L.A. SHERIFF IS GANG INFESTED CLUB OF NEO-NAZI LYING MURDEROUS THUGS!
The tattoo of a Los Angeles police “Executioner”
Los Angeles sheriff terrorizes residents and attacks critics following shooting of two deputies
21 September 2020
No arrest has been announced more than a week after a surveillance video captured a gunman shooting two Los Angeles Sheriff Department (LAPD) transit deputies sitting in their SUV outside the Compton Metro light rail station. There is no evidence of any motive for the attack.
The reward, which was initially $100,000, has grown to over $675,000. According to press reports, over a dozen LASD homicide detectives are assigned to the investigation. There are anecdotal reports from Compton and nearby communities of deputies using warrants and the presence of probationers to ransack homes scouring for leads and terrorizing residents, but so far without results.
The wounded deputies are recovering. One, a 24-year-old male, was released from the hospital Wednesday. The other, a 31-year-old female, remains hospitalized, but her wounds are not life threatening.
Speaking to the press in the hospital parking lot three hours after the shooting on September 12, Sheriff Alex Villanueva had described both deputies as “clinging to life” before his provocative, evidence-free statements that blamed the shooting on recent demonstrations protesting police violence.
Immediately after Villanueva’s press conference, deputies attacked Josie Huang, a reporter for the local National Public Radio station KPCC who was covering the events at the hospital. Video of the arrest by a television news crew immediately exposed an LASD tweet that Huang obstructed deputies, failed to identify herself as a reporter and did not have press credentials to be demonstrably false.
The demonstrations began with the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, but have been boosted locally by the LASD killings of Andres Guardado, an 18-year-old security guard, and Dijon Kizzee, who was shot 19 times after being detained for riding his bicycle on the wrong side of the street.
Despite his department having been exposed
as brazen liars, Villanueva continued attacking
Huang. Villanueva told the Associated Press
last Monday that Huang “crossed the line from
journalism to activism.”
“All I can say is, in the heat of the moment when these protesters are calling or chanting for the death of the deputies in the emergency room, she picked the worst time possible to try to get an up-close of the deputies making an arrest,” Villanueva said. “That’s on her.”
At the same time the LASD was caught in more lies about the events leading up to Huang’s arrest. Kevin Wharton Price, a local activist, acknowledged that he and three other members of his “Africa Town Coalition,” carrying Pan-Africa flags, were responsible for the obnoxious but tiny and non-violent demonstration outside the hospital. Price, who denies any affiliation with Black Lives Matter, Antifa, or any of the other whipping boys of the right wing, claimed his group wanted to focus attention on the presence of violent deputy gangs in the LASD, including “The Executioners” at the Compton station.
Despite a plethora of video cameras, the LASD has produced no video evidence to back up their claims that Price and his three companions ever tried to block a hospital entrance or force their way into the emergency room.
Villanueva during a radio interview taunted LeBron James, the Los Angeles Lakers basketball superstar who, like many professional athletes both black and white, has supported demonstrations against police violence. Singling out James, who has made no public comment about the shootings, Villanueva said he should “step up to the plate and double” what was then $175,000 in reward money “because I know you care about law enforcement.”
“I’ll be very curious to see what his response is, if any, and we just, we’ve got to get people to start thinking big picture,” Villanueva said. Once again pointing blame at his critics, Villanueva added, “Words have consequences. We need to tone down the rhetoric.”
Villanueva’s appeal to James was slammed by Vanessa Bryant, the widow of former Lakers star Kobe Bryant, who died tragically last January in a helicopter accident with their daughter and seven others. She shared an Instagram message reading, “How can [Villanueva] talk about trusting the system? His sheriff’s dept. couldn’t be trusted to secure Kobe Bryant’s helicopter crash scene, his deputies took and shared graphic photos of crash victims.”
