America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Wednesday, June 10, 2020
BREAKDOWN OF LAW AND ORDER IN AMERICA UNRAVELING
Police Officer Writes Heartbreaking Op-Ed About Life in Woke America
After two weeks of protests, violence, and calls to abolish law enforcement in America, life for the men and women of the police force has taken a very dark turn. One Oklahoma police major poured his heart out in a opinion column for Law Officer, a website operated by members of law enforcement, stating simply, "America, we are leaving."
"This is the hardest thing I have written," Tulsa Police Maj. Travis Yates wrote. He detailed growing up with his police captain father and looking forward to interacting with the police force who he revered as "heroes." But now, Yates wrote, things are completely different.
Now, he said, supervisors no longer back up cops in tumultuous situations. Criminals who attack police officers are now regarded as martyrs.
"Parents used to get mad at their kids for getting arrested and now they get mad at us," Yates said. Now, in the aftermath of George Floyd's death, all police have been branded as racists, Yates says. But that isn't what he's seen in his years of experience.
"With all this talk about racism and racist cops, I’ve never seen people treated differently because of their race," Yates wrote. "And while I know that cowards that have never done this job will call me racist for saying it, all I’ve ever seen was criminal behavior and cops trying to stop it and they didn’t give a rip what their skin color was."
Major Yates said that even while he had not experienced racism from other police officers he worked with, racism certainly came from civilians toward law enforcement. Black police officers were no exception, he said.
"I’ve been called every name you can think of and many of them with racial overtones and it’s never come from cops," Yates said. "I’ve watched African American cops take the brunt of this and even talked one rookie out of quitting after he was berated by a lot of cowards that had the same skin color as him." But even with the name calling and the adversity that comes to every officer of the law, no matter their ethnicity, Yates said he had still hoped one of his children would have followed in his footsteps and become a police officer.
"But today, all of that is over," Yates said. "I wouldn’t wish this job on my worst enemy. I would never send anyone I cared about into the hell that this profession has become. It’s the only job you can do everything right and lose everything. It’s the only job where the same citizens you risk your life for hate you for it."
The attacks on police have evolved from verbal to physical, Yates said, as rioters throw rocks, bottles, and even gunfire. More than 300 police officers have been injured across the country while attempting to quell rioters and looters in the wake of Floyd's murder on Memorial Day.
"This job is a walking a time bomb and you could get cancelled or prosecuted on the very next call, even if you do everything right," Yates said. "Now, the little we have, we are told they are going to defund us or even abolish us. Citizens with a political agenda will reign over us and all you have to do is wake up and put on a uniform to be a racist."
"I used to talk cops out of leaving the job. Now I’m encouraging them," Yates said in conclusion. "You aren’t going to have to abolish the police, we won’t be around for it.
Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi for The New York Times
A video shows a police officer violently shoving a young woman to the ground and cursing at her during a protest in Brooklyn. A second recording shows the officer thrusting his arm into her torso.
The woman says that as a result, she suffered a concussion and seizures.
The incident, one of many captured on cellphones and shared across social media during the demonstrations in New York and other cities against police brutality, has led to calls for a change to the status quo — including some from New York State legislative leaders, who have begun approving parts of an expansive package of bills targeting police misconduct.
On Tuesday — 11 days after that Brooklyn protest — the district attorney’s office in the borough charged the officer, Vincent D’Andraia, with assault.
Officer D’Andraia is the first member of the New York Police Department to face criminal charges over conduct at the protests. Police union leaders said city officials were bowing to public pressure and abandoning officers.
The details
The first video showed Officer D’Andraia, 28, knocking the woman, Dounya Zayer, 20, to the ground and calling her a “bitch” after she asked him why he had told her to get out of the street. The second video, recorded by a Newsweek reporter, shows Officer D’Andraia leaning forward and thrusting his arm into Ms. Zayer’s body.
Officer D’Andraia was arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault, criminal mischief, harassment and menacing. Ms. Zayer’s lawyer, Tahani Aboushi, said that she was disappointed that prosecutors had not charged him with a felony.
The officer’s lawyer, Stuart London, declined to comment. Patrick J. Lynch, the president of the Police Benevolent Association, said the mayor and top police officials had sent officers to the protests “with no support and no clear plan.”
The context
Law enforcement officials said prosecutors were weighing criminal charges against as many as 40 New York City police officers for their conduct at the protests. The local demonstrations began May 28, following the May 25 death of George Floyd, a black man, at the hands of the Minneapolis police.
A civilian agency that investigates police misconduct in New York said it had received hundreds of complaints since the protests began.
