According to the Free Thought Project, the 15-year-old girl was a runaway who the police officer was attempting to apprehend.
As a witness filmed, the officer walked up to the girl and punched her, knocking her down. She then put the girl in a chokehold — even after the teen’s mother begged her and a second officer to stop, saying that the girl is asthmatic and has emotional issues.
“She just punched her in the face!” said the woman holding the camera.
As her legs kicked and flailed, the girl told the officers she couldn’t breathe, screaming, “Stop!” over and over, but they continued to pin her against the pavement.
The second officer said that everything his comrade did was according to police procedure and that if she’d wanted to the officer “could have shot her dead.”
And from the top. . . if doing things by the book would allow you to shoot an unarmed teenaged runaway, maybe you need a different book.
Missouri was one of the first states to allow private probation companies, in the late nineteen-eighties, and it has since followed the national trend of allowing court fees and fines to mount rapidly. Now, across much of America, what starts as a simple speeding ticket can, if you’re too poor to pay, mushroom into an insurmountable debt, padded by probation fees and, if you don’t appear in court, by warrant fees. (Often, poverty means transience—not everyone who is sent a court summons receives it.) “Across the country, impoverished people are routinely jailed for court costs they’re unable to pay,” Alec Karakatsanis, a cofounder of Equal Justice Under Law, a nonprofit civil-rights organization that has begun challenging this practice in municipal courts, said. These kinds of fines snowball when defendants’ cases are turned over to for-profit probation companies for collection, since the companies charge their own “supervision” fees. What happens when people fall behind on their payments? Often, police show up at their doorsteps and take them to jail.
From there, the snowball rolls. “Going to jail has huge impacts on people at the edge of poverty,” Sara Zampieren, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, told me. “They lose their job, they lose custody of their kids, they get behind on their home-foreclosure payments,” the sum total of which, she said, is “devastating.” While in prison, “user fees” often accumulate, so that, even after you leave, you’re not quite free. A recent state-by-state survey conducted by NPR showed that in at least forty-three states defendants can be billed for their own public defender, a service to which they have a Constitutional right; in at least forty-one states, inmates can be charged for room and board in jail and prison.
America’s militarized police forces now have some highly visible tools at their disposal, some of which have been in the spotlight this week: machine guns, night-vision equipment, military-style vehicles, and a seemingly endless amount of ammo. But the economic arm of police militarization is often far less visible, and offender-funded justice is part of this sub-arsenal.
Then again, if citizens are unwilling to pay for a truly public force, the police may be de facto privatized, relying on whatever funds they can rustle up through fines and fees. Sara Kliff at Vox notes that
In Ferguson, court fees and fines are the second largest source of funds for the city; $2.6 million was collected in 2013 alone. That’s become a key source of tension. There is a perception in the area, [advocate Thomas] Harvey says, that the black population is targeted to pay those fines. Eighty-six percent of the traffic stops, for example, happen to black residents — even though the city is 67 percent black.
Harvey, director of ArchCity, reported that “I can’t tell you what’s going on in the mind of a police officer but, in the mind of my clients, they’re being pulled over because they’re black. . . . They’re being pulled over so the city can generate revenue.”
In a brief Q&A with Kliff Harvey said
The most charitable reading is that the courts don’t know the impact they’re having on peoples’ lives. For people like me this system works. If I got a traffic ticket I would pay $100 to a lawyer to represent me. I would get my speeding ticket turned into an excessive vehicle noise charge, pay a fine, the lawyer would get paid and the municipality too. It’s the easiest transaction. But if you’re poor, that system hurts you in ways they don’t seem to have considered.
And if you look at Ferguson and Florissant, between those two municipalities they expect to net $4 million from these fines annually. That’s no small amount for towns of 25,000 and 50,000. It’s become a line in the budget and they’re relying on it. That’s the real crux of things. The courts are supposed to be the place where you administer justice, not rely on for revenue. That sense has been lost at some level in the community. [emph added]
And the peoples’ representatives don’t help when they praise prisons as job creators.
Yes, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin tweeted that a prison “would be an important piece in the economic future of northern IL”.
I should note that the second tweet, about a 500% increase in fed prison pop is juxtaposed as if it were a kind a praise, but in digging back thru the Senator’s Twitter feed to March 31, the multiple tweets on the topic make it clear that he considers this a problem and touts the Smarter Sentencing Act as a solution.
Well, great, Senator. But who’s going to fill that northern Illinois prison if that act passes?
It should be a shanda on our people—on Americans—every time we build a prison, a failure of our politics to create a society in which people may live as human beings.
Yes, we need the police and we need prisons because there are those among us who seek to dominate and harm us. But what we have already should be enough, should be more than enough.
So many others have so much more, and better, to say. I’ll note simply the insanity of militarizing the police in order to protect the police.
As if, in a polity, the police aren’t there to protect the citizens. As if we were a police state, where the point of the police is to protect the police. As if. . . .
