A video has gone viral across social media that shows a car salesman urinating on a Black woman’s driver’s license. “I feel so violated,” Leah Jefferson wrote in a Facebook post. “I’m literally shaking, scared and sick to my stomach.” The Milwaukee native continued to explain her outrage in her post. On Feb. 26, Jefferson visited NH Auto Sales LLC in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to view a 2004 Honda Civic. In the post, Jefferson mentioned she decided to test drive the car. The 19-year-old claimed she spoke with the car salesman, Ryan Slaven, before coming to the lot. Jefferson recalled giving her driver’s license to Slaven in the lengthy post. “Upon getting the keys I had to trade my ID in which I did in front of my friends mom and a random lady,” she wrote.
After a 30-minute test drive, Jefferson attempted to negotiate the price with the salesman but ultimately decided against the vehicle. After leaving the dealership, she realized she had left her ID behind and contacted Slaven, offering him a $5 Cash App transaction to return her identification. Unfortunately, the car salesman stated he didn’t have her ID and “wouldn’t return to the office until Monday.” The post White Car Salesman Makes Video Of Him Urinating On A Black Woman’s Driver’s License She Left Behind After A Test Drive appeared first on Blavity. Jefferson admitted she was a little upset but understood. She ended the story by revealing she received a shocking video through Instagram later that evening. “My LICENSE, my state ID that is my property that I need. The guy in the bubble vest is his associate or boss; they sell cars together. STAYAWAY!!!!!!!!! I feel so violated dawg, my family address is listed in big prints where they lay and sleep and night. DOWHATYOUNEEDTODOWITHTHISONE,” she wrote. Jefferson shared screenshots of Slaven’s Facebook profile, the car lot information and the video a Snapchat user sent her.
The appalling video shows a man holding Jefferson’s license saying, “This is what happens … when you say stupid s**t to us.” While the men’s identities in the video are unconfirmed, Jefferson believed Slaven and a coworker were holding the license and recording the incident. Another voice is heard in the background, directing the man to place the license on the bumper. The man places the ID on the back bumper of a beige-colored pickup truck with a Wisconsin license plate that reads SG3539. Once the identification card is on the bumper, he urinates on it. The video closes with an image of a Trump Hotel doormat. The Kenosha Police Department announced it is investigating the incident on its Facebook page. The statement began: “KPD is aware of a disgusting act of disrespect towards a person’s property, a video of which is being widely shared on social media. We have been in contact with the victim and are working with that person on the investigation.” The statement continued: “KPD is also aware that this video has been viewed, a lot! We are aware of the threats being made to the immature culprits and their business. While we can understand that viewing this video causes emotional reactions, we cannot and will not tolerate any acts of violence towards those responsible or associated with the business or the business itself.” There have been no reports of arrests made since the video became public. On Thursday, KPD issued another Facebook statement announcing it had referred misdemeanor charges to the Kenosha County District Attorney’s Office for “two adult men associated with the video” for criminal damage to property, disorderly conduct, theft, and unlawful use of computerized communications systems. However, authorities said they would not “name the suspects until they are formally charged.”(Yahoonews.com)
Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I would find common cause with anything an American police union says, does, or proposes; until I do.….Wonders of wonders, even a broken clock, is right twice daily. On February 28th, just days ago, I wrote that despite bloated police budgets, there are increases in shootings and murders. The simple fact is that more police and armaments do not result in fewer shootings or murders. In my February 28th article, I discussed the violence in Chicago and why Mayor Lori Lightfoot did not deserve a second term in office. https://mikebeckles.com/bloated-police-budgets-increases-in-murders-and-shootings/
My main argument for removing Lightfoot was centered around her position in 2020. Despite supporting measures to defund the police, a proposed $80 million cut to her city’s police budget, Lori Lightfoot, seeing the writing on the wall in internal polling, decided to criticize Brandon Johnson, a Cook County commissioner who was gaining momentum, assailing him as a “radical” who’d “wreck Chicago with dangerous defunding of police.” You can all see what she did there; as soon as she saw that people had gotten fed up with her, she decided to snuggle up to the police and their union. But my article was not about the failed Chicago Mayor who blamed gender and race for her deserved loss at the polls, never mind that she never complained about those biases against her when she won; it is about removing police as much as possible from the lives of people. I contend that defunding the police is a sound policy that has nothing to do with getting rid of the police. It means taking some of the money out of police budgets and putting it into social programs that better serve our communities. I argued that defunding the police has been rendered so radioactive Democrats are afraid even to debate it on its merits out of fear that Republicans will gaslight them as anti-police and soft on crime. Because, of course, although it was Republicans that stormed the Capitol and attempted to overthrow the government, they have managed to gaslight Democrats as pro-criminal and gotten away largely because Democrats are weak and feckless. Black people who bother paying attention know that the more their tax dollars go to fund the police, the less safe they become. Many calls police 911 switchboards receive do not require police to show up armed with guns to deal with persons having mental issues or other medical emergencies. Minor traffic accidents, health issues, mental health, and other issues can be tackled without armed police,with god complex showing up and worsening bad situations. People do not need their loved ones killed because they call 911 for help dealing with the aforementioned issues. It is not that police should not earn their keep. Police have become far too toxic and untrustworthy that the least amount of contact they have with the public, the safer the public will be.
NOWHEREISTHESHOCKER
(Reported by Yahoo news)
The Los Angeles Police Department’s rank-and-file union is proposing that someone other than police respond to more than two dozen types of 911 calls in a bid to transfer officers’ workload to more serious crimes. The move is part of a national trend aimed at limiting situations where armed police officers are the first to respond. The proposal announced Wednesday by the Los Angeles Police Protective League lists 28 kinds of 911 calls, where other city agencies or nonprofit organizations would be sent first. The calls range from mental health situations, quality-of-life and homeless issues, problems at schools and welfare checks, to certain non-fatal traffic collisions, parking violations, trash dumping, loud parties, public intoxication and panhandling. The league said officers would respond if the situation becomes violent or criminal in nature, but only after the initial call goes to another agency or an affiliated nonprofit. “Police officers are not psychologists. We are not psychiatrists. We are not mental health experts. We are not social workers, doctors, nurses or waste management experts,” Debbie Thomas, one of the union’s directors, said Wednesday during a news conference. “I do believe that many people think we should be all those things but we are not. We should be focused on responding to emergencies, saving lives (and) property, and of course, engaging in community policing.”
Police Chief Michel Moore said he welcomed the union’s push for “an alternative non-law enforcement service response to non-emergency calls.” Moore said the department has worked with elected officials to establish a support network of resources including mobile therapy vans and a mental health crisis phone line. “These emerging alternatives have already diverted thousands of calls away from a police response, allowing officers to time to focus on our most essential activities,” Moore said in a statement. Cities including San Francisco, San Diego and New York — as well as Los Angeles — have already implemented programs where clinicians are either paired with officers or work in civilian teams to respond to 911 calls involving someone who is having a mental health crisis. The changes came amid a closer look at law enforcement in the U.S. in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police in 2020. That included looking at how police handle mental health and other calls that don’t include violence or criminality. The Los Angeles proposal comes during the union’s contract negotiations with the city and amid activists’ pleas for reducing or eliminating armed responses to certain situations. The City Council and the mayor’s office will be involved in the final decision, the union said. Activists have long called for Los Angeles police to stop responding to certain mental health calls, minor traffic collisions and encounters in homeless encampments, pointing to times when officers have fatally shot people during the response. Mayor Karen Bass’ office didn’t immediately comment Wednesday. Bass promised during her campaign to create a public safety office that did not include the LAPD.
Hugh Esten, a spokesperson for City Council President Paul Krekorian, said the union’s proposal will be given serious consideration as city officials work to “ensure that sworn personnel are deployed where they are truly needed and that unarmed responders address those situations where an armed response is unnecessary.” With decreased staffing during the COVID-19 pandemic, the union said its proposal would free up officers to respond to more important calls — such as violent crime — and allow cops to engage in more community policing to build better relationships with the city’s residents. Other cities have also experimented with similar models, such as Portland, Oregon, where unarmed “public support specialists” take reports on things like vehicle break-ins and bike thefts. In 2021, the LAPD launched a pilot program to divert some mental health calls to service providers. The department also started dual-response teams that pair officers with clinicians in situations involving mental health crises and people experiencing homelessness, as well as domestic violence and abuse. Also in 2021, the LAPD stopped responding to minor traffic crashes; a deputy chief at the time said the change would eliminate officers responding to roughly 40,000 calls a year.
Without diving too deep, the Intercept reporting below lays out how the American Government, in typical fashion, has allowed the apartheid state of Israel to continue to humiliate, terrorize, dehumanize, brutalize, and murder innocent Palestinians of all ages without consequence. Not only has Israel been allowed to operate with impunity, but it also does so with the backing of billions of American tax dollars each year. The United States has rules for the rest of the world from which it exempts itself; it also creates rules, for example, the Leahy Act, that exempts the state of Israel while other nations and their operatives face punitive consequences for the same and even lesser infractions. Why?
JUSTOVER A year ago, soldiers belonging to a controversial, ultra-Orthodox unit of the Israel Defense Forces stopped a 78-year-old Palestinian American man on his way home from visiting a relative in the occupied West Bank. When the man refused to coöperate with an identification check — insisting on his right to go home — soldiers forced him out of his car, blindfolded him, and zip-tied his hands behind his back. They then dragged him to a nearby yard, where they left him lying face down on the ground, according to witnesses.
Omar Assad had already stopped breathing when the soldiers left him, a man detained alongside him told reporters. When a doctor finally arrived, he found that Assad had been dead “for 15 or 20 minutes.” An autopsyfound that he had suffered a fatal, stress-induced heart attack.
The brutal death of Assad, a U.S. citizen who had retired to his home village near the Palestinian city of Ramallah after four decades in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, sparked widespread outrage. B’tselem, an Israeli human rights group, denounced the soldiers’ “utter indifference” in failing to provide first aid or call an ambulance; the U.S. State Department called Assad’s death “troubling.” Following an internal review, the IDF itself acknowledged that “the incident showed a clear lapse of moral judgment.”
Israel recently moved the unit involved in Assad’s death out of the occupied West Bank. But the soldiers’ treatment of Assad was not unusual. While hardly the only ones accused of human rights abuses in the occupied Palestinian territories, members of the Netzah Yehuda unit often committed gratuitous acts of violence, a former member of the unit told The Intercept in his first interview with an international news organization.
The Netzah Yehuda battalion was originally set up to allow ultra-Orthodox Israelis to serve in the military. But over the years, the unit has attracted not only some of the most religious soldiers, but also a growing number of far-right extremists, including many settlers. Unlike other units, enlistment in Netzah Yehuda is voluntary; until recently, it was deployed exclusively in the West Bank, where its members were in daily contact with Palestinians living under occupation. As such, the unit — whose name is an acronym for “Haredi Military Youth” — was known for getting “a lot of action,” the former member said.
