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  1. #1
    Lab Animal Capt Bringdown's Avatar
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    Excerpted from "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces" -- more -->

    Sal Culosi is dead because he bet on a football game — but it wasn’t a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit.

    Several months earlier at a local bar, Fairfax County, Virginia, detective David Bau overheard the thirty-eight-year-old optometrist and some friends wagering on a college football game. “To Sal, betting a few bills on the Redskins was a stress reliever, done among friends,” a friend of Culosi’s told me shortly after his death. “None of us single, successful professionals ever thought that betting fifty bucks or so on the Virginia–Virginia Tech football game was a crime worthy of investigation.” Bau apparently did. After overhearing the men wagering, Bau befriended Culosi as a cover to begin investigating him. During the next several months, he talked Culosi into raising the stakes of what Culosi thought were just more fun wagers between friends to make watching sports more interesting. Eventually Culosi and Bau bet more than $2,000 in a single day. Under Virginia law, that was enough for police to charge Culosi with running a gambling operation. And that’s when they brought in the SWAT team.

    On the night of January 24, 2006, Bau called Culosi and arranged a time to drop by to collect his winnings. When Culosi, barefoot and clad in a T-shirt and jeans, stepped out of his house to meet the man he thought was a friend, the SWAT team began to move in. Seconds later, Det. Deval Bullock, who had been on duty since 4:00 AM and hadn’t slept in seventeen hours, fired a bullet that pierced Culosi’s heart.

    Sal Culosi’s last words were to Bau , the cop he thought was a friend: “Dude, what are you doing?” -- more -->>

  2. #2
    Lab Animal Capt Bringdown's Avatar
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  3. #3
    Damns (Given): 0 Blake's Avatar
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    Old news.

    The police department admitted they screwed up, the officer was suspended for three weeks and the Culosi family settled for $2 million.

  4. #4
    Lab Animal Capt Bringdown's Avatar
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    Old news.

    The police department admitted they screwed up, the officer was suspended for three weeks and the Culosi family settled for $2 million.
    The incident is a detail supporting a larger book-length point/argument regarding the growth of the surveillance/punishment state - which is hardly "old news."

  5. #5
    Cogito Ergo Sum LnGrrrR's Avatar
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    Old news.

    The police department admitted they screwed up, the officer was suspended for three weeks and the Culosi family settled for $2 million.
    Oh sweet, so I guess everything is hunky dory. The whole "police finding some lowtime crook/troublemaker, giving him tools to become a bigtime guy, then busting him for it" scheme is so re ed that they should just fire everyone involved in one of these things.

  6. #6
    5 Bill_Brasky's Avatar
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    Oh sweet, so I guess everything is hunky dory. The whole "police finding some lowtime crook/troublemaker, giving him tools to become a bigtime guy, then busting him for it" scheme is so re ed that they should just fire everyone involved in one of these things.
    That's actually textbook entrapment, and I've heard of a couple of examples.

    On the Valentine's Day edition of "This American Life", they did a "what i did for love" topic. One of the stories was of a female undercover officer going into a high school and befriending this dude. The dude was into her. She kept bugging the dude about where to find weed but he didn't smoke. So one day he finds out where to get some and buys it and gives it to her. She refuses to accept it and insists that she pay for it, so he just tells her to give hin ten bucks or something stupid(nowhere near what he bought it for) and the arrests him.

    Is this what we're paying the police to do? Seriously?

  7. #7
    Cogito Ergo Sum LnGrrrR's Avatar
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    Exactly Brasky. that .

  8. #8
    Damns (Given): 0 Blake's Avatar
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    Oh sweet, so I guess everything is hunky dory.
    I think it's dishonest for OP to leave out that the incident went unpunished.

    I will say that the punishment is not nearly enough.

  9. #9
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    The evangelical Christians of Greenville County, South Carolina, are afraid.

    There has been talk of informants and undercover agents luring young, conservative evangelicals across the South into sham terrorist plots. The feds and the area’s police want to eliminate a particularly extreme strain of evangelical Christianity opposed to abortion, sexuality, and secularism, whose adherents sometimes use violent imagery and speech. They fear such extreme talk could convince lone wolves or small groups of Christian extremists to target abortion clinics, gay bars, or shopping malls for attack. As a result, law enforcement has flooded these communities with informants meant to provide an early warning system for any signs of such “radicalization.”