In a stomach-churning display of the racism that thrives within the LASD and other major US law enforcement agencies, Juanita Navarro-Suarez, an LASD public information officer, tweeted a photograph of a black man fanning currency in front of two others with the caption “And here’s the neighborhood homies and enemies ‘bout to come up’ on that $100,000 #REWARD because $100,000 dollas is $100,000 dollas.”
Another Navarro-Suarez tweet, this one over an image of a black woman saying “Make that money, girl,” reads, “My advice to all the ex-girlfriends, side pieces, friends, wifey, ol’ lady, dime, queen, baby momma who know the #ComptonAmbush shooter of 2 LA Sheriff’s about getting that $100,000 #REWARD.”
While the LASD has dedicated extraordinary resources to identifying the Compton shooter, investigations of most murders in Compton and the surrounding working-class communities are investigated with little zeal. During 2019, there were 21 criminal homicides reported to the Compton Sheriff’s Station. Only seven arrests were made.
The tattoo of a Los Angeles police “Executioner”
Video footage exposes police shooting of 13-year-old autistic boy in Salt Lake City
23 September 2020
Body camera footage released by the Salt Lake City (Utah) Police Department on Monday has shed more light on the horrific police shooting of 13-year-old Linden Cameron on September 4. Cameron remains in the hospital after somehow surviving being shot nearly a dozen times. He suffered broken bones and serious organ damage when bullets pierced his intestines, bladder, shoulder and ankles.
Cameron, who is white and has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, was shot 11 times as he ran from the police. They had been called to his home by his mother, who was seeking help getting him to the hospital for mental health treatment. She had alerted the 911 dispatcher that her son possibly had a toy gun and had a previous confrontation with police in the neighboring state of Nevada, but that he did not possess a real weapon. “My biggest fear is that, I don’t know, I just don’t want him to die,” Golda Barton said on the call, asking specifically for the aid of a mental health worker.
Multiple videos show that Barton had met a team of four officers down the street from her house to warn them that Cameron was afraid of the police, but that she desperately needed help getting him safely to a hospital, as he was suffering a meltdown. “He sees the badge and automatically thinks you are going to kill him, he freaks out,” she explained.
A screenshot from body camera footage shows Linden Cameron, a 13-year-old boy with autism, lying on the ground after being shot 11 times by police on Sept. 4, 2020. (Credit: Salt Lake City Police Department/YouTube)The four officers then discussed how they would approach and apprehend Cameron. One officer questioned why they would be entering the home of a boy suffering a “psych problem.” She suggested they call their sergeant “and tell him the situation. Because I’m not about to get in a shooting because [Cameron’s] upset.”
A second officer, who shot the boy a short time later, presciently remarked, “Yeah, especially when he hates cops, it’s going to end in a shooting.”
Despite these apparent misgivings, the group of officers proceeded to approach the home to confront Cameron under the assumption he was armed, despite Barton’s assurances to the contrary. Having spotted the police, the boy took off running down an alley behind his home and the police pursued on foot.
As the officers caught up to Cameron, one of them screamed at him several times, ordering him to get on the ground, before opening fire in rapid succession. A second officer can be heard asking Cameron to pull his hands out of his pockets just as the first officer opens fire.
“I don’t feel good,” Cameron told the officers as he lay on the ground. “Tell my mom I love her.”
Since George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota on May 25, sparking multi-racial and multi-ethnic protests demanding an end to police violence and racism across the country and internationally, at least 300 people have been shot and killed by the police, according to the tally kept by killedbypolice.net. At the current rate, police in the US are on track to kill nearly 1,000 people, a grim toll that they have exacted every year since 2015.While Cameron narrowly avoided being one of the more than 714 people killed by police thus far this year, his grandfather, Owen Barton, 66, was one of the first victims of 2020, having been shot and killed by sheriff’s deputies in Lyon County, Nevada on January 16. As with most police killings, details are sparse, but the official account claims he had advanced on deputies with a handgun, forcing them to shoot and kill him.