The ex-Netzah Yehuda soldier asked not to be identified because of the enormous social cost associated with publicly criticizing Israel’s military. Since leaving the unit, he has come to reject the occupation and his own role in it. Netzah Yehuda has long been criticized in Israel — some senior political and military figures have even called for the unit to be disbanded — but testimonies from former members are rare. While The Intercept could not independently verify some of the incidents the former soldier described, he also spoke to Breaking the Silence, an organization of Israeli veterans who gather testimony from soldiers in the occupied territories.
The IDF did not answer a detailed list of questions for this story nor address the former soldier’s allegations on the record. But in a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson wrote that the Netzah Yehuda unit was moved from the West Bank to the Golan Heights “to diversify the IDF’s area of operation and accumulate operational experience.”
The spokesperson also referred The Intercept to an earlier statement in which the IDF wrote that it is “considering filing indictments” against the soldiers involved in Assad’s death. “As part of the investigation, anomalies were found in the conduct of the commander of the checkup force and the commander of the soldiers that guarded the detainees,” that statement read. “It was also found that it is not possible to establish a correlation between these abnormalities and the death.
An ex-Netzah Yehuda member, who requested anonymity because of the enormous social cost associated with publicly criticizing Israel’s military, poses for a portrait on Feb. 6, 2023.
Photo: Oren Ziv for The Intercept
U.S. Pressure
Even before Assad’s death last January, Netzah Yehuda members had been accused of extrajudicial killings, torture, and beatings, among other abuses. In August, the unit made headlines after a video of some members beating two young Palestinians went viral on TikTok. The IDF suspended the soldiers involved in that beating and opened a criminal investigation. It wasn’t the first time: According to Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, Netzah Yehuda soldiers have been convicted of offenses against Palestinians at a rate higher than those in any other IDF unit.
But it was the death of Assad — which came only weeks before the killing by a different IDF unit of another Palestinian American, journalist Shireen Abu Akleh — that put the unit on the radar of U.S. officials. The incident prompted calls for the U.S. government to impose consequences on a foreign military it supports to the tune of $3.3 billion a year. In particular, a growingnumber of critics have urged the Biden administration to apply U.S. legislation known as the “Leahy Law,” after recently retired Sen. Patrick Leahy, which limits the ability of the State and Defense departments to provide military assistance to foreign units that have a record of human rights violations. The law has never been applied to any units of the Israeli military, despite a number of cases — including the killings of several U.S. citizens by Israeli forces — likely meeting its criteria.
“The very least the US can do is to impose Leahy Law sanctions for the murder of an American against a repeat offender Israeli unit that has been killing and abusing Palestinians with impunity for years,” said Adam Shapiro, advocacy director for Israel-Palestine at Democracy for the Arab World Now, a U.S.-based human rights group focused on the Middle East and North Africa. DAWN also submitted a complaint detailing a series of incidents involving the unit to the International Criminal Court, accusing its members and two of its commanders of war crimes. “While Netzah Yehuda might not be the worst abuser in the Israeli Army, its actions have been well-documented by Israeli and international media, offering a unique insight into the absolute unwillingness by Israeli governments to hold its soldiers accountable for violating international law and the Israeli army’s own rules of engagement,” the group noted last fall.
The State Department began looking into the unit’s record following Assad’s death, although officials would not confirm reports that they had asked the U.S. Embassy in Israel to draft an internal report on the unit’s conduct and begun interviewing witnesses. The IDF characterized the unit’s recent move out of the West Bank and its redeployment to the Golan Heights as an operational decision. But many have pointed out that the move followed increased U.S. scrutiny of the unit’s record. Israeli authorities have also opened a criminal investigation into Assad’s death and made a rare offer of compensation to his family — a signal, to some, that U.S. pressure was having an impact.
The State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Israel did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story. At a press briefing in December, State Department spokesperson Ned Price did not directly answer a reporter’s question regarding calls to apply the Leahy Law to Netzah Yehuda but said, “We manage our security relationships around the world in the context of human rights and the rule of law and in accordance with U.S. legislation, including in this case with the Leahy vetting laws.”
Stanley Cohen, an attorney representing the Assad family in the U.S., told The Intercept that the family has repeatedly asked the Justice Department to open an investigation into Assad’s death but has received no response. “The U.S. government has an obligation at this point to initiate a grand jury investigation or certainly a preliminary FBI investigation of what happened and why and how,” Cohen said. “This is an elderly man, simply driving home, in a community filled largely with elderly Palestinians, many of whom are American Palestinians.” (The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.)
Cohen noted that the Assad family declined the Israeli government’s offer of compensation and rejected “Israel’s interpretation that the family only cared about money and not justice.”
“We didn’t have to press the so-called nuclear button in order to get accountability.”
For Shapiro, of DAWN, there is no question that U.S. pressure played a role in the redeployment and the compensation offer, even if those measures fall far short of Leahy Law requirements. “It wasn’t just a random decision to move this unit,” he told The Intercept. “For me, the biggest lesson of all of this is that when the U.S. does something even as minor as asking questions, there can actually be very positive results, though this is not a full, positive outcome yet.”
“Of course, we would like to see a cutting of aid,” Shapiro added. “But we didn’t have to press the so-called nuclear button in order to get accountability. There are things that can be done, and this is a perfect example of that.”
With Netzah Yehuda soldiers now out of the West Bank, however, it’s unclear whether the State Department will continue to investigate their record or demand accountability for their crimes. It also seems unlikely that U.S. officials will heed calls to finally apply the Leahy Law against a unit of the IDF.
“The fact that they moved the unit out of there was a positive step,” Tim Rieser, a senior foreign policy aide to Leahy, told The Intercept. “But they should have disbanded it altogether and punished the soldiers who were responsible.”
Troubled Youth
The Netzah Yehuda unit, originally known as Nahal Haredi, was established in 1999 to offer ultra-Orthodox Israeli men, who are usually exempt from mandatory military service, an opportunity to serve in the IDF while keeping to strict religious codes. No women are allowed in the unit or on its bases, which also adhere to strict kosher standards. A rabbi works with the unit, and soldiers’ terms of service are shorter than in other branches of the military so that members can focus on religious studies. But the 500-man battalion, which started with only a few dozen recruits, was also intended to provide discipline to young men with troubled backgrounds, including some who had been shunned by their families or who had violent and sometimes criminal pasts, the former soldier said.
He had been drawn to Netzah Yehuda because of its religious accommodations, he noted, but had also been impressed to learn that the unit had received a series of awards, including for thwarting several attacks and “neutralizing” alleged terrorists.
“I knew it wasn’t going to be boring,” he told The Intercept. “As a 19-year-old, that gets the testosterone going. It was ‘Black Hawk Down,’ that type of thing.”
“It put a lot of very problematic people in the same place.”
He soon realized, however, that putting troubled young men, many with ultra-nationalist views, in a position of power and with constant access to Palestinians was a recipe for abuse. “I think that the intentions of the rabbis that came up with this were in the right place. I get where they came from, but I don’t think that it panned out very well because it put a lot of very problematic people in the same place,” the former soldier said. “Some were very politically motivated, I would say the settlers were the most politically motivated. And then there were a bunch of teenagers who drew a short straw in life and tried to take it out on other people.”
“There’s definitely a problem with discipline,” he added. “Some officers would not take some people with them on missions because they knew that they might lose a couple of soldiers on the way, because they might just wander off in the middle of a Palestinian village and do whatever they want.”
While it wasn’t until years later that the former Netzah Yehuda soldier began to reevaluate and ultimately disavowed his time in the military, the racist beliefs and often unruly behavior of his peers were readily apparent. One of the soldiers, he recalled, said that the assassination of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo Accords with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 1994, by an Israeli extremist was “justified.” The soldier was disciplined over the remark, “but most people in the unit didn’t understand why — because in the eyes of a lot of people there, it was obvious that the murder of Rabin was justified.”
There were other incidents that revealed the unit’s extremist tendencies. On one occasion, while he was stationed in the northern West Bank, a group of unit members slashed the tires of an Arab driver — a fellow member of the Israeli military — in a nod to the “price tag” attacks frequently carried out by Israeli settlers against Palestinians. The incident infuriated some officers, “but a lot of people thought it was completely fine,” the former soldier recalled. “They said that we shouldn’t have Arabs in the military.”
Members of the unit made no secret of their extremism. On Friday nights, after sharing their Shabbat meal, they would sing racist anthems about Jewish power, including songs glorifying Meir Kahane, the U.S.-born founder of the Kach party, an ultranationalist political group that until recently was listed as a terrorist organization in both the U.S. and Israel. Kahane’s grandson himself served in the unit. “I had no idea how he got into the military to begin with,” the soldier said. “Usually, they wouldn’t let someone like that in.”
The IDF does not “intentionally” recruit soldiers with a criminal background and launches investigations “in cases where criminal offenses are suspected,” the spokesperson wrote in the statement to The Intercept, which also noted that “the IDF is a stately body and prohibits any form of political expression.”
Israeli soldiers of the Jewish ultra-Orthodox battalion Netzah Yehuda hold morning prayers in the Israel-annexed Golan Heights, near the Syrian border, on May 19, 2014.
Photo: AFP via Getty Images
Collective Punishment and “Hannukah Parties”
The Palestinians who members of Netzah Yehuda met daily had been completely dehumanized, the former soldier added. While The Intercept could not independently corroborate details about the specific incidents he described, the episodes are well in line with the violence, harassment, and restriction of movement that Palestinians living under occupation are routinelyexposed to and that human rights groups have documented for decades.
The former soldier said that he once witnessed a commander punch a Palestinian man in the stomach and shove him into a military car, apparently because the man was moving too slowly. Some of the soldiers were not allowed to guard Palestinian detainees, he added, because their superiors “didn’t trust everyone to do that without harming them.”
Some of the most violent incidents happened when the ex-soldier was stationed near a large settlement in the West Bank. Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are illegal under international law and, in some cases, even under Israeli law. Nevertheless, the military is routinely deployed to protect settlers there, even as settler violence against Palestinians has been on the rise.
One Friday, after a funeral for a man killed by the IDF in a Palestinian village near the settlement, a crowd of residents turned up to protest, the former soldier recalled. “Usually, it would just be a couple kids throwing rocks. We would shoot a couple of gas grenades back. There would be back and forth for half an hour, and then we would each go home,” he said. “But after this funeral a huge crowd came together, and when we got there, we had almost no crowd control equipment because all that ammunition, like the rubber bullets and the gas canisters, had run out. So all we had was live ammunition, and it’s very difficult to do crowd control with live ammunition. That day, they actually told us that we are not allowed to shoot at anyone, because they had just killed someone. And in a situation like that, when you start opening fire on a crowd, you can kill a lot of people, and that was going to be an even bigger problem.”
