Tuesday, February 6, 2018

SIX BALTIMORE OFFICES PLEAD GUILTY TO RACKETEERING - IN AMERICA, THE POLICE ARE THE BIGGEST CRIMINALS AND MURDERERS.... BUT THEY KNOW THE CORRUPT JUDGES WILL LET THEM OFF


COP MURDERS IN AMERICA   - THOUSANDS SHOT IN 
THE HEAD. JUDGES GIVE THE THUG COPS A PASS TO 
DO IT AGAIN!


THUG RAPIST COPS SELDOM PROSECUTED…. 

CORRUPT JUDGES WANT TO MAINTAIN THE STATUS-QUO OF JUDGES, THUG COPS AND LAWYERS ARE ALL ABOVE THE LAW!


http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/11/cop-crimes-in-america-brooklyn-thug.html
According to Killedbypolice.net, at least 808 people have been killed by police so far this year, outpacing last year’s deaths by 20 victims.... and they ALL GET AWAY WITH IT!

"Police in the United States are trained to see the working class and poor as a hostile
enemy. Anything less than complete submissiveness is grounds for officers to unleash
deadly force on their victims. In some instances, even the most casual encounters with
police have proven to be deadly."

COP MURDERS IN AMERICA   - 

THOUSANDS SHOT IN THE HEAD. 

JUDGES GIVE THE THUG COPS A PASS TO 

DO IT AGAIN!



