Culture of Resistance

socialismartnature:

Riot police fired bean bag rounds and pepper balls into a crowd of protestors late Tuesday outside City Hall as councilmembers inside voted unanimously to ask the U.S. attorney’s office to investigate recent officer-involved shootings, including one of an unarmed man.

The back-to-back weekend shootings have sparked four days of protests. A crowd of protesters who were shut out of the council meeting because there was no more room grew violent, tossing rocks and bottles at police and ignoring warnings to disperse.

Officers formed lines to try to contain the crowd as residents set fire to trash cans, loudly taunted police and swarmed a Starbucks, breaking windows.

Police helicopters hovered from above as colorful fireworks from nearby Disneyland lit up the sky.

At least two people were arrested, police Sgt. Bob Dunn said. At one point, police shut down a gas station when protesters were seen filling canisters with gas.

CBS station KCAL reports that some of the people in the crowd were trying to hold a peaceful demonstration, but others began chanting, swearing and yelling at police officers.

 … “We want a peaceful demonstration, but when the cops are pushing us off because they want to show that they have control, then they start hitting us with their batons,” one demonstrator told CBS2/KCAL9 reporter Louisa Hodge.

“They hit a woman when we were just standing there voicing our opinion,” he said.

anti-propaganda:

‘IT’S BILLED as the greatest show on earth. But the closer you get to the London stadium that will be the centre of the Olympic Games in just over a fortnight’s time, the more it’s starting to look like a militarised occupation zone. East London has become lockdown London. The Olympics are the focus of Britain’s largest security mobilisation since the second world war.

Soldiers are already on the streets. Around 13,500 are being deployed, more than currently in Afghanistan, along with tens of thousands of police and private security guards. Drones will patrol the skies over the Olympic park, barricaded behind an 11-mile electrified fence and guarded with sonic weapons and 55 teams of attack dogs.

The greatest local outrage has, not surprisingly, been triggered by the decision to site surface-to-air missile batteries, with orders to shoot down any unauthorised aircraft, in six residential areas around the park – including in the former factory buildings where the socialist feminist Annie Besant led the celebrated “matchgirls’ strike” in 1888. On Tuesday, residents of another tower block failed at the high court to stop the army putting missiles on their roof on the grounds that they hadn’t been consulted and could be vulnerable to terrorist attack.

Of course, if the state hosting the Olympics is in the habit of invading and occupying other people’s countries, the likelihood of terrorist attacks will increase. And ever since the killing of Israeli athletes in Munich 40 years ago, Olympic security has been tight. But the scale and visibility of the London operations, including powers to crack down on protest and even remove critical posters from private homes, go far beyond the demands of any potential threat.

There are other motivations, naturally. In the words of one Whitehall official, the Olympics are a “tremendous opportunity to showcase what the private sector can do in the security space”. But it’s all a long way from the Olympic ideals of promoting peace, internationalism and participation through sport.’

#london #militarised #lockdown #police #state #olympic #games #2012

beatyourselfup:

Some Bel Air firefighters recently got in trouble for posting comments on Facebook that expressed disappointment that a local fast food restaurant had failed to extend them a discount routinely offered police and military personnel. The comments included a snide suggestion that the owner might feel differently if he found his dumpster set on fire or if the volunteers declined to respond to a fire on the premises.

Eddie Hopkins, chief of the Bel Air Volunteer Fire Company, took swift and appropriate action, giving reprimands to the nine firefighters involved, suspending several members and demoting an officer. In a statement posted on the company web site, Chief Hopkins said he was “extremely disappointed and ashamed that any of our members would make these statements.”

That would seem a sufficient response except for one thing. While the chief announced that his members should “not expect something for the job they do nor should they ask for it,” and even announced that his personnel would be trained on how to use social media in the future, he did not choose to ban discounts or gifts entirely. Indeed, the told The Sun’s Colin Campbell that it was a “tough call” to decline freebies and the “line is so gray, I don’t know where to draw it.”

On this, we would beg to differ. Police and firefighters can avoid such embarrassments and potential conflicts of interest by simply never accepting a gratuity at any time or anywhere. This is really not so difficult as Mr. Hopkins and others might presume. Just say no, and it’s an easy call.

If the owner of the local convenience store insists you accept a cup of coffee, simply say this: “That’s very generous of you, but my department’s regulations forbid my accepting gifts. I’m sure you understand and wouldn’t want to get me in trouble. Again, thanks for the offer and have a nice day.”

See? No fuss, no muss, and, frankly, a lot of store owners will likely be relieved that they will no longer feel pressured to extend such discounts.

[…]

One day it’s coffee and the next it might be a “tip” for steering business toward a particular towing or private ambulance service. Meanwhile, the public is left to wonder if public servants will respond with the same enthusiasm to their emergencies as those involving the businesses that give them discounts, free food and other perks.

As for the military, that’s another story. A soldier really can’t show favoritism toward a local business — or even risk the appearance of favoritism. There doesn’t appear to be such an obvious ethical conflict aside, perhaps, from those rare occasions when the National Guard is called out for domestic duties and takes on the role of cop or firefighter.

The most shocking revelation of the Bel Air Facebook flap was that so many volunteer firefighters could nurture such a strong sense of entitlement. But that’s what happens when freebies from so many sources are constantly left at their doorstep; the recipients come to expect them like a spoiled child tearing through gifts on Christmas morning.

That they won’t post unsettling thoughts on public forums like Facebook anymore won’t end that sense of entitlement but will just keep it out of public view. The only real solution is to end the practice of freebies entirely. Volunteers may not like it, but we don’t believe any of them got into firefighting to get a burger and fries 20 percent cheaper than the general public.