Instead, the soldiers were instructed to pour mounds of dirt over the main road to the village, essentially trapping its residents. “It was collective punishment,” said the soldier.
Another time, the former soldier recalled, a commander took a group of soldiers into a Palestinian village, where they went door to door, knocking and then throwing flash-bang and gas grenades into each home — retribution after some children from the village had thrown rocks on a nearby road earlier that day.
The former soldier, who said he was not directly involved in the grenade-throwing or some of the other, more egregious incidents he described, remembers being disturbed by the episode. “The company commander said, ‘Let’s throw them a Hanukkah party, because it was during Hanukkah,’” he told The Intercept. His fellow soldiers, he said, “were very excited about that whole thing. They would say, ‘You should have seen the face of the family when we opened the door. Everyone was sitting and watching TV, and all of a sudden, they got tear-gassed.’”
“A lot of soldiers were excited about being able to just walk into a stranger’s house with little to no consequences,” he said. “You couldn’t do that in Tel Aviv.”
No Accountability
The harassment and dehumanization of Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation are a daily affair, and Netzah Yehuda soldiers are hardly the only culprits. But on some occasions, the unit’s actions in the West Bank escalated into gross human rights violations and potential war crimes. Since 2015, members of the unit have killed several Palestinians and beaten and tortured others with electric shocks, according to documentation submitted by DAWN to the ICC, which in 2021 opened an investigation into alleged crimes committed in the occupied territories.
In that time frame, Netzah Yehuda soldiers killed three Palestinians, including a 16-year-old boy, “in incidents in which soldiers used lethal force against unarmed civilians without justification,” DAWN charged. “In almost every case […] soldiers were found to be lying or covering up the incidents to suggest that they were acting in self-defense.” In October 2021, unit members were also accused of beating and sexually assaulting a Palestinian man they had detained in the back of a military vehicle and later at a military base. Four soldiers were arrested following that incident; one of them was demoted and sentenced to four and a half monthsin prison. In 2016, another Netzah Yehuda soldier received a nine-month sentence and demotion for torturing Palestinian detainees on two separate occasions. In one instance, the soldier had attached electrodes to the neck of a man who was blindfolded and handcuffed, increasing the voltage when the man pleaded with him to stop. He did the same to a second detainee a few days later, while fellow soldiers filmed the torture on a cellphone.
It’s unclear whether Netzah Yehuda’s abuses were on the State Department’s radar before last year, but after Omar Assad’s death, U.S. officials began making inquiries about the unit. In September, the State Department’s Special Representative for Palestinian Affairs, Hady Amr, met with Assad’s family and publicly called for accountability for his death. Israel’s offer of a reported $141,000 settlement to the family and later the decision to move Netzah Yehuda out of the West Bank also coincided with a growing chorus of voices, including in Congress, calling for a U.S. investigationinto the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera journalist who was shot in the head in May while reporting from the West Bank city of Jenin. Furor over the killing of Abu Akleh, who was wearing a clearly visible press vest at the time, eventually forced the U.S. Justice Department to launch an investigation — the first time the U.S. government has heeded demands for an independent, American investigation of an incident involving Israeli forces.
Whether growing demands for accountability for Abu Akleh’s killing or calls for Leahy sanctions against Netzah Yehuda — or both — factored into Israeli officials’ decision to move the unit is hard to establish. “I don’t know how much of this has to do with Israel being afraid of the Leahy Law versus Israel trying to manage a relationship with the U.S. after they have killed two U.S. citizens,” Brad Parker, a legislative consultant at the Center for Constitutional Rights who has represented the Abu Akleh family in the U.S., told The Intercept. The Leahy Law hardly seems to work as a deterrent when it comes to Israel, he added. “Even if it means absolutely nothing, a statement saying ‘This unit is problematic’ or something like that would be significant, given the fact that the U.S. really doesn’t do anything.”
Other critics argue that anything short of blocking U.S. financial support for Netzah Yehuda is not enough.
“What we need is the political will to apply the law, and thus far this administration has lacked that will.”
“That’s not accountability,” Matt Duss, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told The Intercept, referring to the unit’s redeployment and the compensation offer. “Some people might claim, ‘Hey, look, high five, we got the Israelis to do something,’ but that doesn’t begin to solve the systemic problem. What we need is the political will to apply the law, and thus far this administration has lacked that will.”
U.S. officials’ failure to apply their own laws against Israel has increasingly become a liability, Duss said, noting that while the U.S. “tends to be very serious about human rights in countries that don’t buy our weapons,” intervening in Israel and with some other allies is viewed as “too politically controversial … despite systemic abuses.”
For Rieser, Leahy’s longtime foreign policy adviser, that’s long been a cause of frustration. “The law has not been applied as consistently as Senator Leahy believes it should be with respect to Israel and some other key U.S. allies,” he told The Intercept. “I think that’s partly due to political calculations by the administration, whose job it is to apply the law.”
The sisters and relatives of Palestinian teenager Hamza Amjad al-Ashqar, shot dead by Israeli troops from a different unit in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, mourn during his funeral at the Askar refugee camp east of Nablus on February 7, 2023.
Photo: Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP via Getty Images
Leahy’s Legacy
There is no public record listing when and where the Leahy Law has been invoked, though public reports indicate that it has been applied to Colombian, Mexican, Turkish, Indonesian, and Pakistani forces, among others. The law is also used as basis for the State Department to vet thousands of foreign military personnel every year — a requirement for the provision of U.S. weapons and training.
More than two decades after it was first introduced, Leahy’s signature legislation “has been institutionalized to the point that it’s not going away,” said Rieser. “It has been built into the training and guidance of the State and Defense departments. It is permanent law. But Congress and human rights defenders still need to ensure that the law is applied as intended.”
Defense officials have at times resisted the law’s implementation. The Intercept reported last year on one of several programs set up to circumvent it. Before he retired, Leahy also worked to close a major loophole in the law that made it difficult to apply against countries that receive U.S. assistance in bulk installments, like Israel, whose security agreements with the U.S. are outlined on a 10-year basis. Previous arrangements made it hard for U.S. officials to know which units of the IDF received what — something Leahy addressed through a recent amendment to the defense budget. “We don’t know with certainty which IDF units receive U.S. equipment,” Rieser said. “We realized that was a loophole for countries that receive bulk shipments of equipment, and Congress modified the law to address that issue.”
The ultimate obstacle to the law’s implementation, however, remains a political one. “Many members of Congress or administration officials are reluctant to suggest that Israeli soldiers may have committed a gross violation of human rights,” said Rieser, noting that Leahy repeatedly called on multiple administrations to apply the law with respect to Israel. He noted that during the Trump administration, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, suggested that the law should not apply there.
The argument, Rieser noted, was that “Israel is a democracy, it has a credible justice system, and therefore the Leahy Law doesn’t apply.” But Israel’s investigations of alleged military misconduct are carried out by the IDF itself, he noted; they have often been cursory and rarely resulted in appropriate punishment. “The Israeli justice system, particularly the military justice system, is not perceived as being impartial in cases involving Palestinians.”
An Extreme Symptom
Shawan Jabarin, the general director of Al-Haq, a prominent Palestinian human rights organization based in the West Bank, told The Intercept that he first heard about the Leahy Law during a trip to the U.S. in 2001, a few years after the legislation was introduced. “We first called for Leahy sanctions to be applied against the IDF two decades ago,” he said.
Over the years, the State Department has flagged several incidents of human rights abuses committed by Israeli forces as potential Leahy cases, including the 2003 killing by an Israeli military bulldozer of American peace activist Rachel Corrie. (Last year, The Intercept published exclusive documents revealing internal deliberations about the law’s application to that case).
Yet none of those incidents resulted in sanctions against any unit of the IDF. “Nothing happened,” said Jabarin. “Nothing happened because this is Israel.”
Multiple U.S. administrations have in the past responded to Israeli abuses with measured words of condemnation, but the U.S. government has never publicly imposed consequences on Israel for its military’s misconduct — neither by applying the Leahy Law nor by threatening to withhold military assistance or limit arms exports under other U.S. statutes. A formal sanctioning of Netzah Yehuda would have only minor practical impact but would convey that the U.S. government is ready to draw a line.
“Israelis got very upset when Ben and Jerry’s said it didn’t want to have ice cream sold in settlements,” said the former soldier. A U.S. rebuke of Netzah Yehuda would likely renew calls to address its history of abuses, he noted, but warned that singling out one unit for censure risks giving a pass to the rest of Israel’s military apparatus.
“For the Israeli public, Netzah Yehuda is very convenient because it’s a group of people that are not very popular in Israeli society to begin with, the Haredim. So it’s very easy to scapegoat and say these Haredim and these settlers, they are the ones who are a problem, it’s not our kids from Tel Aviv and these other nice cities, who also go and kill Palestinians.”
Ori Givati, advocacy director at Breaking the Silence — the group of former Israeli soldiers who have denounced the abuses of Israel’s occupation — told The Intercept that “anything that pushes the U.S. to do anything is a step in the right direction.”
“Every unit that serves in the territories is violent toward Palestinians — every unit,” he said. “Some are documented less, some are documented more. Netzah Yehuda has maybe a tendency to be more violent than others toward Palestinians, but they are not worse than any other unit which invades people’s homes in the middle of the night. They’re not the problem; they’re maybe an extreme symptom.”
Jabarin, the Palestinian human rights activist, agreed that sanctioning Netzah Yehuda would have only symbolic impact — but would be important nonetheless.
“It’s not just the unit, it’s the system behind it,” he said. “Still, this is a test. Can [the U.S.] act according to its principles, its laws, the values they speak about?”
An Oak Lawn police officer pleaded not guilty Wednesday to charges of aggravated battery and official misconduct for his allegedly striking a then 17-year-old Bridgeview teen more than 10 times in the face and head as he was laying face down in the street during an arrest captured on video last July. Officer Patrick O’Donnell was released on an individual recognizance bond, according to the Cook County state’s attorney’s office. He has been with the department since December 2014. He was indicted by a grand jury Feb. 14. O’Donnell is one of three officers involved in the July 27 arrest of the teen, caught on video, which started as a traffic stop and ended with the teen running from officers and being chased. O’Donnell, 32, is scheduled to appear April 6 before Cook County Associate Judge Domenica Stephenson.