    Converts, so important to the evangelical movement, are now looked upon with su ion -- the more fervent, the more su ious. In local barbecue joints, diners, and watering holes, the proprietors are careful not to let FOX News linger onscreen too long, fearing political discussions that could be misconstrued. After all, you can never be too sure who’s listening.


    Come Sunday, the ministers who once railed against abortion, gay marriage, and Hollywood as sure signs that the U.S. is descending into godlessness will mute their messages. They will peer out at their congregations and fear that some faces aren’t interested in the Gospel, or maybe are a little too interested in every word. The once vibrant political clubs at Bob Jones University have become lifeless as students whisper about informants and fear a few misplaced words could leave them in a government database or worse.

    http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/1757...65d7-308834529



  10. #10
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    Shocker: Only 1% of So Called Terrorists Nabbed by the FBI Were Real

    Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism, dug into these supposedly das ly plots and found that they are much less than meets the eye.

    Trevor Aaronson: I’d say that the majority of the foiled attacks that they cite are really only foiled attacks because the FBI made the attack possible, and most of the people who are caught in these so-called foiled attacks are caught through sting operations that use either an undercover FBI agent or informant posing as some sort of Al-Qaeda operative.

    In all of these cases, the defendants, or the would-be terrorists, are people who at best have a vague idea that they want to commit some sort of violent act or some sort of act of terrorism but have no means on their own. They don’t have weapons. They don’t have connections with any international terrorist groups.


    In many cases they’re mentally ill or they’re economically desperate. An undercover informant or agent posing as an Al-Qaeda operative gives them everything they need… gives them the transportation, gives them the money if they need it, and then gives them the bomb and even the idea for the terrorist attack. And then when that person pushes a button to detonate the bomb that they believe will explode—a bomb that was provided to them in whole by the FBI—agents rush in, arrest them and charge them with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction and then parade that person out to the public saying, "Look at us. We caught a terrorist. This is us keeping you safe."


    If you look at the record of prosecutions in the decade after 911, there has yet to be a case of some Al-Qaeda operative providing the means for a wannabe terrorist to do an act of terrorism. It’s only the FBI that’s providing the means through these sting operations. What this has done is really inflate the threat of terrorism within the United States—particularly from Muslim terrorists—because in almost all of these cases sting operations target men on the fringes of Muslim communities who might be mentally ill, economically desperate or otherwise very easily manipulated by an informant who can make a lot of money in these sting operations.

    http://www.alternet.org/civil-libert...t=3&paging=off

    And yet, the FBI, even with a tip from Russia, missed the Boston Marathon bombers.




  11. #11
    Cogito Ergo Sum LnGrrrR's Avatar
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    I think it's dishonest for OP to leave out that the incident went unpunished.

    I will say that the punishment is not nearly enough.
    fair enough.

  12. #12
    Board Man Comes Home Clipper Nation's Avatar
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    Old news.

    The police department admitted they screwed up, the officer was suspended for three weeks and the Culosi family settled for $2 million.
    Only a three-week suspension? I'd have fired everyone involved in the investigation, that's just a slap on the wrist....

  13. #13
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
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  14. #14
    Veteran cantthinkofanything's Avatar
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  16. #16
    Got Woke? DMC's Avatar
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    bad boys bad boys

  17. #17
    I am that guy RandomGuy's Avatar
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    (militarization of the police is a bad thing, and we should be worried about it)
    This is something I agree with.

    Police forces everywhere are creeping towards militarism, and that should be worrying for anyone, left or right. (well, except for Extrastout/homeland, who welcomes any coming police state to my understanding)

    It isn't some purposeful, guided trend, as I'm sure the Inforwars crowd wants to believe, but a simple cultural shift that happens all the time.

    Only this particular shift is having the effect of taking our police from a "we are here to help" mentality to an "us versus them" mentality. Given their role in any country, that should not be something we should accept.