Six Baltimore police officers plead guilty to racketeering
By Harvey Simpkins
6 February 2018
Eight of nine members of an elite Baltimore Police Department task force have been charged with crimes including robbery, extortion and fabricating evidence in a case which has exposed the sorts of brazen corruption and illegal practices which pervade police departments throughout the US.
Six of the eight pleaded guilty to racketeering and other charges last month. Two officers, Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor, are currently on trial in federal court facing robbery, extortion, and overtime fraud charges.
The charged officers were members of the now-defunct Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), which was ostensibly set up in 2007 to focus on cracking down on illegal gun possession in order to reduce the number of guns in the city. Instead, the members of the group systematically violated the Constitutional rights of Baltimore’s residents and used their authority to steal drugs and cash to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The leader of the task force, Wayne Jenkins, admitted in his plea agreement to numerous constitutional rights violations, including the regular use of GPS devices to track people he suspected of having cash, and entering their premises without a warrant in order to steal from them.
Jenkins also admitted to being involved in a scheme to plant drugs on an innocent man, stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from Baltimore residents and providing cocaine and marijuana to an unidentified associate to resell on the streets. Jenkins split the profits of the drug sales, netting himself $200,000 to $250,000. Additionally, Jenkins admitted to stealing dirt bikes and reselling prescription drugs taken during the 2015 protests following the police murder of Freddie Gray.
On February 1, Donald Stepp, a Baltimore County bail bondsman, testified at the ongoing trial of Hersl and Taylor that in April 2015, during the protests, Jenkins walked into his garage carrying two garbage bags full of stolen pharmaceutical drugs. Stepp also testified that Jenkins made near-nightly trips to his home to drop off illegal drugs.
Jenkins also confessed to writing a false report about heroin planted in a car in 2010 following a high-speed police chase that killed an elderly bystander. The two men in the car spent years in prison because of the planted drugs before the task force’s corruption emerged.
On January 23, Maurice Ward, one of the officers who pleaded guilty, testified on the first day of the trial that the officers in the task force would, on a nightly basis, prowl Baltimore’s streets trying to stir up trouble.
Ward testified that Jenkins would deliberately drive at fast speeds towards groups of people and then slam on the brakes. The task force members would then identify anyone who ran, and, without probable cause, give chase and then detain and search them. The officers had no legal basis to target people but were looking to provoke individuals who might have drugs or a gun into running. Ward estimated that the task force did this 10 to 20 times on slow nights and more than 50 times on busier nights.
Ward explained that the task force would also profile certain types of vehicles for traffic stops and pull them over on the basis of various pretexts, such as claiming that drivers weren’t wearing seat belts or that windows were over-tinted. Ward said Jenkins would also ask suspected drug dealers to identify the biggest dealers in town and the task force members would use the information to target who to steal drugs and money from.
Furthermore, Ward testified that the task force members kept BB guns in their vehicles “in case we accidentally hit somebody or got into a shootout, so we could plant them.” He also testified that Jenkins instructed the officers to carry replica guns to plant if they found themselves in a jam.
When Taylor was arrested last year, a replica gun was found in his glove box which was nearly indistinguishable from his service pistol.
In one of the more notorious incidents, GTTF members took a man’s house keys, ran his name through databases to determine his address, and entered his home without a warrant. Once inside they cracked open a safe, finding about $200,000. The officers took $100,000, closed the safe, and then, in an effort to cover up their crime, filmed themselves pretending to open the safe for the first time. In the video, which was played at the trial, Jenkins is heard saying “Nobody touch anything.”
After arresting the man, Jenkins listened to his calls from jail. The victim was heard discussing the police taking his money and stating that he wanted to hire a good lawyer to go after them. Jenkins determined that the man’s wife was arranging his legal matters and decided to target her. He wrote a fraudulent note, purporting to be from another woman, saying that the man had gotten her pregnant, and left it in the man’s door for the wife to find.
In yet another incident, GTTF officers robbed a small-time drug dealer, Sergio Summerville, at the storage unit where he lived. One of the officers falsely told Summerville they were with the Drug Enforcement Administration and another falsely claimed they had a warrant to search his unit. The officers ended up taking thousands of dollars from Summerville and left without charging him with any crime. “They came at me like a gang,” he testified in court.
