Police violence against Occupy movement gets less visible but more extreme

[starroute]

Anyone who thinks we're still dealing with a system of legitimate authority hasn't been paying attention.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/05/david-graeber-new-police-strategy-in-new-york-sexual-assault-against-peaceful-protestors.html

A few weeks ago I was with a few companions from Occupy Wall Street in Union Square when an old friend — I’ll call her Eileen — passed through, her hand in a cast. . . .

“Oh, this?” she held it up. “I was in Liberty Park on the 17th [the Six Month Anniversary of the Occupation]. When the cops were pushing us out the park, one of them yanked at my breast. . . . Yeah so I screamed at the guy, I said, ‘you grabbed my boob! what are you, some kind of fucking pervert?’ So they took me behind the lines and broke my wrists.”

Actually, she quickly clarified, only one wrist was literally broken. She proceeded to launch into a careful, well-nigh clinical blow-by-blow description of what had happened. An experienced activist, she knew to go limp when police seized her, and how to do nothing that could possibly be described as resisting arrest. Police dragged her, partly by the hair, behind their lines and threw her to the ground, periodically shouting “stop resisting!” as she shouted back “I’m not resisting!” At one point though, she said, she did tell them her glasses had fallen to the sidewalk next to her, and announced she was going to reach over to retrieve them. That apparently gave them all the excuse they needed. One seized her right arm and bent her wrist backwards in what she said appeared to be some kind of marshal-arts move, leaving it not broken, but seriously damaged. “I don’t know exactly what they did to my left wrist—at that point I was too busy screaming at the top of my lungs in pain. But they broke it. After that they put me in plastic cuffs, as tightly as they possibly could, and wouldn’t loosen them for at least an hour no matter how loud I screamed or how much the other prisoners begged them to help me. For a while everyone in the arrest van was chanting ‘take them off, take them off’ but they just ignored them…” . . .

The message here is clear. Law has nothing to do with it. Anyone who engages in Occupy Wall Street-related activity should know they can be arrested, for virtually any reason, at any time. Many of these arrests are carried out in such a way to guarantee physical injury. The tone was set on that first night of March 17, when my friend Eileen’s wrists were broken; others suffered broken fingers, concussions, and broken ribs. Again, this was on a night where OWS actions were confined to sitting in a park, playing music, raising one or two tents, and marching down the street.

[Mnemosyne]

1. And Hillary is in China scolding them for human rights abuses, why? Despicable actions, criminals.

K&R

[saras]

2. These officers deserve summary execution. Which is why I don't attend protests.

When America accepts this as necessary, whether it's the Feds, the mayors and police chiefs, or the public taking the law into their own hands, and starts acting on it, America will be able to start moving towards justice.

Until then, good fucking luck.

[ScreamingMeemie]

12. "summary execution"?????

How about summary dismissal, with criminal charges filed?

[Zalatix]

15. I feel you, saras, but summary executions are never the way to go.

If this society was in any way salvageable these cops would have been arrested by Federal Marshals, tried in Federal court, convicted, and put away for LIFE under a special circumstances (abuse of power) clause.

Put them in Gen Pop. The fellow prisoners would have handled it from there.

[coalition_unwilling]

4. The entire article is well worth the read. When the LAPD busted up

Occupy Los Angeles at the end of November, they (and LA Sherrif's deputees) held arrestees on buses for many hours with no access to bathroom facilities, such that several arrestess had to soil themselves. Anecdotal reports had police laughing about it.

It's like some sick sort of sado-masochism at play. I lack the clinical background or training to analyze it properly, so am forced back on my literary training. This brings to mind Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty or the master-slave dynamic between Lucky and Pozzo in Beckett's "Waiting for Godot."

[Blecht]

5. The way things are and the way things are portrayed to be have never been the same

And the gap between the two is getting wider.

Things are really fucked, and it's only going to get worse.

[BitaMig]

7. The Majority of Americans have forgotten the history of it's birth and creation.

if more people actually did things would be very different right now.

[Zalatix]

8. This is why I scarcely see the need for cops. This is all they do anymore.

And by the end of this century they'll ONLY exist to protect the Plutocracy.

Everyone who thinks they need the police for protection? Your kids or grandkids will be asking you "since when did the police ever protect us?"

They have no duty to protect you. They will, however, ALWAYS rise to protect the Plutocracy. Something much worse than lawlessness is coming, it's called a Plutonomy. It'll happen in this century.

[randome]

13. No one is protecting shit!

Conspiracy-minded much?

Cops do their jobs. Some of them do their jobs abominably but this bullshit about the 1% calling the shots is naive in the extreme.

You think Donald Trump is radioing in his orders? LOL!

[Zalatix]

14. Really? Then how do you explain this?

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2012/02/21/ignored-911-call-turns-fatal-in-berkeley-police-busy-with-occupy-protest/

Oakland cops ignored a man's call for help to deal with an intruder. Why? Because they were ALL out protecting a bank from an Occupy protest.

[TBF]

19. All Donald has to do is make one three-minute phone call to the current mayor of NYC

(who then makes his own call to the Police Chief) and whatever he wants will happen. That IS how upper levels folks operate and if you don't know that you haven't ever been in a board meeting. Hell you haven't even worked in management. I learned a lot about capitalism the old fashioned way - working in corporations. If you think CEO's are sitting around thinking about how to be nice to employees you've got a lot to learn.

[Zalatix]

20. Yeah, exactly. Who do these people around here think the cops will respond to first?

A thief in your house, or an Occupy protest?