On July 27, O’Donnell was on-duty working in a marked squad car when he pulled over a sedan with three juveniles that he said had a smell of burnt cannabis, according to a bond proffer filed Wednesday by county prosecutors. O’Donnell searched the vehicle and asked a passenger who was sitting in the rear seat behind the driver to step out. The passenger ran off as he was being searched by the officer, according to the proffer. O’Donnell chased him, ordering him to stop, while a second officer, Brandon Collins, arrived and took the juvenile to the ground, according to the filing. Prosecutors say O’Donnell began hitting the juvenile in the 9500 block of South McVicker Avenue in Oak Lawn, while Collins pulled at his arms. At one point, O’Donnell used his left hand to hold the juvenile by his head and hair as he “repeatedly” used his left hand to punch the youth in the face and head, according to the proffer. A third officer, Mark Hollingsworth arrived and “applied a pressure point” behind the juvenile’s ear while O’Donnell continued to punch him, the proffer said. O’Donnell punched the juvenile more than 10 times, prosecutors alleged.
Here the thugs, in uniform, march with their indicted colleague while on the public’s dime. I guess this is designed to intimidate the court.
Collins then applied a Taser to the juvenile’s back, and he was placed into handcuffs. A pistol was recovered from the juvenile’s bag, the proffer said. The juvenile was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn and treated for a broken nose, cuts and bruises and subdural bleeding. Zaid Abdallah, an attorney representing the teen’s family, said at a news conference last month his client has one more surgery left as a result of injuries he received, and that he’s undergoing mental health treatment. An attorney for O’Donnell did not return messages Wednesday seeking comment, nor did Oak Lawn officials. O’Donnell, Collins and Hollingsworth are named in a federal lawsuit filed Aug. 1, alleging they “engaged in extreme and outrageous conduct” in the teen’s arrest. Video provided by police as well as video taken by witnesses show officers repeatedly punching the youth as he was pinned down. The arrest and video footage sparked protests and the lawsuit alleges the three officers involved in the arrest conspired among one another in a “racially motivated conspiracy” to deprive of the teen of his constitutional rights because he is Arab American.
Ahmed Rehab, CAIR-Chicago executive director, said the video showed “three big, adult males pounding up on a frail minor” hitting his head into the concrete and causing major injuries. “It’s not the way to do. In no civilization, no time, no place on Earth is this kind of behavior accepted,” Rehab said. He said the possible indictment is a first step. “We hope that as this goes into the court system that these charges are not down graded, that justice is served,” Rehab said. State police have been reviewing the arrest and those findings were expected to be turned over to the Cook County state’s attorney’s office. Rehab said police brutality occurs “overwhelmingly” when the arrestee is a person of color. Beyond race, Rehab said ego and power trips also lead to some officers using force against an arrestee. “Someone had to run more than they thought they should have. Someone was not listened to the way that they thought they should have been. Someone was not obeyed the way that they would’ve liked to be obeyed,” Rehab said. “Those sort of things are very subtle but they matter and they are the split second difference between professionalism and police brutality.”
Police officers are supposed to arrest individuals and then let the legal system determine guilt or innocence, Rehab said. “It is not the role of the police to adjudicate criminality. They apprehend individuals who are suspected of crimes, then these individuals go through something we call the justice system that involves courts,” Rehab said. “It’s not the role of police to do all of those things that belong to the justice system.” The teen faces charges of aggravated unlawful use of a weapon and unlawful possession of a firearm. At a July 28 news conference following a protest over the arrest, Oak Lawn police Chief Daniel Vittorio said the arresting officers feared for their safety and suggested they would have been in their right to use deadly force. Vittorio said responding officers feared the teen had a firearm in an “accessory bag” draped over his right shoulder, although the firearm was not recovered until the teen had been handcuffed.(This story first appeared @yahoonew)
There is a very good reason that I could not hold public office. I just do not have the patience for BS, and neither do I have the patience to sit and listen to loads of excrement try to sound important so they can run to FAUX news to be patted on the back. But as you know, Raphael Cruz, who would not defend his own wife when Donald Trump dissed her has an insatiable desire to act and sound like the whitest of the white right-wing Republicans. Oh, so too is his little compadre, down in Florida, Liddle Marko. Oooh, I would have told this little clown where to go stick his stupid face.…
For the record, this is pure theater; this clown is pontificating, auditioning to see his face on FAUX propaganda network. My only question is why is Merrick Garland such a nice, easy-going man?
The five Black cops who beat Tyre Nichols, resulting in his death, were immediately terminated, indicted, and are awaiting trial. My disgust with that case is that they are all out on bail. No bail should have been granted to those murderers because police officers are supposed to operate under a higher standard of care and prudence. Notwithstanding, we exist in a police state where the courts have placed police and the state over the rights of citizens, counter to the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. At the time the five black cops murdered Tyre Nichols, I pointed out a fact right here in this medium that the only reason they were immediately fired and indicted was the color of their skin. It is important to understand that only black cops are immediately fired and indicted when cops run afoul of the laws. White police officers are sent on paid leave, if at all, and if an investigation is even initiated, it usually results in no finding of criminal conduct. Such has been the continuation of separate but equal application of the laws 69 years after the landmark Supreme Court decision that struck down the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ and ordered an end to school segregation. Daniel Pantaleo, the cop who murdered Eric Garner, still has not met justice. Neither have the cops who murdered Alton Sterling, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, and Philandio Castille.
The list of Black people murdered by police is far too expansive to document here. Still, it is important to note that in case after case where white cops kill unarmed people of color, the standard of accountability is far different than when black cops are accused of the same crimes. Now God forbid that it be construed that I am advocating for those cops who murdered Tyre Nichols, far from it. White supremacists who now operate openly in America’s Law Enforcement Agencies do so with impunity. And you thought that after George Floyd, they would stop, huh? Well, not so fast, ladies and gentlemen. Police crimes increased after the murder of Mister Floyd and the mass protests that enveloped the country in 2020 due to that blatant act of murder in the light of day. Emboldened by reactionary white supremacists in the White House and others within the judiciary, including the highest court police, embarked on a crackdown on dissent and peaceful marches that may be attributed only to a totalitarian state. The assault on Black people did not stop with the killing of George Floyd, nor did it stop with the brutal murder of Tyre Nichols. No, neither of those two murders represented an inflection point for America. There were never enough white Americans with the character and lack of hatred to end the dual system of separate but equal that drives police violence; there never will be. This country was built on the false notion that whites are superior and entitled to be treated thus. They pass it down to their children and grandchildren. It is not getting better. For those reasons, Dr. Martin Luther King, before they assassinated him, realized that he had integrated his people into a burning building. Thereafter, King warned about what he characterized as ‘accepting the tranquil drug of gradualism.’ Why? Because younger white people are not getting less racist, they are getting more anti-black.
Did you see this story in the corporate-owned mainstream media? Of course not, because this is not what they want you to believe of their race soldiers. On the other hand, many of you will continue to miss these events because you guys are too busy playing video games, drinking, smoking weed, and sagging your pants to read and understand what’s happening. Too many of you women are too busy trying to purchase the new wig, buying fake eyelashes, fake nails, fake butts, fake breasts, brand name handbags, jewelry, cars, and all kinds of stuff you cannot afford. At the same time, neither of you, men or women, is setting up college funds for your children, which will empower and better position them to effectively deal with the scourge of anti-black racism in this country. You have sons and daughters; you are alive. It does not matter how old you are. You are not exempt from this brutality and genocide. I saw this quote recently and asked my friend if it was okay to borrow it. He said it was okay. Thank you, Este. ” If you are not outraged by injustice, you are immoral.” (MB)
Sheriff Bryan Bailey
Mississippi Officers Allegedly Tortured 2 Black Men After Accusing Them Of Selling Drugs And Dating White Women»>
A group of Black lawyers is speaking up against multiple white police officers in Mississippi who allegedly tortured two Black men after accusing them of selling drugs and “dating white women.” In a statement to News One, the Black Lawyers for Justice organization said the officers brutally beat and kicked the men, used a Taser on both, and threatened to kill them. One of the Black men, Michael C. Jenkins, was shot in the mouth according to the lawyers. The post-Mississippi Officers Allegedly Tortured 2 Black Men After Accusing Them Of Selling Drugs, And Dating White Women appeared first on Blavity. Jenkins was staying with Eddie Terrell Parker in a private residence when six white officers raided the place without a warrant on Jan. 24, the lawyers said. The officers allegedly handcuffed the pair after accusing them of “dating white women” and “selling drugs.
No, it did not stop with Tyre Nichols.
After restraining the men, the officers repeatedly kicked, threatened, and waterboarded the pair, Black Lawyers for Justice said. Jenkins’ mother, Mary, said police told her that they shot her son because he “displayed a gun.” “My son was handcuffed when he was shot in the mouth by Rankin County officers. My son is still in critical condition and has a long road to recovery,” Mary said in a GoFundMe page she created. “With everyone’s continuous prayers and support we’ll be able to get the Justice my son deserves. Not only Justice for him but every other innocent person male or female that Rankin County Sheriff’s Department has killed. Anything that is donated will be greatly appreciated.” Mary also said there is a witness who said Jenkins didn’t have a gun. “The witness told us that [Jenkins] was beat, tased and handcuffed while on his knees,” the devastated mother said. “The witness also stated that they went back and forth tasing [Jenkins and Parker] to see ‘who’s taser was the strongest.’”
Black Lawyers for Justice said “Michael has been clinging to his life and he is unable to talk, only write.” “Michael has confirmed in writing that he was in fact handcuffed when shot by deputies. For several weeks since being shot, Michael has been in ICU at UMMC on life support,” the group stated in a press release to NewsOne. “Michael suffered severe injuries to his mouth and head including having his tongue surgically removed, permanent damage to eyesight and hearing, and suffering severe debilitating cognitive injuries. Surely the psychological and physical trauma will last a lifetime.” Black Lawyers for Justice is demanding for the officers involved to be arrested and criminally charged as well as all body camera footage be released and made public. Parker, who is not hospitalized, is expected to be present at a press conference on Wednesday.
Republicans are trying to remove a Black prosecutor because she refuses to do their bidding, perpetuating people’s locking up for minor offenses and feeding the prison industrial complex. Their problem with Ms. Gardner is that she dared to indict their criminal Governor Eric Greitens in 2018. Be reminded that it is up to a judge to determine bail, not the prosecutor. So it matters little whether a prosecutor asks that an accused be allowed out on bail; the decision rests solely with the judge. But again, this is a red herring by the lying, bullying, racist Republicans who are mad that a black woman holds a position of power. Kim Gardner is an outspoken advocate for police reform. That is the reason they want her removed.