  18. #18
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  19. #19
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    Police Kill Unarmed Former Football Player Seeking Help After a Car Crash





    Officer Randall Kerrick, 27, of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) in North Carolina is facing charges of voluntary manslaughter after fatally shooting Jonathan Ferrell, 24, a former Florida A&M football player who had apparently been seeking help after surviving a major car crash early Saturday morning.

    CMPD officials called the shooting “excessive.” “Our investigation has shown that Officer Kerrick did not have a lawful right to discharge his weapon during this encounter,” said CMPD Chief Rodney Monroe in a statement. “It’s with heavy hearts and significant regrets it’s come to this… Our hearts go out to the Ferrell family and many members of the CMPD family. This is never something easy.”

    The Charlotte Observer reports that the car crash was so severe that Ferrell likely had to “pull himself out” of the wreckage. He then walked to the nearest house, about a half mile away, to seek assistance. But the local resident whose home Ferrell arrived at was frightened that he was attempting to burglarize her after not recognizing him.


    The resident then made a 911 call and three officers arrived at the scene. According to police accounts, Ferrell, who is African-American, acted “aggressively” and charged towards the officers. Officer Thornell Little of the Hickory Grove division of the CMPD responded with an unsuccessful attempt to fire his Taser at Ferrell. Police say that when Ferrell continued to charge toward the police, 27-year-old officer Randall Kerrick discharged his weapon several times, eventually killing Ferrell.

    http://www.alternet.org/police-kill-...tter897196&t=9



  20. #20
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    As in most police states, cops serve as judge and jury on city streets—“a long step down the totalitarian path,” in the words that U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote in 1968 when he decried expanding police powers. And police departments are bolstered by an internal surveillance and security apparatus that has eradicated privacy and dwarfed the intrusion into personal lives by police states of the past, including East Germany.


    Under a series of Supreme Court rulings we have lost the rights to protect ourselves from random searches, home invasions, warrantless wiretapping and eavesdropping and physical abuse.

    Police units in poor neighborhoods function as armed gangs. The pressure to meet departmental arrest quotas—the prerequisite for lavish federal aid in the “war on drugs”—results in police routinely seizing people at will and charging them with a laundry list of crimes, often without just cause. Because many of these crimes carry long mandatory sentences it is easy to intimidate defendants into “pleading out” on lesser offenses. The police and the defendants know that the collapsed court system, in which the poor get only a few minutes with a public attorney, means there is little chance the abused can challenge the system. And there is also a large pool of willing informants who, to reduce their own sentences, will tell a court anything demanded of them by the police.


    The tyranny of law enforcement in poor communities is a window into our emerging police state.

    These thuggish tactics are now being used against activists and dissidents. And as the nation unravels, as social unrest spreads, the naked face of police repression will become commonplace. Totalitarian systems always seek license to engage in this kind of behavior by first targeting a demonized minority. Such systems demand that the police, to combat the “lawlessness” of the demonized minority, be, in essence, emancipated from the constraints of the law. The unrestricted and arbitrary subjugation of one despised group, stripped of equality before the law, conditions the police to employ these tactics against the wider society. “Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” “The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.”

    ...

    http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/...e_20130916/?ln





  21. #21
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    The incident began January 2, 2013 after David Eckert finished shopping at the Wal-Mart in Deming. According to a federal lawsuit, Eckert didn't make a complete stop at a stop sign coming out of the parking lot and was immediately stopped by law enforcement. Eckert's attorney, Shannon Kennedy, said in an interview with KOB that after law enforcement asked him to step out of the vehicle, he appeared to be clenching his buttocks. Law enforcement thought that was probable cause to suspect that Eckert was hiding narcotics in his anal cavity. While officers detained Eckert, they secured a search warrant from a judge that allowed for an anal cavity search.

    Here's what happened to David Eckert at that hospital:

    While there, Eckert was subjected to repeated and humiliating forced medical procedures. A review of Eckert's medical records, which he released to KOB, and details in the lawsuit show the following happened:

    1. Eckert's abdominal area was x-rayed; no narcotics were found.


    2. Doctors then performed an exam of Eckert's anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.


    3. Doctors performed a second exam of Eckert's anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.


    4. Doctors penetrated Eckert's anus to insert an enema. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.


    5. Doctors penetrated Eckert's anus to insert an enema a second time. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.


