As fellow law professor sent me this video of Oakland police shooting a photographer. The video raises serious questions of the unjustified use of force.
In the video, the police appear to be standing without challenge when, around the 33 second mark, an officer suddenly shoot a photographer who is a good distance from the police line.
I cannot imagine the claim of justification in this case when the use of rubber bullets present significant potential harm to citizens, as shown below.
Kudos: Professor Alberto Bernabe (John Marshall Law School)
Source: Lowering Bar
Otteray Scribe: “LK, I foresee lawsuits in the near future. Many police departments have found themselves on the losing end of “excessive use of force” ”
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I hope so.
And your subsequent posting is true, when they start moving the media out you just know there will be violence.
Bloomberg has always been Wall Street’s mayor. Giuliani, the former mayor, was more of a fascist. He probably would have killed more people.
S.M.,
The US govt. is corporate sponsored. That is a reason to resist. Do not give up.
Most mayors are corporate sponsored.
Most politicians are government sponsored…
If this were happening in a country the US govt. wanted control of, it would be time for NATO to start bombing “to protect civilians” (ie: effect regime change).
Yesterday authorities in NY grounded a press helicopter, arrested reporters, stole and destroyed private property to include 5000 books in the people’s library, beat, pepper sprayed and otherwise abused peaceful civilians, were prepared to and may have used a military weapon, the sound canon, defied a legal court order, refused entry of those with sleeping bags to the park despite no order given to that effect by a court of law.
This event was coordinated with similar illegal police brutality in many other cities. The DHS is involved. They tried to force a judge in Nashville to sign arrest warrants against protesters there. Now someone needs to explain how DHS became so concerned with sanitation.
Like China, the US news is pretty much all “fake news”. I have seen this spun many different ways, some to help the right feel good about the destruction of the rule of law by force and others that help the left accept this as well.
It won’t work.
One reason for not wanting documentation is that video evidence is powerful in a tort case against the police. Gets past the “my word against yours” hurdle.
Nonviolent resistance always exposes the corruption of the powerful
A news blackout was necessary so that the well designed unlawful violence of the police could not be fully documented.
Politicians and the Dept. of Homeland Security encouraged the police to riot across the country and the police flamboyantly obliged.
It is who they are; it is what they do.
This is very true. There is no doublt in my mind that the people that are ending up dead are being killed by people that are being paid off to do so.
“As to the middle class? If you really care about the middle class you would want to encourage the job creators to produce products and services in this country.”
Bron,
The test of whether or not one has bought the Kool-Aid of corporate benificence is when they substitute “job creators” for corporatist entrepreneurs.The only true motive for a corporation is profit and that’s by definition. your “job creators” are in reality job and industry destroyers. To avoid paying decent wages they took their manufacturing operations overseas. To avoid paying their fair share of taxes they established headquarters in places like the Cayman’s and Switzerland. Mr. Gates, estimable as he might be in some ways, tried to create a monopoly with MS and was only reigned in by government. A CEO is always judged by the bottom line and that is the basis for the rise and fall of the stock market.
As for the banks and Wall Street they have been running a con game on us for many years. When we allowed investment banking to take over regular banking the whole system went to hell. The repeal of Glass-Steagall was a disaster presided over by bought Democratic and Republican politicians intoxicated by
campaign contributions. The current system is an affront to the senses, but your system of reducing regulation and giving “job creators” a free hand would complete the job of turning America into a Third World feudalist country.
LK, I foresee lawsuits in the near future. Many police departments have found themselves on the losing end of “excessive use of force” lawsuits recently. I wonder if they are insured or are self-insured.
When the reports said police were using pepper spray on Occupy Seattle protesters they weren’t talking about police using those small sized cans on some specific protesters, they were talking about large to huge fire-extinguisher type canisters to blanket a wide field indiscriminately. See the third picture down and take a look at that big black canister being used by the cop at the center.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2062097/Occupy-Seattle-Police-pepper-spray-elderly-pregnant-protesters.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
Mike S:
I think you miss the real problem, which in my mind is government control of the economy. The amassing of wealth by people who actually produce a product, Bill Gates or TJ Rodgers adds to the economic pie and improves all of our lives. Gates and Rodgers are not the only ones who became rich from their success.
Wall St. also plays a role by providing capital for these ventures, granted they do make a shit pot full of dough but they take great risk as well. And they operate within the rules set by government regulations and within the boundaries of the rates set by the Federal Reserve.
I am well aware there are some sleazy operators on Wall St who are unethical and laugh at the rest of us but I dont think this is the rule. In my mind the problem comes from ineffective and inefficient government regulations. For example if memory serves me correctly, the Glass Steagall Act was to prevent banks from acting as brokers as well as banks and other things but I believe that was one of the main issues. But did you know that banks which also dealt in equities had a failure rate 4 times less than those banks which were banks only? If preventing bank failures was the purpose of Glass Steagall why was that fact ignored?
People were pissed off at the bankers for the Great Depression and congress had to do something. But just like now the depression was exacerbated by government intrusion into the market. And just like now people were clamoring for a political solution to a market problem. Although unlike now, people back then put more faith in government than they do now.
Peel that onion and you will find that there is some politician or bureaucrat at the core of most of the economic problems we face today.
We need government to protect us but we do not need over reaching government such as we have now. Why are you against the Patriot Act but for Sarbanes Oaxley (assuming you are)? There is a connection between the 2. Each takes away some of our freedoms in the name of protecting us from some threat to our security. But each is probably more detrimental to our liberty than the loss of security is worth.
As to the middle class? If you really care about the middle class you would want to encourage the job creators to produce products and services in this country. Like for example the pipeline from Canada’s tar sands. But now the oil is going to go to China which will refine it and send it back to us with a hefty mark-up. And we will have lost those few thousands miles of pipe line construction and all of the jobs and material production which would have gone with it not to mention the possibility of us exporting the gas and other products to China, Europe, India.