Officer D’Andraia and another officer in Brooklyn were suspended without pay from the Police Department last week. The second officer, who has not been publicly identified, is seen on a video pulling down the mask of a young man and pepper-spraying him. That officer was also expected to face criminal charges, according to four law enforcement sources.
The precedent
People have long criticized the handling of police brutality complaints, and in 2014, the last words of Eric Garner — “I can’t breathe,” as he was held in a chokehold by an officer on Staten Island — helped galvanize the Black Lives Matter movement. Mr. Floyd said the same words as an officer’s knee was pressed on his neck.
A witness recorded the Garner incident on his cellphone. Five years later, the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, was fired from the department. Mayor Bill de Blasio blamed the delay on the Department of Justice, which after a long investigation declined to bring criminal charges.
The reaction
Mr. de Blasio has agreed to shift an unspecified amount of money from the Police Department to youth and community development programs. Even current and former members of the mayor’s administration said the announced changes were not enough. New York State legislators began to approve a broad package of bills targeting police misconduct, including a ban on chokeholds.
In another incident related to the demonstrations after Mr. Floyd’s death, 57 officers resigned from the Buffalo Police Department’s Emergency Response Team in protest after two of their fellow officers were charged with felony assault this week. A video showed the two officers knocking a 75-year-old man, Martin Gugino, to the ground and walking past him as he lay bleeding. President Trump falsely claimed on Tuesday that Mr. Gugino was an “Antifa provocateur.”
Watch–NY Police Union Boss: ‘Stop Treating Us Like Animals and Thugs’
New York police union boss Mike O’Meara said politicians and the establishment media must stop treating police officers like “animals and thugs.”
O’Meara, president of the New York State Association of Police Benevolent Associations, lashed out at elected officials and the media for invoking fear and hatred towards police officers — specifically in the black American community.
Every year, O’Meara noted, police have about 375 million interactions with the public with “overwhelmingly positive responses.”
“But what we read in the papers all week is that in the black community, mothers are worried about their children getting home from school without being killed by a cop,” O’Meara said. “What world are we living in? That doesn’t happen. It does not happen.” He continued:
Our legislators are failing us. Our press is vilifying us. Stop treating us like animals and thugs and start treating us with some respect. That’s what we’re here today to say. We’ve been vilified. It’s disgusting … trying to make us embarrassed of our profession.
O’Meara denounced former Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin, charged with killing George Floyd last month, and said politicians and the media must stop equating the alleged murder with the actions of New York police officers.
“I am not Derek Chauvin. They are not him,” O’Meara said, pointing to police officers behind him. “He killed someone, we didn’t. We are restrained. We roundly reject what he did as disgusting. It’s not what we do.”
“Everybody’s trying to shame us — the legislators, the press. Everybody’s trying to shame us into being embarrassed about our profession,” O’Meara said. “You know what? This [police badge] isn’t stained by someone in Minneapolis. It’s still got a shine on it, and so do theirs.”
While Mayor Bill de Blasio has vowed to cut funding for the New York City Police Department (NYPD), violent crime in the city has surged despite continuing to be in semi-lockdown over the Chinese coronavirus crisis.
Over the last month, for example, murder has jumped more than 94 percent compared to the same time last year. Burglaries — now that suspects can be freed with0ut paying bail — have increased almost 34 percent in the last month compared to 2019.
Grand larceny auto, whereby suspects likewise are freed now without having to pay bail, has also become the fastest growing crime in New York City.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
THE REAL ISSUE ON COP CRIMES ARE COP UNIONS. THEY PROTECT THEIR CRIMINAL COPS AND ALWAYS HAVE!
The videos below are of a 2014 incident in Independence, Missouri where former policeman Timothy N. Runnels arrested Bryce Masters, a 17-year-old boy. The first video is two minutes and is very disturbing, especially the ending. The second video is 54 minutes and includes the arrival on the scene of backup and ambulance. The second video shows a brief split screen of what Masters shot of the incident before Runnels tased him into cardiac arrest.
The incident was covered in depth by The Intercept and by the website for Britain's Daily Mail. The incident was also covered at Officer.com. In 2018 in nearby Kansas City, the Star's Tony Rizzo reported: "Federal prosecutors later charged Runnels criminally with violating Masters' civil rights, and the former officer was sentenced in 2016 to four years in prison. Runnels, 35, is scheduled to be released from custody in January 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons." Here's the only clear photo of Runnels I could find on the Net. If you see him, steer clear.
Blacks are by no means the only victims of police brutality. Police departments must do a better job of identifying and quickly getting rid of any thugs on their payrolls, but they're being protected by the police unions. We need our police, but not the criminal rogues.