An employee of the storage facility testified that officers demanded access to the security camera system. When he correctly informed them that they needed a warrant, “They told me I was impeding a police investigation.” One of the officers also threatened the employee, saying he “looked like someone who needed to be robbed.” Another officer who has pleaded guilty, Evodio Hendrix, testified that “We would create false reports to cover up the robberies we were involved in.”
At trial, prosecutors introduced two bags of items that Jenkins accumulated for the GTTF to use in carrying out various robberies, including balaclava ski masks, black clothing and shoes, and tools such as a crow bar, battering ram, and a rope with a grappling hook.
In total, the task force is suspected of stealing at least $300,000 in cash, three kilograms of cocaine, 43 pounds of marijuana, 800 grams of heroin, and jewelry worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In addition to the widespread theft, members of the task force regularly filed for overtime pay that was unearned. One officer took a month off to remodel his home and was still paid. Another claimed overtime while on vacation in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
In an indication that the corruption is far more widespread than the eight indicted officers, Ward testified that a lieutenant named Ian Dombroski would authorize eight hours of overtime pay that officers did not have to work, as a reward when officers recovered guns. Dombroski remains the head of the BPD’s Internal Affairs Section, overseeing investigations into allegations of wrongdoing by police officers.
Furthermore, Jenkins’ plea agreement states that “The practice at the GTTF [Gun Trace Task Force] was that if a sub-set of the GTTF had a gun arrest, all members of the GTTF, regardless of whether they had actually participated in the arrest, would submit individual overtime reports, as if they did.”
Already, prosecutors have been forced to drop hundreds of cases which relied on the word of the eight indicted officers. Baltimore’s public defender office notes that thousands of other cases have also been compromised. It is likely that hundreds or thousands of innocent people were convicted based on the actions, statements, and/or testimony of the task force members.
Far from a unique event, these indictments are only the latest revelation of unconstitutional and abusive police practices in Baltimore. Following the Freddie Gray protests the Department of Justice (DOJ) undertook a review which found widespread violations of constitutional rights.
After examining police stops, arrests and court documents from 2010-2016, the DOJ found that Baltimore police officers routinely engaged in unjustified stops and searches, arrests without cause, racial profiling, use of excessive force, sexual discrimination, and retaliation against actions protected by the First Amendment, including detaining and arresting people simply because they used speech perceived to be critical or disrespectful towards the police.
Furthermore, since November 2016, there have been three separate documented incidents involving the fraudulent use of body cameras by Baltimore police officers. In the first incident, police are shown searching the driver’s area of a vehicle and not finding anything suspicious. The officers then turned off their body cameras. When they later turned the cameras back on, an officer almost immediately pulled a bag of alleged drugs out of the driver’s area of the car.
In an incident recorded in January 2017, a police officer is seen placing a bag of alleged drugs among debris in a backyard lot, walking out to the street, activating his body camera and then returning to the alley and recovering the same bag as two other officers look on.
A third incident recorded in June and reported to prosecutors in August involved a Baltimore police officer who allegedly “self-reported” footage from his body-camera as a “re-enactment of the seizure of evidence.” As a result of these incidents, dozens of cases involving the officers who have manipulated their body cameras have either been dropped or are under review.
The series of incidents in the past few years in Baltimore exposes in microcosm the contempt that the police have for the constitutional rights of the working class throughout the country. While organizations such as Black Lives Matter and others tied to the Democratic Party seek various reforms to unconstitutional police actions, such as body cameras, oversight boards, and the hiring of more minority police officers, the events in Baltimore show the hollowness of such efforts.
Not only does Baltimore have one of the most racially-integrated police forces in the US, with over half the police force non-white, but five of the eight officers charged from the GTTF are black. Furthermore, as the three recent incidents involving body cameras show, this “solution” in no way solves the root problem of unconstitutional and violent actions by police. Fundamentally, the police are an instrument of class repression operating, regardless of their race, in the interests of the wealthy.

