And now another episode of racism from the people hired to protect and serve us. Today’s episode comes from a police officer in Baton Rouge Louisiana.
Michael Elsbury, who has been with the department for about 15 years, still faces a criminal investigation even though he resigned, said Cpl. Don Coppola, a Baton Rouge Police spokesman.
The allegations surfaced Wednesday when NAACP state President Ernest Johnson said he was shown a series of text messages with racial slurs that purportedly had been sent by Elsbury to a friend outside of the Police Department.
The texts were given to police “by a girl, a friend” of Elsbury’s, Police Chief Carl Dabadie said Thursday night.
Part of the string of texts read: “I wish someone would pull a Ferguson on them and take them out. I hate looking at those African monkeys at work … I enjoy arresting those thugs with their saggy pants.”
You’ve always heard that cops and ticket agents have daily or monthly quotas they must meet. That they must generate a certain amount of cash from the people they’re supposedly “serving.” And you may have found this hard to believe. How can police intentionally go after ordinary citizens, sometimes setting up traffic-traps to force people into breaking the law in order to issue them a ticket?
The north Florida town of Waldo has long had a reputation as a speed trap, and it’s no wonder. A small segment of highway that runs through Waldo requires drivers to speed up and slow down six times: 65 mph becomes 55 mph; 55 becomes 45; then goes back to 55; then back down to 45; to 55 again and eventually, 35 mph.
AAA named the tiny town between Jacksonville and Gainesville one of only two “traffic traps” nationwide and even placed an attention-getting billboard outside the limits of the town to warn drivers to slow down before entering.
Now Waldo faces a scandal following allegations that the town victimizes motorists to turn a profit. Two police chiefs have been suspended, the police department has rebelled and the state is investigating possible wrongdoing.
The situation simmered for years until this month, when Police Chief Mike Szabo was suspended Aug. 12, apparently in response to an investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement into suspected improprieties in the way officers write tickets.
The issue then burst into the open two weeks later at a Waldo City Council meeting, when a group of police officers said they had been ordered by Szabo to write at least 12 tickets per 12-hour shift or face repercussions.
The officers also leveled allegations at the Aug. 26 meeting against Cpl. Kenneth Smith, who had been picked to fill in for Szabo. The officers complained that Smith had, among other things, mishandled evidence. The city council then suspended Smith.
Not surprisingly, things are tense at the tiny stucco storefront office that serves as Waldo City Hall. On Friday morning, Mayor Louie Davis and City Manager Kim Worley met in a small cluttered office to discuss the controversy, slamming a door shut with a “no comment” when a reporter walked in seeking information.
At one point in our short history, voting was a right. A right people fought and died for. But thanks to Republicans and their massive voter suppression drives, encouraging people to vote these days is now seen as a crime, a crime that landedTy Turner behind bars on Monday.
The stars of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays movement took the stage on Labor Day at Charlotte’s Marshall Park to condemn the state’s record on voter suppression and racial profiling, and urge the community to organize and turn out at the polls this November. Just a few hundred feet away, police cuffed and arrested local LGBT activist and former State Senate candidate Ty Turner as he was putting voting rights information on parked cars.
“They said they would charge me for distributing literature,” Turner told ThinkProgress when he was released a few hours later. “I asked [the policeman] for the ordinance number [being violated], because they can’t put handcuffs on you if they cannot tell you why they’re detaining you. I said, ‘Show me where it’s illegal to do this.’ But he would not do it. The officer got mad and grabbed me. Then he told me that I was resisting arrest!”
You know, I’m really getting sick and tired of all these posts about police brutality. And I would love for the day when there will be no more posts to publish about police brutality. But until that day comes, I am left with no choice.
There is an element of police brutality in this nation that is sometimes, borderline racism. I am NOT saying that all cops are guilty of this. I know there are some who are honestly trying to protect and serve their communities.
But when a man leaves his job, and goes to pick up his kids from daycare and gets tased and arrested because he sat on a public bench while waiting to get his kids, I think something is inherently wrong with that… here, in America… the home of the “FREE!”
The incident began when the man in the video – who is black – sat on a bench outside his kids’ daycare center. Security guards ask him to leave. The man said he looked around and saw no evidence that the bench was a private bench and he kept sitting.
The police were called and began asking the man for his ID and in Minnesota where this incident, he was not required to show his ID if there were no suspicion that he had done anything wrong.