    6. Doctors penetrated Eckert's anus to insert an enema a third time. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.


    7. Doctors then x-rayed Eckert again; no narcotics were found.


    8. Doctors prepared Eckert for surgery, sedated him, and then performed a colonoscopy where a scope with a camera was inserted into Eckert's anus, rectum, colon, and large intestines. No narcotics were found.


    Throughout this ordeal, Eckert protested and never gave doctors at the Gila Regional Medical Center consent to perform any of these medical procedures.


    Think that's outrageous?

    David Eckert has since been billed by the hospital for all the procedures and they are threatening to take him to collections.


    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/1...a?detail=email

  22. #22
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    How the Houston Cop Who Killed an Unarmed, Disabled Man Was Found Innocent

    On October 24, the Houston Police Department announced the results of its yearlong investigation into the shooting death of Brian Claunch, a mentally ill double amputee killed by an officer last September after refusing to drop a pen. HPD cleared the officer, Matthew Marin, of any wrongdoing.

    That may not come as a surprise, since HPD hasn’t found a single police shooting unjustified in at least six years. Between 2007 and 2012, HPD officers fatally shot 109 people and injured another 111. All those shootings were found justified. (For the full story on HPD shootings and beatings, read the Observer investigation here.)

    But some expected this case to be different. Claunch was wheelchair-bound and had one arm and one leg. He was definitely aggressive—officers were on the scene because Claunch was agitated, shouting threats and demanding soda and cigarettes—but he was also obviously disabled. HPD reports that Claunch backed an able-bodied officer into a corner and slashed at her with a shiny object, prompting her partner, MatthewMarin, to shoot him. But it’s difficult to visualize Claunch simultaneously moving effectively and posing a serious threat with one arm, even if he had been holding something more deadly than a ballpoint pen. Claunch was also known to be mentally ill; he lived at a small group home for men with mental illness. For all these reasons, some observers expected this shooting to be considered unacceptable.


    http://www.texasobserver.org/hpd-cle...ailynewsletter



  23. #23
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    How the Houston Cop Who Killed an Unarmed, Disabled Man Was Found Innocent

    On October 24, the Houston Police Department announced the results of its yearlong investigation into the shooting death of Brian Claunch, a mentally ill double amputee killed by an officer last September after refusing to drop a pen. HPD cleared the officer, Matthew Marin, of any wrongdoing.

    That may not come as a surprise, since HPD hasn’t found a single police shooting unjustified in at least six years. Between 2007 and 2012, HPD officers fatally shot 109 people and injured another 111. All those shootings were found justified. (For the full story on HPD shootings and beatings, read the Observer investigation here.)

    But some expected this case to be different. Claunch was wheelchair-bound and had one arm and one leg. He was definitely aggressive—officers were on the scene because Claunch was agitated, shouting threats and demanding soda and cigarettes—but he was also obviously disabled. HPD reports that Claunch backed an able-bodied officer into a corner and slashed at her with a shiny object, prompting her partner, MatthewMarin, to shoot him. But it’s difficult to visualize Claunch simultaneously moving effectively and posing a serious threat with one arm, even if he had been holding something more deadly than a ballpoint pen. Claunch was also known to be mentally ill; he lived at a small group home for men with mental illness. For all these reasons, some observers expected this shooting to be considered unacceptable.


    http://www.texasobserver.org/hpd-cle...ailynewsletter


    And this comes as a shock?
    After all, we are talking "Houston".

  24. #24
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    didn't turn off his truck, police shoot him 6 times

    Iowa police kill son whose father only wanted to ‘teach him a lesson’

    Police chased Tyler Comstock onto the Iowa State University campus and set up a blockade that resulted in Comstock ramming Officer McPherson’s vehicle. McPherson ordered Comstock to shut off his truck, and when he refused to comply, McPherson shot at him six times

    http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/11/0...-him-a-lesson/



  25. #25
    Veteran Wild Cobra's Avatar
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    This is also old news, 3 years old:



    When they examined the scene, this wood carver has his 3" carving knife folded up and in his pocket.

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