African-Americans, along with Native Americans, are disproportionately killed by the police, but the largest share of victims continues to be white. The victims, regardless of race or ethnicity, are overwhelmingly poor and working class. Like Cameron, many were dealing with some sort of mental illness. A significant proportion of those killed by the police were suffering a health emergency when they were shot.
Floyd’s murder and that of Breonna Taylor, who was killed when police opened fire in her home during a no-knock warrant raid in Louisville, Kentucky, as well as the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, have garnered attention from the Democratic Party and the Black Lives Matter organization. However, they have paid virtually no attention to white victims like Cameron, his grandfather, and 25-year-old Hannah Fizer, who was shot dead by police in Sedalia, Missouri last June.
Friends, family and community members have protested largely in isolation to demand justice for Fizer, a convenience store clerk who was killed by a deputy during a traffic stop. Last week, a special prosecutor ruled that the shooting was justifiable and that there would no criminal charges. In July, a protest was held in rural Wilson, Oklahoma to demand criminal charges in the killing of 28-year-old Jared Lakey, who was tased more than 50 times and choked to death by police in 2019.
Even as they feign sympathy for the black victims of police violence and proclaim their commitment to confronting “white supremacy,” the Democrats have slapped down demands for defunding the police and other mild reforms. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has repeatedly rejected the notion that police budgets should be cut, instead highlighting his plan to give local police $300 million in additional federal funding. The former vice president launched a massive “law and order” ad campaign earlier this month denouncing “violent protesters” against police brutality as anarchists and arsonists.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is waging a fascistic reelection campaign, appealing to the police and whipping up the far-right elements of his base. Trump has defended the 17-year-old militia member, Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two anti-police-violence protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, while also praising the federal police squad assassination of Portland protester Michael Reinoehl as “retribution.”
Despite months of protests, police violence is not abating. Rather, the repressive arm of the state is being built up further in an effort to suppress all signs of opposition from the working class. The Department of Justice on Monday targeted New York City, Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington as “anarchist jurisdictions,” paving the way for them to lose federal funding.
A state of emergency was declared in Louisville, Kentucky yesterday in anticipation of protests over an imminent decision by the state’s attorney general on whether to bring charges in the Breonna Taylor case. Police began erecting concrete barricades around the downtown business district Monday, and the federal courthouse has been boarded up. One of the officers involved in shooting Taylor, Sergeant John Mattingly, sent an email to his colleagues early Tuesday morning defending his actions and encouraging them to confront protesters and to “be the Warriors you are.”
The tattoo of a Los Angeles police “Executioner”
The Window for Major Police Reform Might Be Closing
Protesters in New York. Photo: David Dee Delgado/Getty Images
New polling from Gallup shows that the American public has less confidence in the police than at any point in the last three decades, the entire time the organization has been tracking views on the subject. This seems like good news for reformers, and abolitionists in particular. But a yawning racial gap in the Gallup poll, ideological quirks that appear in other surveys, congressional gridlock, and Republicans’ increased use of law enforcement as a wedge issue all bode poorly for major change. Piecemeal implementation of policing reduction efforts, meanwhile, seems bound to leave a sour taste in people’s mouths regarding the burgeoning “defund” movement. And the pitched atmosphere generated by President Trump’s authoritarian antics — and his bungling of the pandemic response — has an expiration date, whether it’s a few months or a few years from now.
In short, the outlook for any reforms beyond several that have mostly been tried in the past — and failed to measurably reduce police violence nationwide — is less encouraging than in recent weeks, and there are signs that it will deteriorate further. Gallup’s 2020 survey of faith in American institutions aptly distills the mood of the last two months, which has at times bordered on insurrectionary. Since the pollster began collecting data on the subject in 1993, the share of Americans who’ve expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the police has hovered between 52 and 64 percent. This year, it dropped to 48 percent — the lowest total yet recorded, and the first time it’s fallen below the level of a majority. The numbers are even starker when accounting for race. Confidence among Black adults has always been significantly lower than for white adults, with a high of 37 percent. But this year’s measure of 19 percent marks an all-time nadir, and boasts the widest racial gap in confidence (37 points) ever measured by Gallup on this topic.