I would say that there are some tools to stop corruption, they are called laws.
Severe punishment for officials wich accept or even promote brivery!

#police #law enforcement #ethics #police misconduct #military #free food

socialismartnature:

Cindy Klumb reports on the growing fight for justice for Tamon Robinson—another Black man who lost his life at the hands of the NYPD.

ON MOTHER’S Day, I couldn’t stop thinking about another mother who needlessly lost her son. Then, on June 9, I got to meet Laverne Dobbinson at a rally and march in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn demanding “Justice for Tamon.”

On April 12, 2012, Laverne’s son Tamon Robinson, like Travon Martin, encountered someone who made a wrong assumption based on his age and the color of his skin. In Tamon’s case, it was a police officer, while in Trayvon’s case, it was a civilian, George Zimmerman. But in both cases, because the young men were African American, their lives were cut tragically short.

Tamon worked in as a barista at the Connecticut Muffin café on Lafayette Avenue in Fort Green, Brooklyn. On the side, he collected bricks, stones and other discarded building materials and sold them for scrap. Around 5:30 a.m., on the way to his car that morning, Tamon stopped to collect some old paving stones that the Seaview Houses were throwing away. He had permission from the building’s management to take them.

Officers in a patrol car spotted him and assumed he was stealing. When two officers began chasing him, Tamon ran toward the building where he had, until recently, lived with his mother. He had moved into his own apartment, but still had a key and stopped by to visit her every day.

He was barely 100 yards away from the entrance when a third officer drove a police cruiser onto the sidewalk and ran him down. A witness reported seeing Tamon fly up into the air and then land on the ground. Officers were overheard telling him to get up before picking him up and throwing the unconscious man onto the hood of the car. When they realized he was not responding, they finally called emergency medical services.

In some twisted irony, during a canvas looking for witnesses, the same officers knocked on Tamon’s mother’s door. Ms. Dobbinson was told there had been an accident and asked if she saw anything. She was unaware that the young man injured in the accident was her son. It was not until later—around 4 p.m.—that officers returned to her door to tell her that her son was in the hospital in a coma.

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

By Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report

The fabulously wealthy Michael Bloomberg won election as mayor of New York just two months after September 11th, and immediately declared that Black and brown pedestrians had no rights that his police were bound to respect. In 2002, Bloomberg’s cops scooped up a little less than 100,000 people. Last year, the total was almost 700,000. In practice, there is little to distinguish the daily racial regime in New York City from the apartheid pass system of white ruled South Africa, where non-whites were made to produce identification papers to justify their presence in those areas of the country designated for whites. Apparently, under Mayor Bloomberg, all of New York City is white people’s territory, because Black and brown folks are stopped for no good reason in every section of town.

socialismartnature:

We all have an interest in fighting against the political frame-up of the “NATO 5” — five social justice activists who have been labelled “dangerous anarchists” by a hyperventilating state prosecution which is pursuing ludicrous terrorism charges. The real “crime” of these 5 activists is merely that they are opposed to war and corporate power and that they were caught up in a misguided undercover police dragnet.

#nato 5 #terrorism #war #imperialism #police #free speech

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

The names of the three men charged with these serious felonies are 28-year-old Mark Nieween and 24-year-old Sebastian Senakiewicz, both of Chicago, as well as 23-year-old Taylor Hall, described by the NLG as an independent journalist fromPittsburgh,Pennsylvania. Nieween is being held on a $500,000 bond, Senakiewicz on a $750,000 bond and Hall on a $250,000 bond.

Senakiewicz was “was arrested Thursday afternoon without incident at his home,” wrote the Tribune. He “stated he has two homemade explosives that can blow up half of an overpass for a train and is holding them until NATO,” reads the court report. The report also explains that Senakiewicz had intentions to “detonate the explosives … in a hollowed out Harry Potter book at his residence.”

How the intelligence was gathered goes unexplained in the report, and a search of his home did not yield any of the alleged explosives.

Nieween, meanwhile, was arrested and charged because he “engaged in dialogue with a subject, during which time he provided same subject with a list of ingredients that are used in the construction of an explosive device,” according to a police report provided to the Tribune. The device? A PVC “pipe bomb,” according to his court documents.

Again, how the intelligence was gathered goes unexplained in the report. Unlike for Senakiewicz, a search of Nieween’s home was never even performed.

As with the original “NATO 3” protesters slapped with charges of “conspiring to commit domestic terrorism during the NATO summit” by theCircuitCourtofCookCounty, the NLG believes the terrorism charges are farcical in nature.

“These additional charges related to terrorism are sensational, politically motivated and meant to spread fear and intimidation among people protesting the NATO summit,” said NLG attorney Sarah Gelsomino in a press release. “The city has still not produced any actual evidence of criminal activity or any weapons, though prosecutors have callously made several serious criminal allegations.”

Furthermore, the NLG also released the photograph of one of the two police informants allegedly responsible for the entrapment of the “NATO 3,” currently going by the pseudonym “Mo.” The photo was taken of his “arrest” during the house raid and seizure of the initial nine activists in town for the NATO summit by the Chicago Police Department. He was one of the two - out of the eleven total at the house - never held at the police station.

Identifying photographs of the other informant, going by the name “Gloves,” have yet to be made public.

A photo taken by an activist and submitted to the National Lawyer’s Guild Chicago of “Mo,” the pseudonym for the undercover informant agent responsible for the entrapment-created arrests of the “NATO 3” and now two others. (Photo: Courtesy National Lawyers Guild)