The man is heard on the video telling the police officer that he was not doing anything wrong, just waiting for his kids to come out from daycare. But of course this incident had to escalate to the point where he was tazed and arrested for sitting on a public bench.
Crooks and Liars posted this video showing one of the police officers working the crowds in Ferguson Missouri, at an apparent “OathKeepers” gathering.
The video is a bit long, but there are bullet points highlighting the juicy parts, where the police officer, Sgt. Major Dan Page, talks about his feelings toward women, gays, black perverts, doing his fair share of killing people, no need for hate-
crime laws, etc., etc., etc.,
1:07: Talks about all men being created equal then went on to say “That does not mean affirmative action”.
1:26: Rants about hate crime laws
3:22: Black (little?) Perverts
5:25: Talks about doing a fair share of killing
15:40: Calls supreme court justice a homosexual sodomite.
18:30 “If I die I go to heaven… I died a long time ago”
20:30: Talks about St. Louis County schools
26:40: Calls President Obama an illegal alien
27:00: We can kill you anyway we want
31:38: Goes on anti-muslim rant
37:00: Talks about being a Saint Louis County Cop
43:00: Talk about killing people again
46:41: Goes on rant over being briefed about the 9/11 attacks on Aug 1st 1999 then says 9/11 happened 30 days later also talks about no weapons of mass destruction being found in Afghanistan.
49:22: Continues rant about having secret clearance at Fort (Leavenworth?) and training with Russian spetsnaz
52:40: Says people involved in domestic violence should “just shoot each other and get it over with”.
53:15: Somebody like me is going to come in and kill you
56:20: I don’t trust nobody and I hate everybody. I hate y’all too I hate everybody. I’m into diversity. I kill everybody.
58:02: Audience member: So what happens when good men like you are retiring from the military. What kind of military do we have left then?
58:15: Sodomites and females. End of statement.
1:01:00: Rants about female green beret
1:03:00 He’s handed an oathkeeper patch.
On the ground in Ferguson Missouri, CNN’s Jake Tapper became irate! Not at the protesters, who, for the most part were peacefully following the new set of protesting rules set on them by the Ferguson Police Department. No Tappa was upset with the Ferguson Police and the obvious response their actions had on these peaceful protesters.
“I want to show you this, okay? To give you an idea of what’s going on. The protesters have moved all the way down there… they’re all the way down there. Nobody is threatening anything. Nobody is doing anything. None of the stores here that I can see are being looted. There is no violence.
Now I want you to look at what is going on in Ferguson, Missouri, in downtown America, okay? These are armed police, with — not machine guns — semi-automatic rifles, with batons, with shields, many of them dressed for combat. Now why they’re doing this? I don’t know. Because there is no threat going on here. None that merits this. There is none, okay? Absolutely there have been looters, absolutely over the last nine days there’s been violence, but there is nothing going on on this street right now that merits this scene out of Bagram. Nothing.
So if people wonder why the people of Ferguson, Missouri are so upset, this is part of the reason. What is this? This doesn’t make any sense.”
Ferguson police continue to protect the identity of the killer of Michael Brown while releasing the preliminary autopsy report, and the report showed that Michael Brown, the black teenager killed by police because he walked in the street, was shot multiple times… multiple times!
There are no indication of how many bullets the police fired into Brown’s body, no indication of where the bullets hit – eyewitness claims that Brown was shot in the back as he ran away from the police. That’s basically all the information the police is allowing out at this time.
But like mentioned above, Ferguson police is doing all they can to protect the shooter’s identity. No one apparently need to know anything about this killer.
Welcome to the New York, where the police officers are called “the finest in the world,” but they still resort to the tried and proven primitive method of choking people inorder to restrain them.
After a Staten Island man named Eric Gardner, lost his life to an illegal cholehold administered by a police officer, other examples of this police-favored submission hold, have been highlighted on the Internet.
In this example, a woman in Brooklyn, seven months pregnant, got up close and personal with her very own chokehold. Her crime? Having a barbecue on the sidewalk in front of her house.
Photos released Monday by an East New York advocacy group show Rosan Miller, 27, struggling with a cop who appears to have his arm around her neck.
A 400-pound asthmatic Staten Island dad died Thursday after a cop put him in a chokehold and other officers appeared to slam his head against the sidewalk, video of the incident shows.
“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” Eric Garner, 43, repeatedly screamed after at least five NYPD officers took him down in front of a Tompkinsville beauty supply store when he balked at being handcuffed.