This shift is attributable to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25. Nationwide protests, intermittent rioting, and often-vicious police crackdowns have drawn ever-greater numbers of Americans into the streets, while prompting many more to reassess the merits of racist and unaccountable law enforcement. For a time, this reassessment seemed to be transpartisan. Six years after the Black Lives Matter movement’s onset highlighted partisan rifts — and became a focal point of the Republican National Convention in 2016 — almost half of Republicans today think the criminal-legal system needs either “major changes” or “a complete overhaul,” according to a recent Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. Lawmakers initially responded accordingly. Republicans and Democrats in Congress each submitted reform bills; President Trump issued an executive order conceding that some officers have “misused their authority,” and called for better training, credentialing, and reporting of abusive police. Most Americans support bans on choke holds and no-knock warrants, duty-to-intervene standards for officers who see others using excessive force, and requiring the use of body cameras. At times, their sympathies have verged on radical: A Monmouth University poll conducted in late May and early June found that 54 percent of Americans thought the torching of Minneapolis’s Third Police Precinct by rioters was at least partially justified.
One might intuit that a public so open to this brand of destruction would hold revolutionary views on what should be done about policing. But more often, surveys uncover a more complicated set of beliefs. Polling conducted by Morning Consult around the same time found that 58 percent of Americans supported dispatching the military to U.S. cities to quell unrest. Marist pollsters found that a combined 56 percent felt the nationwide police response — which, to that point, had included brutal assaults and mass deployment of tear gas by agencies like the NYPD — was either “mostly appropriate” or not aggressive enough. Their taste in reforms has been accordingly milquetoast. With the notable exception of outlawing “qualified immunity,” which protects officers from being held personally liable for constitutional violations, the policy changes supported by wide majorities of Americans are already in place in many departments, and to little avail. Among the most popular — body cameras — have no measurable impact on rates of police violence. Choke holds were banned in New York when one was used to kill Eric Garner in 2014; officers were obligated to intervene in Minneapolis when they saw Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, and yet they did not. In some places, this dissonance has failed to sway even those who recognize it. After Rayshard Brooks was killed in June, Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced a plan to better train police officers in the same speech where she admitted that existing training programs had failed.
Meanwhile, more radical reforms have not found popular purchase. Despite the increased prevalence of cries to “defund” or “abolish” the police, neither proposal has even close to majority support. Nor have most officials who’ve rushed headlong to embrace their spirit done so holistically, as most abolitionists envision. Abolition calls for a reorientation of society toward robust investments in housing, health care, employment, and anti-poverty measures, framed by a new infrastructure for resolving harm. Instead, politicians heeding its slogans have simply withdrawn the police from duty. According to the New York Times, the CHOP zone in Seattle saw several acts of violence against which victims found no protective infrastructure. That police had been prohibited from venturing inside by city officials bodes poorly for a movement that, while meritorious, has plenty of hearts and minds left to win over — including the majority of Black Americans, many whose experience with government neglect, including from police they call for help, holds strong associations with rampant shootings, robberies, and assaults in their communities. This remains so even as most black people plainly don’t trust officers and consider them racist. Experiments like that proposed in Minneapolis — where the city council recently voted to disband the police department and reenvision public safety — would be wise to reckon with this legacy in its totality, rather than offering piecemeal concessions to what they think are abolitionist demands.
The national picture is even less heartening. Congressional talks have since imploded, and a policing-reform deal seems to be off the table. As rioting resumed in Portland and gripped Chicago’s Miracle Mile over the weekend, the president and his allies continued their timeworn tack of demagoguing protest, which has been their main strategy since late June and their default for much longer. Trump has cast the unrest as bedlam caused by Democratic leaders — even as bad policing sparked it and his deployment of federal troops to Portland escalated it. His surrogates on Fox News and others like Rudy Giuliani have gone back to characterizing Black Lives Matter activists as part of a terrorist hate group. One of Trump’s main lines of attack against Joe Biden is the false claim that his Democratic rival wants to abolish the police.