To watch the videos at YouTube, click on these URLs:
Editors at the Washington Post used 34 paragraphs of emotion, drama, and death to hide police forces’ rising ability to reduce lethal shootings amid many dramatic and dangerous confrontations with black men.
“In 2015, the first year The Post tallied these numbers [of police shootings], officers killed 94 unarmed people, the largest group among them black men: 38,” the newspaper reported in the 35th paragraph of a lead article on June 8.
The news of progress came in the next, the 36th, paragraph, which showed that police shootings of unarmed black men and women have dropped by 60 percent:
The following year saw a large drop in the number of unarmed shootings, declining to 51, with 22 of those killed being white and 19 black. The number has remained relatively steady each year since. In 2019, 56 unarmed people were shot and killed by police, with white people accounting for 25 of them, while 15 of them were black.
The article did not combine the numbers to enable readers to recognize the 60 percent decline.
Two paragraphs later, the Post‘s editors and reporters posted a comment acknowledging the progress:
“The reduction in fatal shootings of unarmed suspects is much more of an important factor than the overall number,” said Geoffrey P. Alpert, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina and co-author of “Evaluating Police Uses of Force.” “That shows real progress. . . . That probably is a better barometer of what’s going on with police in the black community than the total number of fatal shootings.”
Instead of spotlighting the 60 percent drop, the Post‘s headline sprayed gasoline on the national protests ignited by the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota: “Protests spread over police shootings. Police promised reforms. Every year, they still shoot and kill nearly 1,000 people.”
The 15 black people who were shot in 2019 died in a wide variety of circumstances that blur the supposedly clear lines between armed and unarmed suspects.
For example, in June 2019, Kevin Pudlik was killed after a car chase in Detroit, according to WWJ News Radio:
Police rammed the car several times in an attempt to bring it to a stop. Several police cars finally had the vehicle mostly surrounded and stopped in the middle of the street, but it was able to escape. The driver turned down a side street, dodging several civilian vehicles.
Police eventually cornered the vehicle near a wall and were able to arrest the driver, who tried to run over several officers in the area of Fort Street and West End. Officer Dan Donakowski says that’s when officers began to fire shots. The driver was wounded, while Pudlik was killed. The condition of the driver was not released.
Authorities said two guns were recovered from the car.
And the Forth Worth Star-Telegramreported in October 2019:
Jefferson was playing Call of Duty with her 8-year-old nephew in their home, according to an attorney hired to represent her family, when she heard a noise outside and looked out of her window at about 2:30 a.m. Saturday. She was shot by an officer who had quietly approached the house through the backyard.
He was identified on Monday afternoon as Aaron Dean. He resigned from the Fort Worth Police Department on Monday morning. On Monday evening, Dean was arrested on a charge of murder, booked into jail and released on bail.
The Washington Post hinted at the improved numbers before the 34th paragraph.
The 12th paragraph said, “The number of black and unarmed people fatally shot by police has declined since 2015.”
The 26th paragraph said, “Fatal police shootings are relatively rare events in a country where nearly 40,000 people die from firearms each year. Hundreds of thousands of police officers work in America, most of whom will never fire their guns on duty.”
"A lie used by cynical media manipulators and unscrupulous politicians who understand that racial strife -- race hatred -- is their path to power, even if it destroys the country." https://video.foxnews.com/v/6161524397001
With a great deal of rhetoric accompanied by a political stunt, the Democratic congressional leadership on Monday released its “Justice in Policing 2020” bill.
Prior to the press conference to present the measure, more than 20 Democratic lawmakers, all wearing African kente cloths, knelt in the Capitol’s Emancipation Hall for eight minutes and 46 seconds, the amount of time fired Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kept his knee on the neck of George Floyd, killing the 46-year-old African American worker.
The group of Democrats included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Karen Bass and senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris.
At the press conference, Bass, Pelosi, Schumer and other sponsors of the bill repeatedly cited the nationwide mass demonstrations against the murder of Floyd and touted their bill as a “transformational” and “bold” attack on police violence and systemic racism.
But their statements and the token character
of the reforms included in the bill make clear
that the measure is nothing of the kind.
Rather, it is a political maneuver designed to
provide cover for Democratic governors and
mayors who have overseen brutal police
attacks on protesters, not to mention the pro-
police record of the Obama administration.
It is also aimed at containing and dissipating social protests by workers and youth against not only racism and the fascistic Trump administration, but also the social inequality, repression and poverty that are embedded in the capitalist system and magnified by the coronavirus pandemic.