2018 begins with US police reign of terror

29 January 2018
While largely ignored by the mass media, the reign of terror by police officers continues to rage across the United States. The entire state apparatus, from local cops to immigration agents, has been unleashed by the Trump administration to beat, maim and kill with impunity.
During a speech to hundreds of uniformed officers last July, Trump urged the police to not be “too nice” and to treat detainees “rough.” The Justice Department has at the same time ended the toothless pretense of federal oversight over a handful of police departments put in place by the Obama administration.
In the year since Trump was sworn in as president, at least 1,223 people have been killed by police. Since the beginning of 2018, according to killedbypolice.net, 3.5 people have been killed on average every day.
Washington Post database reports 78 fatal police shootings so far this year. As in previous years, the figures show that police killings impact every race and ethnicity, with whites comprising the largest share of victims, while African Americans are killed at a rate higher than their overall percentage of the population. In those cases where race or ethnicity has been identified by the Post, 54 percent of victims were white, 25 percent African American, 15 percent Hispanic, 3 percent Asian and 2 percent Native American.
Among the most recent victims is Donte Shannon, a 26-year-old African American man who was killed by police in Racine, Wisconsin on January 17 after fleeing a traffic stop. According to the police account, Shannon’s initial crime was not having a front license plate on his vehicle. Officials claim the police were forced to unleash a hail of bullets after Shannon pointed a gun at them, though investigators have not reported finding a weapon at the scene.
On the same day, a deputy in Columbus, Ohio shot and killed 16-year-old Joseph Haynes, a white youth, during an altercation after a court hearing. Haynes, who was unarmed, was thrown to the ground and shot once in the abdomen after he confronted a deputy for pushing his mother up against a wall.
In addition to those killed, workers and youth are subjected to police harassment and brutality on a daily basis.
Earlier this month, Louisiana teacher Deyshia Hargrave was removed from a school board meeting and handcuffed by a deputy marshal after she raised questions about school officials awarding themselves raises while denying them to teachers and staff. Former coal miner Gary Michael Hunt was choked by a police officer and removed from a public meeting after demanding clean water for the residents of Martin County, Kentucky.
Not even children are spared, as shown by a report Sunday that a 7-year-old child in Miami, Florida was led away from his school in handcuffs after an altercation with a teacher last week.
The issue of police killings and brutality erupted into national and international prominence with the murder of Michael Brown in August 2014 and the militarized police response to protests. Popular anger over police violence has not gone away. However, over the past three and a half years there has been a systematic effort to smother opposition and channel it behind the Democratic Party.
A critical role has been played by Black Lives Matter (BLM), which was developed and promoted to push the false claim that police violence is a racial rather than a class issue. Along with the various other organizations that promote and support the Democratic Party, BLM sought to cover up the relationship between police violence and the nature of the capitalist state as an instrument of class repression. BLM pushed for various reforms, including body cameras, oversight boards and more minority police officers, as the supposed solution to police violence.
In 2016, the main leaders of BLM threw their support behind Hillary Clinton, the favored candidate of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus. During the election season, the Ford Foundation announced that it would funnel $100 million to a panoply of organizations associated with the BLM movement. This was followed by the announcement of an initiative by BLM to promote “black capitalism,” including the introduction of a Black Lives Matter debit card.
The Democratic Party is fully complicit in the epidemic of police violence. The Obama administration presided over the continued militarization of police forces while ensuring that nothing was done to prosecute officers who perpetrated violence.
Since the election of Trump, the Democrats have entirely ignored the ongoing wave of police killings. They have worked to suppress and divert all manifestations of social opposition to the Trump administration behind a reactionary and militarist agenda of aggression against Russia, a further redistribution of wealth to the rich, and the destruction of democratic rights.
A significant factor in the efforts to censor the Internet, spearheaded by the Democratic Party, is concern that police killings and abuse videotaped on smartphones have become national and international issues through distribution on social media platforms. Facebook is now changing its newsfeed to limit the reach of content from news sources outside the so-called “mainstream,” with the aim of preventing the expression and propagation of opposition to police violence and social inequality.
Opposition to police violence within the United States cannot be separated from opposition to war, social inequality and the capitalist system. With wealth concentration rising to levels without historic precedent, the ruling elite relies on the police to enforce inequality.
And as the Pentagon prepares to wage war abroad on an unprecedented scale, the ruling class is preparing for war at home. The concept of “Total Army” has been coined to embrace the innumerable and growing connections between the police, border patrol, immigration agents and the military—a single apparatus of war and repression.
The ruling class is well aware that it faces its greatest danger within the United States, in the form of the growth of working-class struggle and the development of a mass movement against capitalism. It is only through the building of such a political movement that the reign of police violence can be ended.
Niles Niemuth
  
