As American police continue their daily assault against citizens of color, we ask the questions that the corporate media will not ask. Literally, every day more and more information comes to light of police atrocities against citizens of the United States, citizens of color. If committed by security forces in other countries, some of these atrocities would receive rebuke, receive sanctions by the United Nations.
Why are these daily human rights abuses allowed to continue without any attention from Human Rights Agencies? Where is Amnesty International in all of this, or is it safe to say that Amnesty International and other Fraudulent Agencies that purport to care about human rights only care when the offenders are Black or Brown?
In the land of the free, judges dish out no-knock warrants to police on the flimsy arguments (by cops) that if they announce themselves, they will be in danger. Imagine heavily armed cops dressed like power rangers with semi-automatic weapons and weighed down with ammunition, afraid for their safety when they are breaking down citizens’ homes, destroying everything in sight as they supposedly search for drugs in a hate-filled frenzy.
The body cameras they are supposed to activate and wear when interacting with the public — they get to decide whether or not they turn them on during those encounters.
• They decide when to mute the audio.
• They decide what to redact from the recordings (actions that are the same as tampering with evidence, yet there are absolutely no consequences when they erase evidence needed in court proceedings.
• They get to decide whether recordings are handed over to the families of their victims, usually produced to families after intense court battles even though police are public employees paid by the taxpayers. The equipment is also the property of the taxpaying public.
• Even though there is freedom of Information laws in the United States, police tend to flout the laws with impunity, basically operating outside the laws that govern everyone else.
• The ability of police to flout the laws, commit perjury even in court without consequence makes it literally impossible for people of color to receive any justice in the courts, even without the racially biased prosecutors and judges that populate the American Criminal Justice System.
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On what authority, you ask, can police justify the egregious instances of civil rights abuse without consequence?
In 2016 the United States Supreme Court ruled in a 6 – 3 decision that in some cases, evidence of a crime can be used against a defendant even if police obtained it illegally. According to the Associated Press, the 5 – 3 decision drew “heated dissents from liberal justices who warned that the outcome would encourage police to violate people’s rights.” (ya think?) The ruling comes in a case in which South Salt Lake City Police Department narcotics detective Douglas Fackrell stopped defendant Joseph Edward Strieff in 2006. Fackrell suspected Strieff of being involved in drug activity but didn’t actually have “reasonable suspicion,” required by the U.S. Constitution for investigatory stops.
During questioning, Fackrell “relayed Strieff’s personal information to a police dispatcher — a routine practice during police stops — and learned Strieff had an outstanding traffic warrant.” The detective then arrested Strieff based on that warrant and found a small amount of methamphetamine on his person; Strieff was charged and convicted for unlawful possession. On Fackrell, U.S. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her popular dissent, “In his search for lawbreaking, the officer in this case himself broke the law.”
Since then, we have seen that police have taken these Supreme Court Actions to mean that they have unfettered action to do as they please, including to take life with impunity.
This writer continue to maintain that the Supreme Court continues to be a grave threat to the rights and freedoms of the average American.
Coupled with the doctrine of qualified immunity created by the court, American police officers have a license to abuse the rights of citizens at will with little to no fear that they will be held accountable.
We now see police conduct traffic stops by using lies that drivers failed to indicate before a turn, that the driver hit a yellow line, was driving unsteady, or any number of lies they dream up to justify their intentions to search a citizen’s automobile and run their licenses for warrants.
We have seen police illegally stop motorists and spend an inordinate amount of time holding the motorist hostage as they fish for something to charge the motorist with. These are [not]the actions of a free society.
These actions directly contravene the Constitutional fourth amendment guarantee a citizen has against illegal government intrusion into their personal spaces.
In her moral and commonsense dissent to the court’s 2016 ruling, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said:
The Court today holds that the discovery of a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket will forgive a police officer’s violation of your Fourth Amendment rights. Do not be soothed by the opinion’s technical language: This case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and check it for outstanding traffic warrants — even if you are doing nothing wrong. If the officer discovers a warrant for a fine you forgot to pay, courts will now excuse his illegal stop and will admit into evidence anything he happens to find by searching you after arresting you on the warrant. Because the Fourth Amendment should prohibit, not permit, such misconduct, I dissent. I do not doubt that most officers act in “good faith” and do not set out to break the law. That does not mean these stops are “isolated instance[s] of negligence,” however. Many are the product of institutionalized training procedures. The New York City Police Department long trained officers to, in the words of a District Judge, “stop and question first, develop reasonable suspicion later.”
Most Americans of color and even poorer whites are now living that dystopian nightmare in their everyday lives.
Scoop.com argues, The United States and its allies do not call the U.S. a “police state,” but, if this phrase has any meaning, then it clearly does apply, and a strong case can be presented that the U.S. might even be more of a police state than is any other nation on Earth.
In January of 2021, Scoop.com.nz reported
Since 2015, police officers have fatally shot at least 135 unarmed Black men and women nationwide, an NPR investigation has found. NPR reviewed police, court, and other records to examine the details of the cases. At least 75% of the officers were white. The latest one happened this month in Killeen, Texas, when Patrick Warren Sr., 52, was fatally shot by an officer responding to a mental health call.
For at least 15 of the officers …, the shootings were not their first — or their last, NPR found. They have been involved in two — sometimes three or more — shootings, often deadly and without consequences.
In fact:
Of the officers involved in the deadly shootings of unarmed Black people over the last five years, 13 were charged with murder. Two were found guilty.NPR’s report alleged a number of reasons for that “without consequences,” but ignored the most important one: In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court created what is, in practical reality, a new law, almost a total ban against convicting a police officer of murder if he kills someone while on the job. The ‘Justices’ called this judge-made law (subsequently reaffirmed by the Supreme Court many times, the latest being in 2020) “qualified immunity,” but it is very close to being total immunity, and thus virtually all of the many abuses that NPR reported there can be traced back to it. Being a mainstream ‘news’-medium, the deeper level of reality is censored out by the editors and managers.(scoop.com.nz wrote.)
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Mike Beckles is a former Police Detective, businessman, freelance writer, black achiever honoree, and creator of the blog mikebeckles.com.