The Democrats are well aware that even their collection of mild reforms has no chance of being passed by the Republican-controlled Senate or signed into law by President Trump. Just minutes after the Democrats’ press conference, Trump, who later met behind closed doors with law enforcement officials, tweeted: “This year has seen the lowest crime numbers in our Country’s recorded history, and now the Radical Left Democrats want to Defund and Abandon our Police. Sorry, I want LAW & ORDER!”
The major provisions of the bill include:
* Changes in the wording of statutes dealing with police abuse that somewhat lower the legal threshold for obtaining a conviction. The bill alters the federal standard for criminal police behavior from “willfully” violating the constitutional rights of a victim to doing so “knowingly or with reckless disregard.”
It also changes the standard for determining whether the use of force is justified from whether it is “reasonable” to whether it is “necessary.”
* It somewhat limits, but does not eliminate, the application of “qualified immunity” to police offenders. For the past 15 years, the Supreme Court has interpreted the “qualified immunity” doctrine, which applies to public officials pursuing their official duties, to vacate civil suits and throw out criminal cases against police who break the law or use unwarranted force.
Legal researchers Amir H. Ali and Emily Clark argued in 2019 that “qualified immunity permits law enforcement and other government officials to violate people’s constitutional rights with virtual impunity.” The Obama administration repeatedly intervened in Supreme Court cases to uphold the blanket use of “qualified immunity” to shield cops from civil suits or criminal prosecution.
* The bill limits, but does not eliminate, the transfer of military equipment to the police. Obama continued the practice of militarizing police departments with billions of dollars worth of military-grade weapons, armored vehicles, attack helicopters, drones and other tactical weapons.
* The bill creates a national register of police misconduct.
* It bans chokeholds.
* It establishes a grant program allowing—but not requiring—state attorneys general to create an independent process to investigate misconduct or excessive force.
* It requires body cameras for federal uniformed police officers and dashboard cameras for marked federal police vehicles. These federal forces comprise only a small fraction of the 687,000 full-time law enforcement officers in the US. The bill also mandates that state and local agencies use federal funds to “ensure” the use of body and dashboard cameras.
* The bill bans racial profiling.
* It grants subpoena powers to the civil rights division of the Justice Department for “pattern and practice” investigations of police departments.
* It makes lynching a federal hate crime.
At the press conference, Bass, who represents parts of South Los Angeles, went out of her way to profess her support for the police. “I am certain that police officers, professionals who risk their lives every day, are deeply concerned about their profession and do not want to work in an environment that requires their silence when they know a fellow officer is abusing the public,” she said.
She went on to present police officers as the unwitting victims of poor training and policing practices and a lack of “transparency.”
Pelosi called the bill a “transformational” and “structural change,” ran through its main provisions, and concluded by saying, “Police brutality is a heartbreaking reflection of an entrenched system of racial injustice in America.” She called the bill a “first step,” promising “more to come.”
New York Senator Schumer, known as the senator from Wall Street, referred nervously to the massive demonstrations that have continued in New York City and in cities and towns across the US for nearly two weeks, noting in particular their multi-racial and multi-ethnic diversity.
He then proceeded to define the issue of police violence exclusively in racial terms, saying, “The poison of racism affects more than just our criminal justice system. It runs much deeper than that. There are racial disparities in housing and health care, education, the economy, jobs, income and wealth and COVID has only placed a magnifying glass on them.”
This is a continuation of the narrative that has been employed by the ruling class, and particularly that faction represented by the Democratic Party, for more than 50 years, ever since the massive urban rebellions of the 1960s. Beginning with the Kerner Commission Report of 1968, there has been a concerted effort to portray the essential social category in America as race, rather than class.
BLOG EDITOR: THE DEMOCRAT PARTY RELIED ON THE BLACK SLAVE CLASS UNTIL IT BECAME APPARENT THAT THE INVADING ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS WOULD MAKE A BETTER CLASS OF SLAVES.
ASK YOURSELF WHAT BARACK OBAMA EVER DID FOR BLACK AMERICA AS HE SABOTAGED HOMELAND SECURITY TO FLOOD AMERICAN WITH DEM VOTING 'CHEAP' LABOR MEXICANS.
This was designed from the outset to divert attention from the class exploitation upon which capitalism is based and within which racism serves as a weapon to divide the working class. All of the African-American lawmakers at the Democrats’ press conference are wealthy beneficiaries of policies that have elevated a thin layer of blacks into the upper-middle class and the bourgeoisie, while leaving black workers, and the working class as a whole, in far worse circumstances than in the 1960s.