The future remains uncertain, but broadly speaking, the reformist sentiment that seemed transpartisan and was enthusiastically supported by the majority earlier this summer has regressed to a site of partisan bickering, muddled by the ideological inconsistencies of a public whose abstract sympathies often clash with its preferred realities. And hope for structural change that reckons with the more banal violence of policing — as opposed to its more extreme forms, like on-camera killings — rests with localities whose proposed changes, in many cases, have either echoed failed efforts past or engaged in piecemeal abolition that’s left potential allies skeptical. There are other complicating factors at play. In the likely event that the unrest is fueled by antipathy toward Trump — on whose watch hundreds of thousands of people have died from COVID-19, and millions have lost work — protest energy seems bound to flag further once he leaves office, which could credibly happen in January. Absent changes to these trends, the opportunity for major reform seems increasingly tenuous. Even at this historic moment, eroded trust in the police could be greeted with yet another thwarted effort to change them.
The tattoo of a Los Angeles police “Executioner”
Violent,
secretive fascistic networks operating inside California police stations
7 August 2020
A
whistleblower in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has exposed a
violent right-wing extremist gang operating within the Compton station known as
the “Executioners.”
The
“Executioners” network, according to a report on July 30 in the Los
Angeles Times, is composed of sworn law enforcement officers who all have
matching tattoos featuring “a skull with Nazi imagery” and an assault rifle.
The gang “celebrates deputy shootings and the induction of new members with
‘inking parties.’”
An estimated
20 deputies are members of the “Executioners” network, most of whom work at
night. According to the whistleblower’s claim, which was submitted on June 23
and more recently came to light, the “Executioners do not allow
African-American or female members.”
Instead of
using official police channels, the gang members communicate with each other
through WhatsApp. “Members become inked as ‘Executioners’ after executing members
of the public,” the whistleblower complaint states with emphasis, “or otherwise
committing acts of violence in furtherance of the gang.”
According to
the whistleblower complaint, the gang “wields vast power at the Compton
station,” which covers an area of Los Angeles that is historically home to a
large proportion of working-class black residents.
The
whistleblower, deputy Thomas Banuelos, was targeted, threatened, and attacked
by a member of the Executioners. “It was a very serious, violent and bloody
assault which could have killed Deputy Banuelos,” the whistleblower’s attorney
Alan Romero reported. A member of the Executioners “had him on the ground and
was literally just bashing his head in with his elbow over and over and over
again.”
When another
deputy attempted to anonymously report the attack on Banuelos through an
internal tip line, his identity was exposed and turned over to the
Executioners, and he found graffiti scrawled on the keypad in front of the
station accusing him of being a “rat.”
“I think the
scariest thing,” Romero said, “is that he did what he was supposed to do. He
called the authorities, and they betrayed him. They turned him right over to
the gang. It’s a whistleblower’s worst nightmare.”
On the
website WitnessLA, an inside source identified the three deputies
in this video as
members of the Executioners gang. On the video, which was published in June,
the deputies savagely beat a man who is pinned to the ground.
“We have a
gang here that has grown to the point where it dominates every aspect of life
at the Compton station,” Romero told the Los Angeles Times. “It
essentially controls scheduling, the distribution of informant tips, and
assignments to deputies in the station with preference shown to members of the
gang as well as prospects.”
When members
of the right-wing extremist “Executioners” network do not get what they want
within the sheriff’s department, the gang members threaten “work slowdowns —
which involve ignoring or responding slowly to calls.” In addition, they set
illegal “arrest quotas.”
The
“Executioners” are only the latest subject of a string of exposures of
right-wing extremist gangs, networks, and cliques operating in California
police stations.
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