We found out the answer to that in Oakland. Tragically.

[starroute]

9. "Pain compliance techniques" are part of police training -- but they are widely abused

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grappling_hold#Pain_compliance_hold

A pain compliance hold (also referred to as a pain compliance technique or sometimes a pain hold) is a grappling hold which uses painful joint lock, compression lock or pressure point technique to control a person or opponent. . . . Frequently used by police and corrections personnel in accordance with an "escalation of force" policy, such techniques presume a rational adversary. Some altered states such as those caused by mental illness, extreme flexibility, phencyclidine and amphetamine use[citation needed], or extreme adrenaline may alter the subject's perception of pain or willingness to submit.

Like other forms of non-lethal force, pain compliance strategies are not perfect and may be abused as a form of torture with plausible deniability.


http://mobilizingideas.wordpress.com/2011/11/22/pain-compliance/

November 22, 2011

Most readers have probably already watched the videos of protesters at UC Davis being pepper sprayed and/or videos of protesters at UC Berkeley being hit with batons. As someone who studies protest policing, I wish I could say that I was as surprised as I am appalled. I have been writing for a while about violence that occurs “incident to arrest,” at protests, which can be quite substantial. . . . Perhaps incidents like these will lead us to collectively reconsider this view of arrests as somehow violence-free encounters.

Encounters like the one at UC Davis should also prompt a larger conversation about when “pain compliance” techniques are justified. For those not familiar with the phrase, the idea of pain compliance is that police can apply techniques, ranging from physical holds to the use of less than lethal weapons like pepper spray or tazers, to gain compliance with an order. Pain compliance has been routinely used on violent subjects as a way of making arrests without unholstering a firearm. But, the use of these techniques has become much more common, to the point where pain compliance is sometimes used to gain compliance more quickly or easily (from the officer’s perspective) from non-violent subjects—in other words, it has, in some cases, turned into a tool for police efficiency.

There were early warning signs of this shift as long ago as 1997 when police in Humboldt County, California used q-tips to directly apply pepper spray to the eyes of non-violent protesters, as well as direct sprays not unlike what was observed at UC Davis. Although a lawsuit eventually found the technique to be inappropriate, it was taught to California police officers as an approved method for non-violent crowd control through the California POST.

[starroute]

10. I've just been looking into the history of police brutality

It seems that in 1928, President Hoover appointed what was known as the Wickersham Commission to look into the effects of Prohibition. One section of the commission's report, which was delivered in 1931, drew attention to the issue of extreme police brutality during interrogations (which had often been used against political dissidents as well as common criminals.)

Most of the information that I'm finding on this is showing up only in Google Books, snippets of academic papers, and images of old newspapers, none of which can be copy-and-pasted. For example, there's an image of a newspaper story from 1931 at http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1338&dat=19310810&id=Kt1YAAAAIBAJ&sjid=3vQDAAAAIBAJ&pg=7033,2053923 which discusses the commission's findings about third degree methods, coerced confessions, and "lawlessness in law enforcement." It also quotes an acting district attorney as calling the report "absurd" and asking, "What are we to do, give our baby killers ice cream sodas?"

There's also a discussion of some of this in a Google Book preview at http://books.google.com/books?id=JzZFZPrdn-oC&pg=PA81&lpg=PA81&dq=%22wickersham+report%22+police+brutality&source=bl&ots=dU93DWTQkm&sig=dy68d-Okd1eBNKb_hEReuZRPfIg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=QUKlT_jLMIys0AGupPWlBQ&ved=0CHMQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=%22wickersham%20report%22%20police%20brutality&f=false

It cites the Wickersham Report as setting off a trend towards closer scrutiny of police practices but says that things only really began to change in the 1960s, and particularly as a result of the Miranda decision, which almost completely eliminated police brutality during interrogations. (No matter what your friendly neighborhood right-wingers might say, Miranda is not some petty technical requirement.)

But somehow in the last few decades police brutality has cropped up again, only now as part of the arrest procedure and mainly directed against protests and civil disobedience. In that context, the purpose is not to extract confessions but to demonstrate that there is a heavy price to be paid for opposing the system -- which is to say that it has become an explicit tool of political repression.

I haven't found anything online so far about just how and when it became acceptable to torture protesters in the process of arresting them. My own recollection is that I first began to see discussions of pain compliance techniques in the late 80s or early 90s, about the same time as the "ticking time bomb" scenario began to show up on TV talk shows as a defense of torture.

But just where the responsibility for endorsing these abusive tactics currently lies -- whether among ordinary cops, their white-shirt superiors, the mayors and other city officials who are in the service of elite and corporate demands to promote gentrification and tourism, or high-level federal and state officials -- is a much trickier question.

[raouldukelives]

11. How anyone could do that to another human being

or even watch it happen and do nothing is beyond me. I'd probably do fine as a cop until I saw a fellow officer do something like this and I'd be arrested myself or kicked off the force. You have to be able to turn a blind eye as a "peace officer" these days and sadly my patriotism compels me to react while watching a countrymen being denied rights people fought and died for 200 years ago almost as much as my faith disallows me from helping to hurt someone or bearing false witness. Very bad traits for any kind of paid employment involving killing people for the state here or abroad.

[Odin2005]

17. They are sociopaths.

[Odin2005]

16. And people DARE tell me this is noty a police state?

Fuck the pigs!

[inna]

18. important! thank you for posting this