And yes, I’ve mentioned this before: If someone in your group promotes any kind of violence, you should ask, loudly and publicly, Are you a cop?
Even if the person is just an idiot (as opposed to agent provocateur), by calling him or her out you highlight how the police/feds have attempted to short-circuit activist movements by pushing them toward violence, and illegitimacy.
Police forces-have a long and dishonorable history of infiltration of and provocation among organized protest groups—never mind the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and assembly. Those tasked to “protect and serve” forget that protesters, too, deserve protection and service.
Anyway, given that long history of surveillance and disruption, the best course for any protest organization is to be open and public as possible: hide nothing, publicize everything.
There may be bits that it makes sense to keep under wraps for tactical reasons—the location of a pop-up protest, for example, might be texted to members at the last minute—and those involved in present-day sanctuary movements of whatever sort have good reason for discretion, but on the whole, if the purpose is to raise public consciousness, change public opinion, or call for new/different laws, then the best bet is to embrace one’s status as a public entity and throw everything into the open.
Will this prevent police surveillance? Almost certainly not. But it will both eliminate the need to waste any time worrying about who among the crowd might be a cop and inoculate the group against claims of criminality.
(Of course, there are protesters who embrace criminality as the best/only way to undermine/overthrow the whole shebang, so, yeah, secrecy might be the best bet for them. It will also, in combination with the criminality which requires it, curb their effectiveness in under-/over- mining/throwing.)
This, for example, is the wrong attitude to take:
[United Students Against Sweatshop protester] Shishido Strain says his run-ins with Rizzi have already made him wary of strangers who want to get involved in fights for workers’ rights.
“I have personally become much more cautious with people who express support for us at actions and others who express an interest in joining our actions, if I do not know them already,” he says.
I get why Strain is concerned, but if your group has any sway whatsoever, it’d be so much easier simply to assume cops are present, and move on. Don’t let ’em distract you, don’t let ’em limit your efforts to reach out.
Open subversion: it’s the better way.
~~~
None of this is to say that cops shouldn’t be sued each and every time they infringe upon the Constitutional rights of protesters. You can be open without being a sap.
That he might, in fact, die from the resultant injuries?
But AbsurdBeats, you say, the old man was WIELDING A CANE and a SHOEHORN (?!) and a FOOT-LONG BUTCHER’S KNIFE? How else are trained professionals supposed to act in the face of a obstreperous 95-year-old-man who was refusing medical treatment and threatening—I say threatening!—them with a FOOT-LONG BUTCHER’S KNIFE?
I mean, it’s not like those highly trained protectors of the peace had any other options in the face of such imminent and overwhelming danger.
After all, a concerned neighbor had called the police, so, really, can you blame them for not waiting for him actually to turn around before emptying their pistols in his general direction?
Safety first, after all.
*No, the real question is: Should we feel better or worse that the police shot at him seven times and only managed to him once, maybe twice, in the leg?
~~~
I don’t know how Radley Balko tracks this shit without going insane.
Twenty five years ago today I was vacationing in lovely Chez Bedlam, watching Wimbledon, enjoying the respite from the Madison heat.
Well, okay, it might be a stretch to call a just-barely-voluntary (as in: do it or else) stint in a locked psychiatric ward a “vacation”, but I did watch Wimbledon and the ward climate, like everything else, was controlled.
I’d first ended up in B6/5, as the unit was known, in June, and not voluntarily. I still have my “patient’s subject’s right” sheet for those detained against their wishes:
I was first interviewed by the some/all of the staff (what fun!) the day after the cops deposited me in the ER. I don’t remember much about the interview—and, really, even in calling up the event I’m almost certainly altering it—but I do recall someone asking me (after I must have mentioned I’d been accepted to grad school in political science) if I thought I’d be or wanted to be president.
I’d snorted and said “No”. My therapist was the only one who laughed.
Everyone else was dead serious. I wonder if they were trying to figure out whether my distorted thoughts had extended all the way into delusion.
I did get the hearing, was represented by a competent attorney, and ended up staying, mmm, a week, maybe?
A coupla’ weeks later I was back, not in cuffs this time, but under the impression that had I not returned voluntarily the cops would know where to find me.
My rights as a voluntary admit were a bit more expansive:
Friends did visit, bringing food and quite possibly a beer, and over the course of my two stays I made friends with J. who, unlike me, was not at all conflicted about wanting to get better. She wanted to be healthy more than anything, but it seemed like every time she managed to get a grip on the ledge, something would come smashing down on her fingers.
We stayed in touch for a few years afterward, but eventually fell away from one another. I have no idea if she’s still alive.
Anyway, no great scandal on the ward. ECT was suggested, but the suggestion was dropped at my vehement opposition. I was given an experimental drug, fluoxetine (brand: Prozac), but it made my legs shake and not much else, so that ended. I spent a few nights in the open containment rooms, got a few day passes, had a few good conversations with some of the nurses, and then I left.
And about a month or so after I left I was in Minneapolis, starting grad school.
AbsurdBeats 