Within moments Garner, a married father of six children with two grandchildren, stopped struggling and appeared to be unconscious as police called paramedics to the scene. An angry crowd gathered, some recording with smartphones.
“When I kissed my husband this morning, I never thought it would be for the last time,” Garner’s wife, Esaw, told the Daily News.
She got no details from police until after she had gone to the hospital to identify his body, she said.
Officials confirmed that NYPD Internal Affairs officers launched an investigation Thursday night.
Records show Garner was due in court in October on three Staten Island cases, including charges of pot possession and possession or selling untaxed cigarettes.
Esaw Garner said her husband was unable to work because he suffered from a host of ailments, including chronic asthma, diabetes and sleep apnea.
The Staten Island resident was sitting in front of Bay Beauty on Bay St. and Victory Blvd. just before 5 p.m. when two plainclothes cops began questioning him about selling untaxed cigarettes, a video obtained by the Daily News shows.
“I didn’t do s—!” the 6-foot-4 Garner, wearing a sweaty T-shirt and khaki shorts, told the officers from the 120th Precinct when they approached him. “I was just minding my own business.
“Every time you see me you want to mess with me. I’m tired of it. It stops today!” he yelled.
Ramsey Orta, 22, who shot the video, tried to intervene, telling the cops his friend had just broken up a fight between three men and had not been selling cigarettes.
But when backup uniformed officers arrived, the cops moved in to cuff Garner, the video shows.
“Don’t touch me, please,” he said.
When Garner refused orders to put his hands behind his back, one of the plainclothes cops, wearing a green T-shirt with a yellow No. 99 on the back, got behind him and put him in a chokehold, the footage shows.
A struggle ensued as three uniformed officers joined in on the arrest, knocking the man to the ground.
He screamed, “I can’t breathe!” six times before he went silent and paramedics were called.
“They jumped him and they were choking him. He was foaming at the mouth,” Orta told The News. “And that’s it, he was done. The cops were saying, ‘No, he’s OK, he’s OK.” He wasn’t OK.”
“They were choking him. He kept saying, ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe! Get off of me, get off of me!’ and I didn’t hear any more talking after that,” said witness Valencia Griffin, 50, of Staten Island. “He died right there.”
Somehow, although his statement is reprehensible, I expected him to say something worse about the police than a comparison to Nazis. After all, he is a Republican and today’s Republicans pride themselves on saying and doing the most outlandish things.
Gary Kiehne, a hotel owner, complained in a Thursday interview with the Republic about police evacuation checkpoints set up during the devastating Wallow Fire in 2011.
Referring to Nazi SS agents and paramilitary officers, Kiehne said the police were willing to “shoot you and me,” according to the Republic.
Kiehne has apologized for his statement about mass shooters, but his campaign denied the Nazi comparisons he made.
Campaign spokesman Chris Baker said that Kiehne “expressing disappointment about the way the police had acted during the Wallow Fire.”
According to Baker, Kiehne “always wondered how German soldiers in (World War II) could turn on their own people with martial law, but after seeing martial law implemented during the Wallow Fire, he understood how it could happen.”
The Arizona Fraternal Order of Police has called on the candidate to drop out of the race, but Baker refused to comment on the group’s statement.
This is a sad and unfortunate story, and it is fully representative of the road we are traveling as a society
It was supposed to be a family night out at the movies. A father, a mother and their 19-year-old daughter.
There was an argument between the mother and her daughter that caused the mother to hit her daughter. Someone witnessed the confrontation and called the cops and that’s where all hell broke loose.
The police arrived and went straight to the family. The singled out the father asking him for his identification. What happened next is sketchy, but the police ended up pepper-spraying the husband. At this point the mother started recording the encounter on her cellphone.
We see the man lying on his stomach handcuffed with police officers kneeling on his back. We hear the mother calling out to her husband multiple times asking if he’s okay.
No response.
The man stayed on the ground, still on his stomach, still handcuffed, still surrounded by cops, his wife now frantically calling out his name asking anyone, everyone, if her husband is okay.
No response.
The recording ended when it finally dawned on the mother and the daughter that something terrible had happened. Her husband, her father was dead. Pepper sprayed, faced down on the ground, handcuffed, with multiple officers subduing him.
He was dead.
This nation is quickly becoming a police state. The shoot first ask questions never mentality abounds, and innocent people are dying in the process.
Three officers were suspended with pay for the killing of this innocent man. A daughter is left fatherless and a wife is left with a video that she filmed, showing the killing of her husband.
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