*Excellent* article on "Vox" about police abuse of people's rights (especially POC) and

[tblue37]

about how the culture of a given department--and the ~15% of cops who are inherently vicious--can turn even those not initially inclined to such brutality into abusers or accomplices of abusers.

http://www.vox.com/2015/5/28/8661977/race-police-officer

I'm a black ex-cop, and this is the real truth about race and policing
by Redditt Hudson on July 7, 2016

SNIP

It is not only white officers who abuse their authority. The effect of institutional racism is such that no matter what color the officer abusing the citizen is, in the vast majority of those cases of abuse that citizen will be black or brown. That is what is allowed.

SNIP

He tells some harrowing (but unsurprising) stories in the article.

[uponit7771]

1. +1, "...It is not only white officers who abuse their authority..." Ice Cube rapped about these cops

... decades ago. Its a culture of not serving for the 15% and its allowed by leadership

[tblue37]

5. Reynolds herself said that she discovered that the lights were working, and Gregory Ford, a

witness who came on the scene a few minutes after the shooting also said they were working. (He has a video.) I can't find the witness quoted anywhere else yet, so I have to give you the Daily Mail link, but I am sure he will be interviewed by other outlets soon.

Also, notice that the cops threatened to confiscate phones if any witnesses dared to videotape the scene:

Here is what Diamond Reynolds said about the tail lights:

Reynolds said the car’s taillight wasn’t even broken, which was the excuse for the stop in the first place. Castile told the officer he was licensed to carry a gun, reached for his identification, and was shot.

Here is what witness Gregory Ford said:

~Cops say he was pulled over by Officer Jeronimo Yanez because of a busted taillight on the Oldsmobile Aurora

~But Ford, 42, says he could clearly see the taillights on the car were working when he was at scene minutes later

~'The rear lights were on. The car was still running and it was night-time, so you could clearly see both lights were on.'

~He said that officers warned bystanders if they shot video, their phones would be taken for evidence (emphasis added)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3681591/That-taillight-working-fine-Witness-rubbishes-police-claim-Philando-Castile-death-streamed-Facebook-pulled-busted-light-car.html#ixzz4DrmxKroV

[uponit7771]

6. The phone confiscation should be against the damn law... the Minnesota issue is fuckin disgusting

[tblue37]

8. It IS against the damn law--according to the SCOTUS we have the right to videotape the cops--

but when did such cops ever worry about obeying the law? If they obeyed the law we wouldn't have to videotape them to prove what they are up to.

Note that the store owner in the Alton Sterling case hid his phone in his pocket before the cops could see that he had taken a video, because he knew they'd snatch it and disappear the video, and in fact the cops did take his security camera, claiming they had a warrant to do so. No doubt they meant to "accidentally" erase the security cam footage, just as both of their own body cams "accidentally" fell off during the scuffle. But once they realized there were two other videos of the incident that they had not managed to grab, they had to know that the two missing body cam videos plus a missing security cam video would make them look even worse.

[uponit7771]

9. Thx for the reminder I do remember that and this is ONE of the issues that fustrates this issue and

... the PD leadership can fix QUICKLY; they SHOULD NOT allow the PDs to not follow the simple low hanging fruit rules and laws of the land... they do allow for the "disapeering" of shit and then the corrupt culture in their depts grow.

[tblue37]

10. Carlos Miller started his website "Photography Is Not a Crime" after being

arrested or recording cops. He posts a lot of videos of cops abusing their authority.

https://photographyisnotacrime.com/

[tblue37]

11. Omerta is important to organized gangs. I once saw a post on a Facebook site for cops

that really reinforced my suspicion of cop culture. In the post a police officer bragged that the police are "the largest armed gang in America." He got a lot of positive, similarly boastful responses from his peers for that comment.

And then there is this:

http://thegrio.com/2015/05/12/fbi-white-supremacists-law-enforcement/
"FBI's warning of white supremacists infiltrating law enforcement nearly forgotten"

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/5/21/1384553/-2006-FBI-Report-on-White-Infiltration-of-Law-Enforcement-You-Will-Be-Assimilated
"2006 FBI Report on White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement: You Will Be Assimilated"

One positively chilling aspect of this 2006 FBI report is the description of what white supremacists call "ghost skins."

[font color = "blue"]Since coming to law enforcement attention in late 2004, the term "ghost skins" has gained currency among white supremacists to describe those who avoid overt displays of their beliefs to blend into society and covertly advance white supremacist causes.

[/font]
I don't know who the white supremacists are in the police departments, DA offices, and judge's chambers of this country. And neither do you.

They have assimilated.

[uponit7771]

12. +1

[tblue37]

13. Here is another typical video from Miller's site:

In this video (posted on PINAC), at 9 seconds in a cop drags a passively resisting woman down the steps by her hair, another cop throws a witness violently across the sidewalk, and then at 20 seconds the first cop punches the woman, who is on her back on the sidewalk by then, hard 3 times in the face. Then starting at 25 or 26 seconds he grabs her hair and drags her for about 15 seconds by her hair all the way to the cop car some distance away!

<iframe width="620" height="465" src="

" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

This sort of crap is why we need to video them and why they need to be forced to wear body cams and sanctioned when they don't turn them on or when they pretend they didn't work. No doubt the woman was being uncooperative, and she had been stupid and obnoxious before the videotaping started.

The article with the video says she had slapped the cop, so obviously he was enraged, but as a cop it is part of his job to control the situation and control himself, not to go all caveman on a (probably drunk) woman half his size because she acted like an ass. Yes, she slapped him, but he beat the crap out of her and then dragged her all the way down the stairs and down the sidewalk by her hair!

If a woman stupidly slaps her husband and he then punches her repeatedly in the face and drags her around by her hair, he would be arrested for domestic abuse. (She would probably be arrested, too, but her slap is a much less brutal attack than the face-punching and hair dragging by a man twice her size.)

[Meldread]

2. Why is Vox in scare quotes?

[tblue37]

3. It isn't. The title punctuation rule is that website titles are italicized, and titles of

specific articles on websites are enclosed in quotation marks.

But there is no way to italicize the title of Vox in the subject line, so I put the title in quotation marks as a way of punctuating it as a title.

I used to use underscores to do that (like this: _Vox_), but several people questioned me about what those lines were for, so although that is standard form of punctuation when one cannot italicize or underline a title online, I stopped using it because it confused readers.

(BTW, I am an online grammar guru: http://www.grammartips.homestead.com/index.html)

[Meldread]

4. Ah, sorry! I misunderstood.

I know that some people didn't like Vox's (rather honest) coverage of the primaries. I wasn't sure whether you were trying to insinuate something or not, considering that Vox is pretty left leaning--though it does fall in line with more mainstream Democrats.

Thanks for the clarification.

[tblue37]

7. No problem. I can see how you might wonder whether I was undermining--rather than underscoring--the

website for snarky reasons.