St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner
On Thursday, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey filed a legal motion to remove St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner from office. The action comes after a chorus of elected officials called on Gardner to resign after a driver who repeatedly violated his bond allegedly injured a 16-year-old volleyball player from Tennessee, resulting in both of her legs being amputated. Bailey, a Republican, and others have accused Gardner, a Democrat, of neglecting her duties because the driver had violated his bond. Gardner, in response, has accused the judge in the driver’s case of denying prosecutors’ requests for a higher bond. Bailey’s motion, which accuses Gardner of neglect, represents the latest battle over Gardner’s handling of the office. Gardner, the first Black woman to be elected as St. Louis’ top prosecutor, has repeatedly clashed with Republican lawmakers in Jefferson City during her tenure. While lawmakers of both parties have criticized Gardner’s handling of the case, some view Bailey’s motion as another example of Republicans targeting a progressive, Black official.
Here’s what you need to know about Bailey’s action against Gardner. WHOISKIMGARDNER?
Kim Gardner, an outspoken advocate for police reform, was elected as St. Louis’ top prosecutor in 2016. She won reelection to a second term in 2020. During her time in office, Gardner has repeatedly faced backlash from Republicans over how she’s run the office. Much of that criticism stems from Gardner’s prosecution of former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens in 2018. Last year, Gardner was reprimanded by the Missouri Supreme Court for her handling of the invasion of privacy case against Greitens. As part of an agreement with the court, she admitted to failing to disclose evidence — handwritten notes — to attorneys representing Greitens. Greitens was indicted for felony invasion of privacy in the 2018 case, but Gardner dropped the case a day before it was set to go to trial. She agreed to drop an additional computer tampering charge against Greitens as part of an agreement that coincided with Greitens’ voluntary resignation from office. Republican lawmakers are also targeting Gardner’s handling of crime in St. Louis. A bill filed this year would allow Republican Gov. Mike Parson to appoint a special prosecutor to any circuit or prosecuting attorney’s jurisdiction for five years if he deems there is a threat to public safety.
Andrew Bailey. Don’t these F***** all seem to look alike?
Bailey and other officials, including Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, want Gardner removed after a motorist who had repeatedly violated his bond struck and injured a teenager in St. Louis this week. Police say Daniel Riley, 21, was speeding and failed to yield at an intersection when his vehicle hit another car that then struck 16-year-old Janae Edmondson. Riley, who was out on bond for a 2020 robbery charge that was dismissed and refiled last year, had violated the conditions of his bond several times, including by letting his GPS monitor die. Bailey has criticized Gardner for not filing a motion to revoke Riley’s bond. On Thursday, Bailey said Gardner illustrated a “continued pattern of failure” to “discharge her moral and legal duties.” Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article272584109.html
As the world enters the age of artificial intelligence, better known as AI, one of the risks being discussed is what happens when the computer decides to go rogue. So too, they created the monster called policing, and it has gotten so big and powerful that they are afraid to even talk about downsizing it. It rears its ugly head to any talk of defunding or downsizing it. Amazingly, instead of downsizing by defunding, they fight to find ways to funnel taxpayer money into more policing, more of the same> Police cannot stop murders, so the idea of more police to stop murders is beyond stupid. Hiring more police sends our taxes through the roof but does precious little to stem violent crimes over the long run. It is the equivalent of letting the Genie out of the bottle or squeezing the toothpaste out of the tube; you don’t get to put it back. And so it is with Tuesday’s Mayoral elections in the windy city of Chicago as Democrat Lori Lightfoot, the incumbent, faces eight (8) opponents to lead the nation’s third-largest city. If no candidate wins more than 50 percent of ballots cast Tuesday, the top two advance to a runoff election on April 4. Despite supporting measures to defund the police, a proposed $80 million cut to her city’s police budget, Lori Lightfoot is now accusing Brandon Johnson, a Cook County commissioner who’s gaining momentum, assailing him as a “radical” who’d “wreck our city with dangerous defunding of police.”
Cook county commissioner Brandon Johnson
What’s remarkable about Lightfoot’s attack on Johnson is that she ran as a person who saw the need to defund the bloated police budget, but once she got into office, she drank the biased pro-police cool-aid. The call to defund police is legitimate, and it remains so. The problem for people living in large urban areas is the powerful police unions. Their proxies have tremendous clout that drives the fear of the devil into Democrats who know cutting those bloated budgets is the right thing to do but are too piss-scared to do it. Defunding the police has been rendered so radioactive Democrats are afraid even to debate it on its merits. The political right which espouses a police state that protects white supremacy is extremely comfortable throwing outrageous sums of money at police, providing them with armaments and overtime pay, confident in the knowledge that cops will not come to their communities to murder their sons and daughters. Many large city police departments are larger and better armed than some nations’ militaries; Chicago is one such city. New York City’s police department boasts a 36,000-strong army. On the other hand, black people know the more their tax dollars go to fund the police, the less safe they and their children become.
Lori Lightfoot
Overall, more police officers may prevent some street-level crimes, but they do nothing to curtail the scourge of murders and other serious crimes. If more police equaled less crime in large cities with their huge police armies and bloated police budgets, cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago would be virtually crime free. Many of the calls police 911 switchboards receive do not require police to show up armed with guns to deal with persons having mental issues, or other medical emergencies. Minor traffic accidents, and a host of other issues can be tackled without armed police with god complex to sort through. Experts in social work and other fields have long argued that a more humane way is needed to deal with people going through emotional distress outside of armed police yelling different and confusing orders at them leading to police killing them. How is that even an acceptable solution? Minor traffic offenses do not warrant hyped-up militarized police itching to shoot someone. The streets cannot be a battlefield with overhyped militarized police looking to kill members of the public they deem to be the enemy.
Listen to the average cop on the street talking to a person who tells them they are a veteran and the first thing you hear is that the cop is also a veteran as well. Imagine the danger inherent in having former soldiers who were on the battlefield killing people now police officers, replete with all of the issues soldiers returning from wars have. No, not all police officers are bad but the idea of policing as it is presently configured is dangerous and should not be supported. Making the point about a cop who is a good friend who is a solid guy misses the point. It is not about whether ornot there are good police officers. The rea;it is that the entire concept of what constitutes policing in the United States is beyond repair and should be discarded. You do not extract a clean bucket of water from a toxic dirty pool. No one should be afraid to say defund the police. Every taxpayer has the absolute right to demand that their tax dollars are spent in ways that are beneficial to them. Only Racists Fascists and fool are unable to see that defunding the police is exactly he right thing to do. Lets hope that voters in the Windy City shows Lori Lightfoot the door and elect a Mayor who is truly reform minded, someone unbeholden to police unions and their corrupt and corrosive influence.
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Mike Beckles is a former Police Detective, businessman, freelance writer, black achiever honoree, and creator of the blog mikebeckles.com.
On the murder Index, Jamaica stands atop the heap beating out South Africa, Mexico, St Lucia, Belize, Colombia, and Brazil in homicides each year. Last year alone, the tiny nation of under three million people recorded 1498 homicides, an increase over the previous year, which saw 1463 cases of homicide reported to authorities…
The Andrew Holness Government has tabled a new proposal that would repeal and replace the 1976 firearms Act. The Bill, among other things, would make it a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 yearsfor individuals convicted of illegally possessing a firearm or stockpiling three or more firearms or 50 or more rounds of ammunition. As a decades-long advocate for much stiffer penalties for violent offenders, I believe that 15 years is not a strong enough penalty for someone caught with an illegal firearm. Let me be clear; no one is forcing anyone to pick up an illegal firearm. Every person who does so makes that decision on their own. A gun is seen as a symbol of power, the power to take the property and life of those without guns. Because it is a free-will decision and not something forced on young men like explosive belts in war-torn middle eastern countries, every individual deciding to pick up a weapon by default takes on all the attendant risks of being caught with that weapon.
The 1976 Firearm Act has long needed overhaul and repeal. Clearly, the penalties associated with possession are completely out of wack with the severity of having an illegal weapon. There is absolutely no good reason that any law-abiding citizen of Jamaica would be opposed to the most serious penalties for gun possession, given the nation’s high homicide rate and propensity for violence. In the 47 years since the passage of the existing firearms act, tens of thousands of innocent Jamaicans have been seriously injured and killed, including brave police officers and our military members. That alone is reason enough to pass a bill with even more teeth than the one proposed, making it a mandatory 15 years for possessing an illegal weapon. Furthermore, despite the protestations of many, the nation’s liberal criminal coddling judges continue to turn violent offenders caught with illegal weapons back onto the streets immediately after the police arrest them. It is past time for mandatory penalties for violent offenders. More importantly, it is past time that a bill is passed that sends a clear message to the almighty-appointed judges that the people are the bosses, not them.
The proposed bill does not go nearly far enough in sending the strongest of messages that, as a nation, law-abiding Jamaicans will not stand for the violent lawlessness that has been allowed to continue for far too long. Despite the shortcomings of the newly proposed bill, the defeated People’s National Party Member from Manchester, who now sits in the upper chamber, and who once held the title of Minister Of National Security, in exasperation as the minister said Jamaica’s crime problem needs divine intervention is now flapping his gums in opposition to the bill. Last September, as the bill came up for debate in the upper chamber, Peter Bunting dared to open his mouth in opposition to a bill he should have sponsored and pushed as Minister of National Security years prior. Said Bunting, “focus should instead be placed on ensuring criminals are caught, arguing that criminals know very little about the sanctions for these offenses and therefore would not be phased. “We must understand that this [Bill] is no silver bullet…we’re not in all cases saying some of the penalties may not be more appropriate, but let us not fool ourselves into thinking that just by increasing the severity is going to have a meaningful impact on reducing our violent crime rate”. What a fucking Jackass!!!! So let us dissect this nonsense. (1) Focus should be placed on ensuring criminals are caught. Police catch criminals and lock them up daily; they are back on the streets immediately through lax and archaic laws and criminal-loving judges abusing the loopholes. (2)Criminals know very little about the sanctions for these offenses. This guy headed the security apparatus with no brian. Imagine saying criminals do not know the penalties. That is shockingly revealing to me. Every person who picks up a gun or commits a crime knows beforehand the penalties they are likely to face, and they’re all smarter than Peter Dumb-ting. So even if they do not know when they face a judge and the mandatory minimum, they will get the message, and guess what? That is how they learn. (3) They won’t be phased. They will be phased; the problem is that Peter Dumb-ting and the PNP will be mad. (4) we must understand the bill is no silver bullet. No one said it was; the fact that the bill is not a panacea does not mean nothing should be done about violent crime. The PNP hates to support any legislation that deals with Jamaica’s crime pandemic. The party continues to blow smoke up the people’s asses that they care, just not about whether they live or die. (5) Let us not fool ourselves into thinking that increasing the severity will significantly impact reducing our violent crime rate. It will do exactly that, and that’s what the People’s National Party is afraid of.
