 degree heat.
One march headed west on Harrison Street over the south branch of the Chicago River, a second became kettled at State and Congress, while the third mustered at 175 N. Desplaines, and proceeded south towards the others. After converging near Madison and Jefferson, the larger gathering moved north, then east, to turn south onto State Street, when double lines of police on foot and bicycles again met, stopped, and kettled the crowd of approximately 1,500, arresting several, while using batons to beat several more. The crowd worked its way south on State Street, and as it neared Taylor, it was again hemmed in, and in response to some provocation (likely the rapid brandishing of metal batons by officers) the noise level in the crowd increased. Around ten people in the assembly were beaten.
At the height of the Occupy Wall Street evictions, it seemed as though some diminutive version of “shock and awe” had stumbled from Baghdad, Iraq, to Oakland, California. American police forces had been “militarized,” many commentators worried, as though the firepower and callous tactics on display were anomalies, surprises bursting upon us from nowhere.
There should have been no surprise. Those flash grenades exploding in Oakland and the sound cannons on New York’s streets simply opened small windows onto a national policing landscape long in the process of militarization — a bleak domestic no man’s land marked by tanks and drones, robot bomb detectors, grenade launchers, tasers, and most of all, interlinked video surveillance cameras and information databases growing quietly on unobtrusive server farms everywhere.
The ubiquitous fantasy of “homeland security,” pushed hard by the federal government in the wake of 9/11, has been widely embraced by the public. It has also excited intense weapons- and techno-envy among police departments and municipalities vying for the latest in armor and spy equipment.
In such a world, deadly gadgetry is just a grant request away, so why shouldn’t the 14,000 at-risk souls in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, have a closed-circuit-digital-camera-and-monitor system (cost: $180,000, courtesy of the Homeland Security Department) identical to the one up and running in New York’s Times Square?
Feds Invade Homes of Independentistas and Trade-Unionists, Steal Documents, Brutally Assault Journalists
Another level of the seemingly endless, unregulated Midwestern law enforcement campaign against political activists has been revealed in 525 pages obtained from the Department of Justice by Freedom of Information Act requests filed by David Goodner of Des Moines. (FULL PDF 62MB / Scribd.com)
Two related stories emerge: in 2004-2006, federal agents spurred to achieve career-advancing “statistical accomplishments” spied on people the G-Men linked with the CrimeThinc Anarchist publishing label — in Des Moines and Winona, MN anyone linked to anything CrimeThinc is deemed a great target for further snooping. Read the rest of this entry →
by Daniel Willis and Thomas Peele - originally found via Occupy Santa Cruz
Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle Oakland interim Police Chief Howard Jordan and Mayor Jean Quan answer questions about the Occupy Oakland camp raid at City Hall.
Journalists constantly struggle to go beyond the official spin and report on a deeper level about government actions.
It’s a daily fight, one in which we need to be ever diligent against getting snowed by officials and falling into the role of stenographers rather than independent reporters. All of us, me included, can find ourselves regretful when we learn that the bureaucratic rhetoric we reported turns out to be far from reality.
That’s why the best reporting tracks government action by document rather than lip service. It’s why obtaining government communications is a vital and why I have dedicated my 2012 columns to the obtaining public officials’ e-mails and texts.
Today, rather than write this column, I am going to let the bureaucrats write it. What follows are city of Oakland e-mails obtained under the Public Records Act in which top officials discuss Occupy Oakland and the tent city that sprang up last year outside City Hall. City officials’ attempts to oust the protesters and the violent response that followed helped turn Oakland into an epicenter of the national Occupy movement. The emails’ writers include public relations people, lawyers, and top police officials, including a deputy police chief, Jeffrey Israel, who has since been demoted to captain. Read the rest of this entry →
Current and former students have sued the University of California, Davis over its campus police’s use of pepper spray against peaceful student demonstrators.
Seventeen UC Davis students and two alumni filed the lawsuit against university officials and police on Wednesday concerning the shocking pepper-spraying incident in November 2011 that sparked international condemnation.
The incident saw campus police pepper-spraying a group of students, who were sitting down in a peaceful protest as part of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. The OWS emerged after a group of demonstrators gathered in New York’s financial district of Wall Street on September 17, 2011 to protest against the excessive influence of big corporations on the US policies and the high-level corruption in the country. Read the rest of this entry →
OAKLAND, California (Reuters) – A man shot and wounded by an Oakland police officer last weekend was a cousin of Oscar Grant, whose shooting death by a Bay Area transit officer sparked violent demonstrations in 2010, his attorney said on Wednesday.
The officer shot Tony Jones, 24, in the back as he fled from a police car at about 11:45 p.m. on Sunday, according to Jones’ attorney, Waukeen McCoy.
“He made a mistake running, but that didn’t give them the right to shoot him in the back,” McCoy said. Jones is the son of Oscar Grant’s aunt, he added.
By fighting terrorism with covert CIA actions, President Obama deprives us of the ability to meaningfully evaluate American foreign policy.
The War in Iraq is mostly over. We’re drawing down forces in Afghanistan. Barring an unexpected terrorist attack or another Libya-style troop deployment, Election 2012 will proceed in a world where the War on Terrorism is being waged by intelligence agencies making drone strikes in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and one in which we may be taking covert action inside Iran too.