COP MURDERS IN AMERICA   - 

THOUSANDS SHOT IN THE HEAD.

JUDGES GIVE THE THUG COPS A PASS TO 

DO IT AGAIN!

 

Police kill over a thousand for fourth year in a row

By George Gallanis
27 December 2017
For the fourth year in a row, police killed over a thousand people in the United States in one year. The four-year bloodbath is a stern warning to the working class in America and across the world. Social inequality is reaching unprecedented levels. Three billionaires own as much wealth as the bottom half of the population of the United States. The killings of thousands by police in the span of few years is an indication of the ruling elite’s fear and hatred of the vast working class majority.
As of this writing, killedbypolice.net reports police killed 1,164 people in 2017. With a few days left in the year, the death count will likely increase, marking 2017 as second deadliest year since 2013, when the web site began tabulating the figures. Last year’s count stands at 1,165.
Other police killing aggregators show similar totals. Mapping Police Violence places the count at 1,049. The Washington Post, which only tracks police shootings as opposed to other forms of police killings, by means of tasering, beatings and the like, places the count at 952 as of December 25.
Murder by police is effectively legal. Police officers can kill anyone, as long as they claim some kind of perceived threat, whether real or not. Hundreds, many of whom are unarmed, are murdered by officers who will never face a trial. According to Mapping Police Violence, in 2015, under the Obama presidency, 99 percent of all police killings did not result in any police officer being convicted of a crime by the so-called justice system. The capitalist state shoots and kills with one hand and washes the blood off with the other.
In November, released video footage showed an unarmed Daniel Shaver murdered by an Arizona police officer after begging for his life on his knees. The officer was acquitted of all charges after claiming he feared for his life. In September, St. Louis police officer Jason Stockley was acquitted of murder for the 2011 killing of Anthony Lamar Smith. After shooting Smith six times from close range, Stockley planted a gun on Smith’s dead body. Stockley’s fingerprints were later found on the gun.
Following the verdict, protests erupted in St. Louis. St. Louis police responded, dressed in riot gear, illegally “kettling” protesters and arresting many all the while shouting, “Whose streets? Our streets!”
The protests were largely organized by Black Lives Matters (BLM) and pseudo-left groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Socialist Alternative, who sought to portray the killing by Stockley as an act solely due to racism. Slogans such as “white silence is violence” were heard during the protests.
Three years earlier, in the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson, pseudo-left groups put forth the same narrative: the fundamental cause of police violence is racism. Often cited to bolster this argument is the fact that blacks are killed in disproportionately higher numbers compared to whites. According to the Washington Post, African-Americans comprised a quarter of all police killings in 2017. This clearly suggests that racism is an element in police killings, but these statistics only reveal part of the picture. The victims of police killings include all races and ethnicities. As any good doctor will point out, one must not confuse a symptom for the disease, and the disease is class oppression, claiming the poorest and most vulnerable sections of the working class.
The police, along with the state machine as a whole, exist as an instrument in the irreconcilable conflict between the ruling class and the working class. The police are not neutral actors who can be pressured to act in a certain way. They serve the interests of the capitalist class, and carry out its orders. The thousands that lay dead at the hands of the police, regardless of skin color and gender, come almost entirely from the ranks of the working class. Police roam working class and poor neighborhoods hunting perpetrators of petty crimes. If you are stopped by the police, you are de facto guilty. If you fidget or do not follow a command directly, you may very well be shot and die. Whatever part racism plays in these murders, it is ultimately secondary to that of class.
American society is divided by massive inequality, intensified by decades of social counterrevolution. Social tension is palpable, with most working people increasingly angry and moving to the left. There is deep concern within the ruling class that social explosions of revolutionary dimensions are on the horizon. Preparing for such events, police more and more act as an occupying force, carrying the same weapons used overseas in occupied countries by the United States. In 1989, Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act. It has made possible the transfer of $5.4 billion worth of military gear to police departments across the United States. A report published by the US Department of Justice in 2015 states that local police departments swelled to 477,000 full-time personnel in 2013, a 35 percent increase since 1987. This three-decade period coincides with a drastic decline in crime, while the forces of “law and order” have been swelled and armed to the teeth.
History demonstrates the real role of the police. In 1937, for example, Chicago police shot and killed 10 striking workers during the Little Steel Strike. During the Detroit Rebellion of 1967, police were given order to ‘shoot to kill,’ claiming 16 victims. In some of the other social explosions of the mid- and late 1960s, the death toll at the hands of the police was even greater.
Under the Trump presidency, the police will operate more openly and ruthlessly. Police violence will grow, accompanied by increased attacks on democratic rights. Social and political opposition will be met with brutal violence, directed not only against individuals but also mass struggles.
The efforts of the proponents of identity politics to place the blame of police violence on racism effectively denies the role of the state and its class character. This serves to create divisions within the working class along ethnic and racial lines. It leads to the counterproductive and reactionary conclusion that the police can be reformed by increasing the number of minority officers, or through such techniques as community policing, racial-sensitivity training and similar nostrums.