I bet you haven’t seen this in the corporate-owned so-called mainstream media. This is how they act when caught, and someone has the balls to take appropriate action against them. They have developed a sense of entitlement, bolstered by qualified immunity, corrupt prosecutors and judges who do their bidding, and unions who support them regardless of the egregious crimes they commit against citizens. This is what passes for police officers today.
At the heels of an investigation, several members of a police department are turning in their badges after their police chief was arrested and replaced. According to the Clinch County Sheriff’s Office, a special city council meeting was held on Saturday to appoint the interim Homerville police chief, James Herndon. This is after the Georgia Bureau of Investigation arrested the former Chief of Police at the Homerville Police department. Dearin “Mack” Drury, 40, was arrested for a Feb. 19 incident where he allegedly improperly handled evidence at the department. The Clinch County Sheriff’s Office reported the incident to the GBI and then began investigating Drury’s alleged misconduct. On Saturday, Homerville command staff and other police officers turned in their resignations.
After the meeting was over, Clinch County Sheriff Stephen Tinsley took to Facebook to address the resignation of several members of the police force. In the lengthy post, Tinsley states the newly appointed chief Herndon didn’t have the staff or equipment available able to answer service calls for Homerville. “He had neither the staff nor the equipment available to handle any calls for service within the City of Homerville. I assured Chief Herndon that the Clinch County Sheriff’s Office will answer calls for service until a resolution can be reached by the city administrators,” Tinsley said. The sheriff’s office said it will continue to serve all of Clinch County and will not affect how they conduct business. “We will continue to answer calls and enforce the laws throughout the county, including the City of Homerville,” the sheriff said. As for Drury, he is facing charges of theft by taking possession of marijuana, false statements and writing, and violation of oath.
This is a case of cops wanting to have their own way outside of the control of the elected leaders; the people chose to oversee their affairs.
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POLICEINST. LOUIS, MISSOURI, are working to wrest control of their department from the city’s progressive mayor and put it in the hands of the Republican governor. Law enforcement unions argue that local control has “put politics in policing” and that state oversight would help address an increase in homicides and a drop in police morale and staffing levels. They have rallied around Senate Bill 78, which would reinstate a Civil War-era system of state control overturned by Missouri voters in 2012 — and make St. Louis one of the only major cities in the country without authority over its own police force. The attempt by the Missouri Legislature to strip power away from city officials is a “slap in the face” to constituents in St. Louis, Mayor Tishaura Jones said. The move comes just two years after St. Louis first elected Jones and progressives won a majority on the city’s Board of Aldermen. While police department operations “are definitely not perfect,” Jones told The Intercept, the people closest to the problem are closest to the solution. Local officials should have control over how law enforcement resources are deployed, she said.
Mayor Tishaura Jones
The bill targeting elected leaders in St. Louis is one of several recent efforts across the country to undercut the authority of local progressive officials on policing and prosecution matters. Jones and her allies say the bill is an example of police turning their political efforts toward legislation as their preferred candidates have continued to lose at the ballot box. There is a “common thread of the cities that I am aware of where this is happening,” Jones said. “Where there has been a concerted attempt to strip power away from local leadership, the mayors are Black.” She pointed to Kansas City, Missouri, where residents have been fighting to regain control of the police department from the state, and Jackson, Mississippi, a majority-Black city that could see the creation of a separate court system and police force appointed by white state officials if Republican lawmakers get their way. Another recent Missouri House bill would allow the governor to strip elected prosecutors of jurisdiction over certain violent crimes. A previous version of the bill singled out the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office, where prosecutor Kim Gardner has drawn the ire of Republican officials for her pledges to hold police accountable, stop detaining nonviolent offenders, and end cash bail. Concerns over the constitutionality of targeting a specific office eventually led state officials to expand the scope of the bill.
Prosecutor Kim Gardner
Jones characterized the fight over control of the St. Louis Police Department as performative politics. “Either we’re going to learn to get along and make sure that we’re protecting the people that we are all duly elected to serve, or we’re going to keep having these petty fights,” she said. Critics of the proposed change in St. Louis say it’s not a genuine effort to stop violent crime but a power play against officials who haven’t shown the same allegiance to police as their predecessors. Black lawmakers in the state Legislature have criticized the bill as an effort to strip authority from democratically elected Black officials “under the guise of ‘public safety.’” The Missouri Legislative Black Caucus did not respond to a request for comment. Under the current structure, Jones has the power to hire and fire police chiefs. Should the bill pass, that power would be given to a board appointed by Republican Gov. Mike Parson. The bill would also require the board to staff the police department with at least 1,142 members and increase police salaries by $4,000 starting next summer. (The department currently has around 1,000 sworn officers and 400 civilian employees.) Jones said she was hopeful that Parson would see the city’s case and stop the bill should it pass. “Our governor is a former sheriff,” she said. “I know that he appreciates local control of law enforcement.” State Sen. Nick Schroer, who sponsored the bill, did not respond to a request for comment.
The St. Louis Police Department was previously overseen by the state in an arrangement dating back to the Civil War, when Missouri’s then-governor enacted state control of local police as he prepared to secede and join the Confederacy. It wasn’t until 2012 that Missouri voters secured local control of the St. Louis Police Department in a statewide referendum. Kansas City’s police department, meanwhile, has remained under state authority. That hasn’t insulated Kansas City from experiencing the same spike in homicides as many other cities across the country in recent years. Nevertheless, St. Louis police and their allies in office have cited a similar spike in St. Louis in calling for a return to state oversight.
The move comes just two years after St. Louis first elected Jones and progressives won a majority on the city’s Board of Aldermen. While police department operations “are definitely not perfect,” Jones told The Intercept, the people closest to the problem are closest to the solution. Local officials should have control over how law enforcement resources are deployed, she said. The bill targeting elected leaders in St. Louis is one of several recent efforts across the country to undercut the authority of local progressive officials on policing and prosecution matters. Jones and her allies say the bill is an example of police turning their political efforts toward legislation as their preferred candidates have continued to lose at the ballot box. There is a “common thread of the cities that I am aware of where this is happening,” Jones said. “Where there has been a concerted attempt to strip power away from local leadership, the mayors are Black.” She pointed to Kansas City, Missouri, where residents have been fighting to regain control of the police department from the state, and Jackson, Mississippi, a majority-Black city that could see the creation of a separate court system and police force appointed by white state officials if Republican lawmakers get their way.
Another recent Missouri House bill would allow the governor to strip elected prosecutors of jurisdiction over certain violent crimes. A previous version of the bill singled out the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office, where prosecutor Kim Gardner has drawn the ire of Republican officials for her pledges to hold police accountable, stop detaining nonviolent offenders, and end cash bail. Concerns over the constitutionality of targeting a specific office eventually led state officials to expand the scope of the bill. Jones characterized the fight over control of the St. Louis Police Department as performative politics. “Either we’re going to learn to get along and make sure that we’re protecting the people that we are all duly elected to serve, or we’re going to keep having these petty fights,” she said. Critics of the proposed change in St. Louis say it’s not a genuine effort to stop violent crime but a power play against officials who haven’t shown the same allegiance to police as their predecessors. Black lawmakers in the state Legislature have criticized the bill as an effort to strip authority from democratically elected Black officials “under the guise of ‘public safety.’” The Missouri Legislative Black Caucus did not respond to a request for comment.
Republican Governor Mike Parsons
Under the current structure, Jones has the power to hire and fire police chiefs. Should the bill pass, that power would be given to a board appointed by Republican Gov. Mike Parson. The bill would also require the board to staff the police department with at least 1,142 members and increase police salaries by $4,000 starting next summer. (The department currently has around 1,000 sworn officers and 400 civilian employees.) Jones said she was hopeful that Parson would see the city’s case and stop the bill should it pass. “Our governor is a former sheriff,” she said. “I know that he appreciates local control of law enforcement.” State Sen. Nick Schroer, who sponsored the bill, did not respond to a request for comment. The St. Louis Police Department was previously overseen by the state in an arrangement dating back to the Civil War when Missouri’s then-governor enacted state control of local police as he prepared to secede and join the Confederacy. It wasn’t until 2012 that Missouri voters secured local control of the St. Louis Police Department in a statewide referendum. Kansas City’s police department, meanwhile, has remained under state authority. That hasn’t insulated Kansas City from experiencing the same spike in homicides as many other cities across the country in recent years. Nevertheless, St. Louis police and their allies in office have cited a similar spike in St. Louis in calling for a return to state oversight.
State Sen. Nick Schroer, sponsor of the police state bill
The St. Louis Police Officers Association has been vocal in support of the bill, as has the Ethical Society of Police, a union that represents Black cops in St. Louis. The two unions have long disagreed on some political issues, particularly related to police reform. The Ethical Society of Police opposeda move by St. Louis prosecutors to join the officers association in a rebuke of St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell, who ran on a reform platform and ousted longtime officers association ally Bob McCulloch in 2018. The Missouri state Legislature first brought the bill targeting St. Louis up for consideration in January. The bill passed out of a state Senate committee earlier this month and is expected to pass out of a House committee in the coming weeks before receiving a full floor vote in both chambers. (This story originated at the Intercept)
In this medium, we try to document as many of the police killings as we possibly can. Realistically, we can only document a small amount of the illicit killings, and the blatant acts of abuse carried out under the name of law enforcement. Most of the information provided here is sourced from independent citizens, journalists, and other non-corporate media entities, as we do not have the financial resources or the staff to research and document this dilemma of police violence. The family of this victim speaks in simple, common-sense terms that the officer did not need to shoot; they could have opted not to kick in the door… Officers do not have to place themself close to a person wielding a knife so that they may claim justification for using lethal force. Suppose there are ways for the officer/s to gain space between themselves and the assailant wielding a knife, machete, sword, or other objects. In that case, the officer should use that option as long as the assailant does not pose an existential threat to anyone else. Unless the objective is to kill all offenders wielding a weapon, regardless of the circumstances and reasons surrounding the person’s actions. We see instances of police officers shooting a person wielding a fan rake. Others threaten someone with lethal force with a pail bucket, cell phone, screwdriver, or hammer. This leaves us with the only conclusion we can arrive at, which is that the objective is not to help but to dominate, and if they cannot gain compliance through threats and intimidation, then the person’s family must bury him or her. Far too many Americans have come to accept this kind of dangerously domineering thuggery as policing. It is not good policing. A good officer cannot seek to take someone’s life because he knows the system will legally exonerate him. A good officer is conscientious and does not only rely on legal exoneration but is guided by a strict moral compass. .
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Mike Beckles is a former Police Detective, businessman, freelance writer, black achiever honoree, and creator of the blog mikebeckles.com.