In others words, much of American foreign policy will be a state secret.
Think about what that means for democracy.
The Iraq War was a major campaign issue in 2004 and 2006. President Obama owes his victory in 2008 partly to the fact that he opposed it, persuaded voters he’d exercise better judgment if faced with a “3 a.m. phone call,” and vowed to double down on winning the War in Afghanistan.
Leading neuroscientists believe that the UK Government may be about to sanction the development of nerve agents for British police that would be banned in warfare under an international treaty on chemical weapons.
A high-level group of experts has asked the Government to clarify its position on whether it intends to develop “incapacitating chemical agents” for a range of domestic uses that go beyond the limited use of chemical irritants such as CS gas for riot control.
The experts were commissioned by the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences, to investigate new developments in neuroscience that could be of use to the military. They concluded that the Government may be preparing to exploit a loophole in the Chemical Weapons Convention allowing the use of incapacitating chemical agents for domestic law enforcement.
The 1993 convention bans the development, stockpiling and use of nerve agents and other toxic chemicals by the military but there is an exemption for certain chemical agents that could be used for “peaceful” domestic purposes such as policing and riot control.
The British Government has traditionally taken the view that only a relatively mild class of irritant chemical agents that affect the eyes and respiratory tissues, such as CS gas, are exempt from the treaty, and then only strictly for use in riot control.
Nato Summit – 2012. Chicago, Illinois plans to host more than 7,500 international dignitaries and 3,000 journalists at the G8 Summit this spring.
But if history is any indication, those numbers will be dwarfed by tens of thousands of demonstrators descending on the Windy City this year to protest the massive gathering of world leaders.
And as police prepare to clash with protesters who picket the annual meeting of the minds, the crime scenes that are expected to be marred by messy arrests might never be made available outside of Chicago. In the state of Illinois, an obscure eavesdropping law prohibits recordings of unknowing individuals. Even if a cop is caught clobbering a protester on the streets of Chicago, recording the incident can land both amateur photographers and seasoned journalists alike behind bars, where they could face sentencing on par with charges of rape and murder.
The law in question is an antiquated eavesdropping rule that can bring about felony charges for producing an audio recording without ones’ consent. Critics have come after the law and challenged its constitutionality — or lack thereof — but as of now the offense is on the books and is likely to stay that way come springtime. For the Chicago cops that will be tasked with controlling a swarm of protesters at the summit, it could be to their benefit. The same, sadly, can’t be said for the freedom of the press.
The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists—so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property—is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state. The Occupy encampments in various cities were shut down precisely because they were nonviolent. They were shut down because the state realized the potential of their broad appeal even to those within the systems of power. They were shut down because they articulated a truth about our economic and political system that cut across political and cultural lines. And they were shut down because they were places mothers and fathers with strollers felt safe.
Black Bloc adherents detest those of us on the organized left and seek, quite consciously, to take away our tools of empowerment. They confuse acts of petty vandalism and a repellent cynicism with revolution. The real enemies, they argue, are not the corporate capitalists, but their collaborators among the unions, workers’ movements, radical intellectuals, environmental activists and populist movements such as the Zapatistas. Any group that seeks to rebuild social structures, especially through nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, rather than physically destroy, becomes, in the eyes of Black Bloc anarchists, the enemy. Black Bloc anarchists spend most of their fury not on the architects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or globalism, but on those, such as the Zapatistas, who respond to the problem. It is a grotesque inversion of value systems.
But in this case, something stood out: police failed to issue an eviction notice through the government “point of contact,” who’d been in regular talks with Occupy Austin, and instead launched a late night sneak attack that left many homeless people particularly vulnerable ahead of a big storm.
“We had no idea this was going to happen, we weren’t prepared at all,” said Ronnie Garza, 28, an Austin Interoccupy correspondent who took part in a nationally coordinated march Friday against the National Defense Authorization Act.
Police in Oakland have a history of brutal repression and wrongdoing, which has incited the ire of local activists [EPA]
Oakland, CA – The streets of Oakland, a California city of about 400,000, became a battle ground again on Saturday, as police showed excessive force in their response to Occupy Oakland demonstrations. Around 400 protesters were arrested, and many more, including the elderly, children, and some unwitting passersby, were tear-gassed and injured during the course of the first day of Occupy Oakland’s Move-In Weekend and Rise Up Festival.
January 28th was a day blackened by the dark armor of riot police clear across the North American continent. In Oakland, the efforts of Occupy protesters to build a community center in a long abandoned convention hall were blocked by brutal repression at the hands of law enforcement. Over three hundred people were reported arrested by the Oakland Police Department, after they were rounded up from their peaceful protest without warning, kettled into a square, tear gased, shot with rubber bullets and bean bags, beaten with batons, and then systematically imprisioned one by one. Among them were several members of the Occupy Portland Media Committee, who had traveled to the city in order to help with media coverage for their re-occupation. This photo below, shows the aftermath once the police had come in and done their work. American citizens sit, bound on their knees, which guarded by by a black-clad, invading army.