Seattle had their City Council come out in support of their Occupy camp.
Tonight, the Seattle Occupy camp is being raided in the most vicious way: people pepper sprayed so far, a old blind woman with a cane, a child, a priest, and a pregnant woman.
Good job Homeland Security.
They seem to be as well trained as the TSA.
Thanks for the Olbermann link, OS. I hope he is right.
Keith Olbermann had a special comment on his show tonight. For those who do not get Current TV or have not seen it streaming on the ‘tubes, here is the article he published earlier this evening about it. He thanks Mayor Bloomberg for managing to revitalize the OWS movement. Hizzoner’s actions last night lit a fire under the protest movement. Gandhi’s maxim was right.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/11/15/1036813/-Special-Comment:-The-Hero-Of-Occupy,-Mike-Bloomberg?via=siderec
At Zuccotti Park, Police Protect the One Percent
Laurie Penny November 15, 2011
The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/article/164608/zuccotti-park-police-protect-one-percent
A Raid on the First Amendment: New York’s Assault on Press Freedom
John Nichols on November 15, 2011
The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/blog/164613/raid-first-amendment-new-yorks-assault-press-freedom
The dark-of-night raid on New York City’s Zuccotti Park was not merely an assault on the Occupy Wall Street movement. It was an assault on the underpinnings of the First Amendment to the Constitution, an amendment that was outlined and approved by the First Congress of the United States at No. 26 Wall Street in 1789.
That amendment, which was written to empower citizens to challenge and prevent the rise of a totalitarian state, recognized basic freedoms that were essential to the defense of liberty. Among these are, of course, the right to speak freely and to embrace the religious ideals of one’s choice.
But from a standpoint of pushing back against power, however, the rights to assemble and to petition for the redress of grievances are fundamental. And those rights were clearly assaulted early Tuesday morning.
So, too, was another right: the right to a free press.
Why does the right to a free press matter so much? Because, as the founders knew, no experiment in democracy could ever be anything more than that—an experiment—if the people don’t know what is being done in their name by those in positions of authority. “A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it,” observed James Madison, “is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both.”
Nothing is more necessary in a democracy than the informing of the people, not merely to assure that they can influence the direction of government but also to assure that government does not become a threat to their livelihoods, their rights, their freedoms. The playwright Tom Stoppard captured the reality of why a free press is so very necessary in his 1978 play, “Night and Day,” where a veteran journalist explained that “people do awful things to each other. But it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark.”
When New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the dark-of-night clearance of Zuccotti Park, and police authorities barred journalists from the scene early Tuesday, the people were kept in the dark. Helicopters for television stations were grounded, most reporters were kept far from the scene in a “press pen,” a reporter for the New York Post and others who got close enough to the park to see what was happening were roughed up, and several journalists—included reporters for the New York Daily News, Associated Press and National Public Radio—were detained and arrested.
Congressman Jerrold Nadler, who represents much of Lower Manhattan and who is the senior Democrat on the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement issued with state Senator Daniel Squadron, another Manhattan Democrat, that warned: “The City’s actions to shut down OWS last night raise a number of serious civil liberties questions that must be answered. Moving forward, how will the City respect the protesters’ rights to speech and assembly? Why was press access limited, and why were some reporters’ credentials confiscated? How will reported incidents of excessive force used by the police be addressed?”
As lawyers for the movement pressed for injunctions against the city, Nadler and Squadron argued that: “Whatever the courts rule, the City’s actions here must not be a backdoor means of ending the free exercise of protesters’ rights.”
Responding to concerns about the battering that the Constitution has taken at “Occupy” protests around the country, the union that represents journalists, the Newspaper Guild, has launched an “Occupied Journalists” Facebook page. Designed to serve as an online forum for media workers to share survival strategies and anecdotes from the streets, the page was started when Guild-CWA organizer Sara Steffens says the union “started hearing a lot of reports from all over the country from journalists running into trouble covering the protests.”
Unions and press freedom groups need to step up, as do elected officials who swear oaths to defend the Constitution against all enemies “foreign and domestic.”
Referring to the clearing of the treatment of protesters and journalists in New York, Nadler and Squadron said: “Irrespective of this incident, OWS is now bigger than Zuccotti Park, and no one has the power to silence this national movement.”
Let’s hope they are right and that the people are no longer “kept in the dark” by officials who want the freedom to operate without the oversight and accountability that a free press must provide.
OS- great minds and like that, you would have said it more eloquently I’m sure: I was writing purely from snark and and that weakens a more literate style. 🙂
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Blouise, “1%ers down through history never do their own dirty work … lackeys are always eager to kiss-up”
Yep, drones and traitors indeed.
1%ers down through history never do their own dirty work … lackeys are always eager to kiss-up
“What miserable drones and traitors have I nurtured and promoted in my household who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric! ( Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?)” (Henry II, king of England)
LK, you beat me to it. I was composing pretty much the same thing in my head when you posted. Well said.
Bdaman: “When the cops raided Zuccotti Park, lawyers for Occupy Wall Street woke up a judge with a civil liberties background and asked for help.
….
Billings’ biography notes that before she became a judge in 1997, she spent three years as a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union and also worked work community legal services.
“I have devoted my career to public service, especially the disadvantaged in desperate circumstances,” she wrote in a 2007 pre-election statement.
Her involvement will be short-lived.”
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Heaven forbid that a Judge with a civil liberties background should be allowed on the bench, it’s so antithetical to a country founded on the principle of liberty and freedom and justice and all that plebeian crap. New York city and the country can rest more securely knowing that the city has taken her off their go-to list.