Cops Beat Crap Out of Rutgers Students

[babylonsister]

Cops Beat Crap Out of Rutgers Students

by Steven D
Sat Feb 12th, 2011 at 11:05:47 PM EST


Imagine this. You are asleep in a basement apartment with your roommate. You are both Rutgers students. One of you is white, the other an Arab American, and you are both 19. One of you has a father who was a cop. Police in New Brunswick, NJ have a warrant for a different student living in a different apartment in the same building. You have no police record. You are not identified on the warrant. It's 4:30 in the morning. Guess what happened next:

Two Rutgers roommates say they were sleeping in the early morning hours of December 10th and had no idea who was barging into the basement room they share in an off-campus house in New Brunswick.

"I got hit in the face; I got hit in the ribs. That's basically what happened," said Kareem Najjar, a Rutgers University student.

"I remember basically waking up to being hit, on the side of my face, on my back I got kicked a couple of times and stepped on," Kostman said.

Pictures show boot marks left on Kostman's back.

"One person was standing on my back another was standing on my head," Najjar said.

"It's really scary, really intimidating when there are people just yelling at your and hitting you, you don't believe that it's something that cops would do," Kostman said.

The roommates say it wasn't until they were handcuffed that they were told this was a raid by New Brunswick Police who apparently had a warrant for someone else in the house.

Note these kids were not formally arrested or charged with any crime. They were, however forced to sit in the underwear while handcuffed in freezing temperatures. In short they got the s**t beat out of them because the police were looking for other alleged criminals. They weren't even told they had been assaulted and "detained" by the cops until after they were handcuffed. Their room was trashed by the cops even though the police had no warrant to search their apartment.

snip//

Hard to respect cops who act like criminals and don't even identify themselves when they break into your apartment to beat you up for no reason I can see other other than a desire to beat young helpless kids up.

Imagine, however, if one of these kids had a permit for a gun. Imagine if he had tried to defend himself against what he could reasonably assume were burglars (remember they did not identify themselves as as police and were dressed in plain clothes) intent on causing grievous bodily harm or death to the two students. We'd be talking about two dead Rutgers Sophomores today, and the New Brunswick Police would no doubt be whitewashing the incident to smear the victims.

more...

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2011/2/12/23547/1136

[ladjf]

1. This kind of stuff is happening all over America and it appears to

that the number of this type if incident is increasing. How long before America notices?

[roamer65]

2. Sounds like they need a good attorney to file a lawsuit.

[DCKit]

3. Still, too often, the officers are held harmless and the taxpayers pick up the tab.

D.C. is really good at keeping judgments against the city quiet (police, education and labor disputes), but I think we're paying out an average of $100 million per year, or better. No individuals are held accountable. So, while the tax base has increased exponentially over the past two decades, property taxes continue to rise to cover continuing budget shortfalls.

See how that works?

[MadMaddie]

4. I keep going back to basics

How hard is it to validate that the right address and the correct people are in a location before the cops kick the door down? Anyone?

There are all kinds of databases, they could have gone to the school to verify, they had hundreds of other choices.

What about the homeowners and their animals attacked and killed because of these police state actions?

How do Americans reign in this behavior?

[w4rma]

5. This is why I don't support any additional gun control.

When only the military, police and certain empowered individuals are allowed to carry guns, this will become much more common.

[backscatter712]

6. HEY PIG-LOVERS!!! JUSTIFY THIS!!!

C'MON!!! Your heroes are in a spot, and they need your obsequious brown-nosing asses to tell DU why it was necessary to protect American freedom for criminal cops to break into the home of two innocent people and kick the shit out of them.

You also need to explain why the pigs should get punished with a paid vacation for a crime that would land anyone else in prison for a year at the minimum. Explain to us why the pigs are special.

C'mon. I want to hear you spin this.

[tkmorris]

8. They are bad apples of course

Just a couple more bad apples to add to the countless ones we already have.

[Odin2005]

7. FUCKING PIGS!!!

:grr:

[MilesColtrane]

9. Oink

[donheld]

10. I"m thinking "Make my Day" Law

Campuses are arming something's gonna go very wrong some day, worse than it already is.

[ThomCat]

11. I have never, ever heard of any department purging

bad cops and changing their training because of shit like this.

We all know that this is becoming common.

Warrants are unnecessary if they don't think you are important enough and/or rich enough to be able to have a lawyer to fight them for not having one. So poor and powerless people just don't get the protection of the 4th amendment, and the courts routinely look the other way.

Cops are able to lie and file false charges to criminalize anyone they want, so even if you haven't done anything, even if they have the wrong house, if they decide they want to put someone in jail the cops can always manage to do it. They may have attacked you, and didn't ever identify themselves as cops, but you have no legal right to defend yourself, they get to arrest you on the fake charge of attacking them, and they'll get a conviction even if there are witnesses that swear you were entirely passive and complied with the plain-clothes, unannounced police.

If that isn't enough, they can always drop small amounts of party drugs where ever they searched just so they can "find" it and arrest you for it "possession" of it. Hey, when they confiscate stuff in drug busts, you don't think they destroy that stuff, do you? What better use for it than to create lots more criminals to keep them in business, justify their existence, and reinforce their absolute authority?

Finding people who have broken laws takes a lot of time, and effort. Why bother working so hard when it is so much easier to criminalize any powerless nobodies that happen to be nearby? If they do it often enough, prison corporations might even reward their department with some gifts and perks as a way of saying "thank you for the business."

So, have you ever heard of any city or town doing anything to clean up corruption and purging the the leadership, and the training and supervising staff responsible for the culture that allows this kind of stuff to happen? Have you ever heard of an internal affairs office that wasn't mostly there for whitewashing and finding one person to blame? Have you ever heard of a civilian review board that was able to recommend real consequences and realistically see them ever happen?

No, neither have I. Organizations with power have far too much incentive to cover up their faults and protect themselves from outside influence, and police departments are institutionalized power and authority. It is in their nature to protect themselves from outside influence and oversight.

But that leaves us here, with police protecting corrupt cops far more than they protect us.