By Michelle De Pacina
Family members and community protesters are demanding criminal charges against the St. Paul police officer who shot and killed Yia Xiong, a 65-year-old Hmong war hero. On Feb. 11, Saint Paul Police Department (SPPD) officers responded to a call regarding a man threatening residents with a knife at an apartment complex in the 100 block of Western Avenue in the West Seventh neighborhood. In footage recorded by body cameras worn by officers Noushue Cha and Abdirahman Dahir, police can be seen entering the St. Paul apartment building. When officers find Xiong wielding a 16-inch knife, the officers can be heard yelling at the man to “drop the knife” and “get on the ground.” However, Xiong, whose daughter said he spoke limited English and was hard of hearing, disregards the officers’ commands and enters an apartment
Officer Cha can then be seen kicking the apartment door open before Xiong steps out. He comes forward with the knife in-hand as Officer Dahir fires his rifle and Officer Cha deploys his taser.
According to Xiong’s family, he lost his hearing five decades ago while fighting for the U.S. in the U.S. Secret War in Laos. Xiong reportedly fought for the CIA and climbed the ranks of the Royal Lao Army before being left in a refugee camp for years after exile in May 1975. Xiong’s younger brother, Wallor, said that the 65-year-old could not hear anything unless someone was close by and yelling at him. He added that Xiong was in the process of getting hearing aids. “He cannot hear anyone, he doesn’t speak English and they opened the door and just shot him,” Wallor Xiong told St. Paul Pioneer Press. “They just shot him like an animal, and it just broke my heart.”
Not too long ago, this was the mode of transportation for many Jamaicans. It was a simpler, less pretentious time, and we now look back with feelings of deep nostalgia.
images of the way it used to beThey travelled fast too.
Then there were these beauties that operated in the Kingston Metropolitan area. JOSSome not so new onesSuch a beauty.
Their lily-white juries will not indict the murderous scumbags in uniform who savagely murder your children, so you are left to cry and bury your dead right? In fact, prosecutors will not present the facts in a way for the grand juries to indict even if the members of those juries weren’t soulless racists. I wish to point out that they continue to shoot while or before demanding that suspects drop their weapons, and are justified according to these investigations, even though the subject never pointed a weapon in their direction and are running away.
A grand jury in Mississippi has declined to charge a Gulfport Police officer who fatally shot a Black teenager in a parking lot in October, the Mississippi Department of Public Safety confirmed to HuffPost on Thursday. Body-camera and dashcam footage of the incident, which HuffPost obtained through a public records request, shows Officer Kenneth Nassar firing at least eight shots at 15-year-old Jaheim McMillan outside of a Family Dollar store in broad daylight. Nassar and another officer, Benjamin Ford, responded to a 911 call on Oct. 6 that reported reckless driving. An investigative report stated the caller said that “occupants inside a silver Kia Soul were brandishing firearms and wearing camouflage masks.”
Dashcam footage shows that McMillan and four other teens were sitting inside a Kia Soul as officers arrived at the scene and parked. McMillan ran out of the car while trying to cover something with his sweatshirt in his hand; another teen jumped out of the car behind him. The dashcam footage appears to show a gun in McMillan’s hand as he decides which direction to run, but at no point does McMillan point a weapon toward Nassar. Nassar’s body-camera footage shows the officer firing his gun while also shouting at McMillan to drop his weapon.
Jaheim McMillan.
The encounter, during which Nassar fires eight shots, lasts about five seconds. Video shows McMillan falling to the ground, after which point he is no longer visible on camera. Nassar fires his last shots as McMillan is lying on the ground, according to the bodycam footage. An autopsy revealed that a gunshot to the head killed McMillan. In the footage, the three other teens exit the car with their hands up after Nassar fires his gun. “Get out the fucking car and stay on the ground,” Nassar is heard shouting on the footage, and the teens comply. While Nassar points his gun at the other teens lying on the ground, a white male walks toward him and questions why Nassar shot McMillan. “You better have had a good intent. You shot the child? Your ass is going to fucking jail,” the man is heard saying. “Sir, step the fuck away,” Nassar shouts. At one point, one of the teens who was inside of the car asks Nassar to check on McMillan because he thinks he died.
“Sir, can you please check on him? I think he’s dead,” the teen says. More officers arrive at the scene, and Nassar tells one he had seen a gun in McMillan’s hand, but that McMillan didn’t appear to have a gun on him when Nassar handcuffed him and rolled over his body. Officers later discovered a gun in the parking lot. Bodycam footage also shows Katrina Mateen, McMillan’s mother, arriving at the scene and questioning why police killed her son. The Mississippi Bureau of Investigations completed an investigation into the shooting this week, and its findings were presented to a grand jury, which declined to indict Nassar. Nassar said during an interview as part of the investigation that he saw a gun in McMillan’s hand and ordered him to drop it, and that he remembered firing at least eight shots. He said he handcuffed McMillan while he was injured on the ground, which he said was “common practice.” One of the teens in the car told investigators that he felt Nassar had a bias against McMillan. “I really feel like the officer had something against Jahiem too though,” the witness said.
Having the burden of potentially ending someone’s life as part of your job is not something anyone should take lightly. Having carried that burden for almost a decade, I was not particularly fond of it. These days it seems that many people entrusted with that power relish it and use it in ways contrary to why they were given those powers. The cries and complaints about police brutality are not confined to any one country. All over the world, particularly in nations where citizens are allowed to speak freely, the subject of police violence is always front and center. In fairness to police officers, they are asked to deal with some of the worst actors in our societies, and the optics of the job are not always great to look at. For the most part, some people tend to be reasonable whenever they view the lawful actions of police who carry out their duties in a lawful manner. In other places where there are other dynamics at play, the most reasonable actions are criticized, and elsewhere, the most egregious transgressions are downplayed, depending on people’s motivations.
For example, if you are a cop lawfully enforcing the law in most inner-city Jamaican communities, you are bound to be demonized regardless of the lawfulness of your actions. On the other hand, a cop who summarily murders a black person in the United States is lionized by a certain segment of the white community and their propaganda media outlets. The need to support criminality in the former sense and racist proclivities in the latter influences how police operate in the two geographies. Having served in law enforcement in Jamaica, I saw firsthand how inner-city communities, their political representatives, the judiciary, media, and what passes for academia responded to the work of the police in ways that made it impossible for the police to achieve its mandate. You do not get the consensus you need when there are people on television telling citizens to attack police stations. Contrary to what many in Jamaica say on the subject of crime, they actually loathe the rule of law. In the United States, on the other hand, black citizens operate in fear of the over 18,000 police departments and the just under a million sworn officers who populate those departments. The simple act of driving down the streets places a black motorist in deadly peril. All it takes is for a racist cop to conjure up a pretextual reason to initiate a traffic stop and then shoot the driver under the pretext that they reached for something, usually the papers they demand after initiating the stop.
So members of the black community are forced to constantly adjust to staying alive when pulled over by a cop rather than the cops adjusting to treating members of the public with respect and ensuring that they respect their rights and dignity. Cops have a particular hard-on for traffic stops. Traffic stops are the singular most effective means of acquiring a motorist’s identification so they may run names through their system for warrants. Not that there is anything wrong with getting people who shouldn’t be on the streets in jail, but when the motivation is not about safety but is about feeding the beast of the ‘for-profit prison industrial complex, this is where it becomes dangerous. Social media has done a terrific job of getting video imagery of police violence into the public domain. Previously the mainstream media rarely reported on police killings and when they bothered to do so, they presented fabricated police versions of events as true representations of the facts as they occurred. Seeing these events unfold, Americans continue to ask why they are so intent on traffic stops and demanding pedestrians identifications even in situations in which they have no lawful authority to demand and receive them. They are told to use intimidation where they have no authority to demand ID from pedestrians and to concoct reasons to stop motorists to get their ideas- all toward ramping up arrests and incarcerations. This practice is upheld by the supreme court and encouraged all the way down to county attorneys. Follow motorists and create a pretextual reason to justify a traffic stop. A motorist driving down the street is at the mercy of the ‘for profit’ mercenaries who lie on affidavits and violate their fourth (4) amendment right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures. The idea that they shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized are willfully discarded…
None of this matter anymore as the Supreme Court continues to erode the rights of Americans in its unconstitutional rulings giving police more and more illegal power to subvert the constitution. So to set the stage, a rogue cop, wait, let me rephrase that; the rogue cop initiates a pretextual stop;(dubious, spurious), demands papers; motorists are clean has all of their papers. But the cop isn’t satisfied because the motorist had the temerity and gall to ask what was the reason he was pulled over, safe in the knowledge he had not committed an infraction. That is, contempt of cops is a crime so serious that it is advisable not to ever commit that offense because it usually ends in death to the black person. The motorist is then ordered out of the vehicle, and any hesitation on his part will likely end in him getting killed right at that point. If the motorist doesn’t immediately comply, he is dragged from the car, thrown to the ground, brutalized, and cuffed, or killed as Tyre Nichols was, as Sandra Bland was, as Philando Castile was, as Patrick Lyoya was, as Daunte Wright was, you get the picture. If the motorist suspends all of his rights and dignity and piously complies in an attempt to ward off death for another hour he is searched, handcuffed, and ordered to either sit of lie on the ground as one would a Dog.
It is at this point the other aspects of the lies begin. Remember, the Supreme Court has ruled that police can lie to citizens; in fact, they are allowed to lie even to children. Now we all know if cops are given the green light to lie, they will not only lie to gather the evidence they will also lie to secure convictions. So the cop tells the motorists they smell .…… wait for it… drum roll, please, marijuana. ‘The dreaded and dangerous drug that has killed billions of people’. At this point, they then illegally search the motorist’s vehicle or call for a canine and handler. The dog is manipulated around the vehicle several times and, more often than not, indicates to the handler that there is something contraband in the vehicle. Checkmate, a comprehensive end run around the fourth amendment right of the motorists, and all legal according to the highest court. However, here are some facts according to brownwhitelaw.com, so take your average, run-of-the-mill traffic stop or an average, run-of-the-mill traffic violation. If the police get the dog to the scene reasonably quickly, they can run the dog over the vehicle without any basis whatsoever for believing there are drugs inside. Then if the dog alerts, that alert, by itself, constitutes probable cause. And once you have probable cause, you can make an arrest, or if the alert is to a vehicle, you can search the entire vehicle without a warrant. Now why, you might be asking, does the dog alert in itself constitute probable cause? The answer is clear: courts accept the government’s assertion that drug dogs are extraordinarily accurate. No one doubts that drug dogs have the physiological ability to sniff out concealed loads. * Hold that thought!!!! According to a January 2011 NPR report, the Chicago Tribune sifted through three years worth of cases in which law enforcement used dogs to sniff out drugs in cars in suburban Chicago. According to the analysis, officers found drugs or paraphernalia in only 44 percent of cases in which the dogs had alerted them. When the driver was Latino, the dogs were right just 27 percent of the time. We will never know the data on white motorists, because they are hardly subjected to the indignities of canine searches as blacks and latinos are. At least not nearly to the degree that blacks are degraded. * So much for the assertion that dogs are extraordinarily accurate. Here is the funny part; well, not funny in the real sense, just funnily ridiculous. “Dog-handling cops and trainers argue the canine teams’ accuracy shouldn’t be measured in the number of alerts that turn up drugs. They said the scent of drugs or paraphernalia can linger in a car after drugs are used or sold, and the dogs’ noses are so sensitive they can pick up residue from drugs that can no longer be found in a car.