Court quashes subpoena of reporter who uncovered Chicago police murder coverup

By George Marlowe
27 December 2017
On December 13, a Cook County judge quashed an anti-press subpoena against independent journalist Jamie Kalven that would have forced him to disclose his confidential sources in court. Kalven was the first to bring to light the coverup of the police murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014 by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, who faces charges of first-degree murder.
Were it not for Kalven, who works with the independent news organization Invisible Institute, there would have been no exposure of the police murder of McDonald and the subsequent coverup by the Chicago Police Department (CPD), the Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel and the entire political establishment.
Kalven wrote an explosive article in Slate in 2015 entitled “Sixteen Shots” that shattered the official fake news and coverup—promoted by the CPD, the Emanuel administration and the media. In the article, Kalven revealed that McDonald had been shot sixteen times across his entire body, according to the autopsy report he had obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
He also cited an unnamed witness who contradicted the entire official police narrative, which claimed that the teenager was lunging at a police officer with a knife while under the influence drugs. The witness stated instead that McDonald was “shying away” from the police officer when he was shot multiple times. Finally, Kalven revealed that there was a police dashboard-camera video documenting the entire incident, which he learned from an unnamed source.
The subpoena—issued by Van Dyke’s lawyers in an attempt to delay his trial—threatened to undermine basic democratic rights afforded to reporters under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Such rights include a reporter’s constitutional privilege to be protected from being compelled to testify about confidential information or sources, critical to reporting freely on matters of public interest. At the same time, attacks on the press have steadily increased over the last few decades by multiple administrations, Democratic and Republican.
Van Dyke’s lead attorney, Daniel Herbert, himself a former police officer, issued the subpoena against Kalven claiming that his reporting influenced witnesses—thereby tainting the investigation. Kalven’s lawyers countered that the witnesses in question had already spoken to law enforcement prior to Kalven’s discussions with them. In reality, the spurious subpoena issued by Herbert is part of a counter-offensive to intimidate and threaten reporters who uncover crimes committed by police officers or other agents of the state.
In demanding the subpoena, Herbert also accused Kalven of being an activist, rather than a neutral reporter of the facts. He argued therefore that Kalven could not make use of his reporter’s privilege to maintain the confidentiality of his sources. While Kalven certainly has taken a point of view in his reporting on police brutality for many years, and has been a partisan for the voices of the poor in Chicago’s south side, he is also a conscientious and objective reporter.
Kalven’s lawyer highlighted the spuriousness of the assault on his rights. Compelling Kalven to testify about his sources, they noted, violated the Illinois Reporter’s Privilege Act—which forbids courts from forcing reporters to disclose the source of information they have obtained (confidential or not), except where no other law can prevent its disclosure, and all other sources of information have been exhausted.
An amicus curiae brief filed by the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press (RCFP) and eighteen other media organizations noted, “When a subpoena demands information about confidential sources, the specter of enforcing that subpoena has a chilling effect on all future sources who may have valuable information about matters of public concern, but need an assurance of confidentiality before sharing it.”
In light of the spuriousness of the charges made by Herbert, Judge Vincent Gaughan was forced to quash the subpoena. Gaughan, however, maintained he did so not because of Kalven’s protected status as a reporter, but because of the inadequacy of the subpoena itself. While the dismissal of the subpoena was a victory for Kalven’s rights as a reporter, the courts have only maintained a qualified and limited assertion of a reporter’s privilege.
After months of legal and court battles, the Emanuel administration released the video of the shooting on a late night in 2014. The video confirmed what the witnesses and autopsy reports showed. Laquan McDonald, an impoverished ward of the state, unknown to the public until his untimely death, was shot sixteen times by Van Dyke as he walked away from the officer. The first few shots took the teenager down. Van Dyke subsequently shot him multiple times as smoke emerged from his shaking, dying body.
The video of McDonald finally released in November 2015 engulfed the Emanuel administration in a full-blown political crisis. Protests ensued nightly and there were widespread calls for Emanuel to resign for his role in the cover-up. Instead, the Democratic Party and the political establishment thereafter began a process of damage control.
Emanuel, who bears chief responsibility for the murder, remains in office and no high-level political figure has been charged. In December of 2015, Emanuel called for the resignation of Superintendent Garry McCarthy, the head of the CPD at the time of McDonald’s death. Van Dyke was then indicted on six counts of first-degree murder and one count of official misconduct. Multiple officers on the scene were involved in a conspiracy to cover up what happened. The official organs of police oversight, such as the Independent Police Review Authority, sanctioned the false statements of the officers.
The mainstream press, for their part, uncritically reported what CPD officials told them, which was that McDonald had lunged at the officer with a knife. Kalven’s reporting, however, was instrumental in bringing to light the real circumstances of the murder of McDonald and added to the growing public outrage against police brutality.
In the wake of the release of the video, Emanuel also vowed to create a task force for police accountability, in order to cover up his own tracks. Emails released by the Chicago Tribune later revealed the entire administration in City Hall was aware of the video and chose to suppress it. The Justice Department also opened an investigation, which released its report earlier this year. The report revealed a damning pattern of constitutional abuses by the CPD. It detailed a history of police brutality and violence in Chicago, but it only offered mere palliatives and half-measures.

Despite the reporting by Kalven and widespread outrage against police brutality in Chicago, there has been no fundamental change in the course of the CPD and its policies. Far from ushering in an era of “police reform”, as promised by Emanuel in the wake of release of the video footage of the police murder of McDonald, police violence and brutality continue unabated, in Chicago and across the country.


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