I am a Dog-lover, so I will give my Canine friends all the love and deference they deserve. They are not at fault; the issue is the faulty logic used by the unconstitutional injustice system on certain segments of the population. Using the logic given by cops and dog trainers, it is okay to violate people’s fourth amendment rights simply because someone who entered a vehicle may have used illicit drugs or even had on their person prescription drugs? How about the motorist who recently purchased the vehicle? What about the motorists who gave someone a ride? What about the Canine is just plain wrong because it knows it will receive a treat for a positive hit? In case you are wondering, how did we lose our rights in a country that says it is the land of the free home of the brave? I just told you!!!
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Mike Beckles is a former Police Detective, businessman, freelance writer, black achiever honoree, and creator of the blog mikebeckles.com.
Some of you will remember this image of a Mulberry, Arkansas, police officer and two Sheriff’s deputy brutalizing a man before arresting him. You may also recall their response when they realized they were being filmed.
The two deputies were fired.
The two Crawford county deputies were fired, but the cop was not, and as you may have expected, he is back on the job. The incident began during the August 2021 arrest of Randal Worcester in the small town of Mulberry, about 140 miles (220 kilometers) northwest of Little Rock, near the border with Oklahoma. A local Mulberry Police Officer, Thell Riddle, and two Sheriff’s deputies, Zack King, and Levi White were recorded beating and brutalizing Randal Worcester during an attempted arrest. Then Sheriff Damante said Worcester was being questioned for threatening a clerk at a nearby convenience store and that he attacked one of the deputies. .
In the video, Thell Ridedle is seen holding Worchester down while the two deputies beat the daylights out of him. All three were suspended after the video came to light, and nationwide outcry ensued. The Sheriff’s department correctly fired the deputies who have since been charged Federally and are awaiting trial in April. On the other hand, local authorities have failed to charge Thell Riddel and have since allowed him back on duty. Randal Worcester is a white male; imagine what these cops would have done to a black person. Here is the really funny part, special prosecutor Emily White said in a letter dated Feb. 15 that she would [not] pursue any charges against Riddle. White said the investigation against former deputies Zack King and Levi White remained open. So they are charged federally, but local authorities are still investigating. This is why Republicans want everything to be decided at the state level and do away with the federal government.
Arkansas cop Thell Riddle was caught helping to brutalize a citizen back on the job without charge.
What could they be investigating? The Feds investigated and charged the two deputies, but the case is still open at the state level. The video shows one of the deputies repeatedly punching and kneeing Worcester in the head before grabbing his hair and slamming him against the pavement. The other kneed him repeatedly. The grand jury did not charge Riddle, who has been with the Mulberry Police Department since 2017.
The special prosecutor’s logic is anchored in the fact that he wasn’t seen hitting mister Worcester. Using that logic, a getaway driver in a bank robbery could not be prosecuted for the robbery. Never mind that an officer seeing a crime being committed by colleagues has a duty to intervene. It is also one more reminder that unrestrained police violence is no longer reserved for innocent unarmed black people. It has come full circle and is engulfing us all. .
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Mike Beckles is a former Police Detective, businessman, freelance writer, black achiever honoree, and creator of the blog mikebeckles.com.
The decision by the Andrew Holness Government to push through a bill that postpones local government elections.…..again, to February 28, 2024, highlights the glaring reality that elections have consequences. Over the angry protests of Mark Golding People’s National Party’s opposition to the bill and the obligatory walk-out, the bill was pushed through on a 20 to 8 vote. The Holness Administration postponed the local government elections due in February 2021 during the height of the COVID pandemic. The opposition PNP argued that they did not oppose putting off those elections at the time as it made sense. The opposition is angry, however, that this was the third postponement since 2021. Moreover, the opposition is not buying the reasons for this latest postponement. Local Government Minister Desmond McKenzie, who made the case for the Government’s position, argued that the Government had weighed the balance. We believe at this time where the country is, the fact that we have to consider important issues — an election is important — but I urge the country’s patience to understand and respect the decision of the Government”. https://mikebeckles.com/jamaica-could-copy-paste-from-others-that-did-it-before-but-even-that-is-too-difficult/
Image of the Bonnet to Benbow main Road in North East Saint Catherine.
“We are in a better position than last year, but it is clear that we are not yet out of the woods. The Government is focused on building national resilience against further economic shocks and expanding and maintaining strong economic growth.” According to the minister, holding the municipal elections at this time carried significant risk of diverting the country from these two tasks. If ever there was a load of poppycock, this is it. Using this logic, there would never be elections in Jamaica ever. In fact, any administration in power in any country could use that logic to postpone elections they fear may be unfavorable to them. Here again, is a case for Jamaica to adopt a Republican governance model through a new constitutional order and one that has set election dates. Elections are the most vital element in a democratic society, and they should not be left up to the whims of the party in power to manipulate them to suit their needs. Fixed elections allow the people (the real bosses) to determine who they choose to lead. The opposition party doesn’t always get it right, and although the party is wholly craven about gaining power for power’s sake, its arguments are no less reasonable.
This is utterly disgraceful in a District that has voted JLP for as long as I can remember and more.
Having said that, it is important to draw attention to the lack of usefulness of the local government, and some will argue the central government as well. Jamaica’s roads are a little more than donkey tracks in many cases. Growing up in the District of Bonnett North East St Catherine in the 70s, a paved road was something we saw in Benbow, Guys Hill, and other more well-known areas. The road from Benbow into Bonnett was a dirt track covered in stones and trenches. North East Saint Catherine, from as far as I can remember, supported the Jamaica Labor Party; from John Percival Gyles to E K Powell, the constituency remained JLP except later when the PNP won, and Phillis Mitchell represented the constituency. As a schoolboy growing up there, E K Powell was very accessible as a Member of Parliament. He was active in encouraging youth sports and was instrumental in facilitating cross-district cricketing rivalries. We lobbied Mister Powell incessantly as a collective of young people, and individually I lobbied the government utilizing Ronnie Thwaites and Wilmott Perkins’s daily radio shows.
This is the Bonnett to Benbow main road.
The road into Bonnett was eventually paved. The road into Bonnett today is once again a dirt track. I sat down with a friend and a family member last November and reminisced about how we were instrumental in getting the road paved. I was stunned that one friend was quick to take credit for having something to do with it while simultaneously joining with my relative to tell me nothing could be done to fix the road today, over four decades later, as it is considered a secondary road. The road was a secondary road forty-plus years ago when I incessantly lobbied and shamed them into fixing it as a schoolboy. The road that was beautifully paved well over four decades ago is now a dirt track, and nothing will be done about it because some people there lack imagination and are satisfied with the status quo.
The time for posing is over, its time to get to work serving the residents of the constituency.
I chopped a few choice pieces of Jamaican fabric during that conversation with my friend and family member. I was totally pissed that people could be that comfortable with mediocrity. When I inquired about representation in the local government, I was told that some guy named [Dunn] was the councilor there. He is not from there but had family from there. On my last trip home last November, the SUV I drove sustained a flat tire from falling into the craters that are impossible to navigate without falling into some of them. I am calling on the Jamaica Labor Party Member of Parliament forNorth East Saint Catherine, Kerensia Morrison, to fix the road leading into Bonnett From Benbow. Failing this, I will begin a campaign for citizens there to look at the other party not because it is better but to send a message that this behavior will not be tolerated.
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Mike Beckles is a former Police Detective, businessman, freelance writer, black achiever honoree, and creator of the blog mikebeckles.com.
Temple police shooting suspect shot officer 3 more times as cop lay on the ground with head wound: officials
The 18-year-old suspect accused of fatally shooting a Temple University police officer in the head over the weekend stood over the officer and shot him three more times as the cop lay on the ground near the Philadelphia campus before trying to steal the fallen officer’s gun, officials said on Tuesday. Philadelphia police released the new details during a press conference on the death of Temple University Police Officer Christopher Fitzgerald, who had responded Saturday night to a robbery call in an area that officials say has seen a spike in carjackings and robberies. While responding to the call, police said Fitzgerald spotted three teenagers dressed in all black and wearing masks to cover their faces. The officer approached the trio but they tried to flee. Fitzgerald called in a foot pursuit over his radio and chased after the teens. He caught up to the 18-year-old alleged gunman, later identified as Miles Pfeffer, and ordered him to get on the ground, police said.
Christopher Fitzgerald served with the Temple University police force since October 2021
Pfeffer ignored the officer’s orders and pulled out a gun, according to authorities. The suspect fired at Fitzgerald, striking the officer in the head and torso. When Fitzgerald fell to the ground, Pfeffer shot the officer three more times, officials said.
Officials said that U.S. Marshals captured 18-year-old Miles Pfeffer and arrested him using Fitzgerald’s handcuffs.
Pfeffer initially fled the scene, according to police, but returned to search through the fallen officer’s pockets. Officials said he tried to steal Fitzgerald’s gun. After shooting the officer, police said the suspect carjacked a driver at gunpoint, threatening to shoot and kill them. Fitzgerald, a married father, was rushed to a Temple University Hospital, where he later died. He served on the Temple University police force since October 2021 and was the son of a former police chief of Fort Worth, Texas. Officials said Pfeffer was identified as a suspect after the two other teens he was with were detained and told police his name. Less than 12 hours after the shooting, U.S. Marshals captured Pfeffer in Buckingham Township, Pennsylvania. Officers used Fitzgerald’s handcuffs during the arrest. Pfeffer is facing multiple charges, including murder of a law enforcement officer, robbery and carjacking, officials said. He is not eligible for release on bail. Temple police said the department is working to hire more police to help keep its campus safe, adding that it has become difficult to find quality people who want to be a police officer. Meanwhile, city and school officials said Philadelphia has a major crime problem, with Mayor Jim Kenney and District Attorney Larry Krasner repeatedly blaming the lack of gun control.(From Yahoo.com)
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