A reporter asked if the sponsors of the “Justice in Policing Act” supported calls for “defunding” the police that have been embraced by some local Democratic officials, who have generally defined it as diverting a small portion of the police budget to social services. Bass had previously made clear she did not support such calls and the campaign of Joe Biden released a statement Monday disavowing the demand.
Responding to the question, Pelosi said, “We want to work with our police departments. There are many who take pride in their work, and we want to be able to make sure the focus is on them.” She went on to warn against getting “into these questions that may come by the small minds of some.”
Government-employee unions—including those for police—put the power and interests of their workers above the public interest.
George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, and the ensuing protests and urban riots, have brought police departments under enormous scrutiny and widespread hostility. Liberals and conservatives alike have identified police unions as a barrier to salutary reform. They aren’t wrong—and union contracts are one reason why reforming police departments is so hard. But while Left and Right may agree about police unions, those on the left would not make a broader connection: that the problems posed by police unions in particular are similar to those with public-sector unions in general.
Liberal sympathy for organized labor doesn’t extend to police unions because cops are seen as the “bad proletariat.” Liberals try to paint the problems of police unions as unique to law enforcement, rather than endemic to unionized government. In the wake of the Floyd killing, some have called for the abolition of police forces—and, in Minneapolis, the city council has announced that it will “begin the process” of disbanding the city’s police department. On the other side, conservative aversion to government unions often stops short of police unions because conservatives worry that criticism of cop unions will be mistaken for criticism of the police. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, for example, excluded police unions from Act 10, which dramatically weakened public-sector unions in his state.
The deeper problem is that unionization and collective bargaining have made it almost impossible to bring about meaningful reform of state and local government, policing included. The consequences are huge, because the inability to reform government means that performance suffers and public trust in key institutions declines.
Collective bargaining is not fundamentally about products or services—whether public safety, education, automobiles, or anything else—but about the power and interests of workers and management. Public-sector unions are in the business of winning better salaries and benefits, protecting job security, and advancing their members’ occupational interests. Organizational incentives, and state law, ensure that union leaders prioritize these amenities.
Police and public schools are the institutions of government with which Americans most frequently engage. Police protect our most vulnerable citizens and allow communities to thrive. Schools offer opportunities for social mobility. There are thousands of heroic and devoted police officers and school teachers. But unionization and collective bargaining have enmeshed these two crucial government functions in red tape that too often protects the inept and abusive.
Collective bargaining in the public-safety and educational sectors strips government executives of the tools they need to supervise and manage their workforces effectively. Police chiefs and school principals struggle to weed out poor performers. A few bad actors can undermine an entire organizational culture.
Upholding the law presents unique challenges, and police can have adversarial relationships with the communities whom they serve. Consequently, police-union contracts contain myriad formal rules and procedures designed to protect police officers from the inevitable complaints—some justified, others not—that arise in the course of duty. Many big-city union contracts limit officer interrogation procedures after alleged wrongdoing, mandate the deletion of disciplinary records, and require cumbersome grievance proceedings.
Language spelling out these procedures often makes up the largest part of any contract—it’s roughly 20 percent of the New York City police officers’ contract, for example. These provisions allow both police unions and individual officers to challenge personnel actions by their superiors. If the matter can’t be settled by appealing up the chain of command, it is sent to binding arbitration. Arbitrators often split the difference and avoid dismissing officers. For instance, in 2018, a Seattle arbitrator reinstated—with back pay—an officer fired for punching a handcuffed, intoxicated woman. The nuisance involved in dealing with grievances, and the prospect that an appeal will reverse the outcome anyway, can dissuade supervisors from initiating discipline procedures against poor performers.
Police officers accused of misconduct are, consequently, rarely disciplined or punished insofar as investigations are long, highly regulated, and allow for frequent appeals. One study found that the worst 5 percent of officers in the Chicago Police Department accounted for a third of all civilian complaints. But few were ever disciplined or removed. Jason Van Dyke, the officer who killed an unarmed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014, was among the officers with the most civilian complaints. But he remained on active duty.
Teachers also enjoy extensive job protections that make them nearly impossible to fire. State laws and union contracts create a labyrinth of paperwork and processes. In most school districts, over 95 percent of teachers receive satisfactory ratings and get tenure (which means more job protections) after three years on the job. Many principals don’t even bother trying to dismiss bad teachers because of the costs involved. One study found that dismissing a veteran teacher for poor performance takes a minimum of two years; in Los Angeles and San Francisco, it takes at least five years.
Even teachers accused of sexual misconduct rarely lose their jobs. Under many state laws or union contracts, an independent investigator—usually an independent law firm or the school superintendent—first vets any accusation. Then the case goes before an arbitrator chosen by the teachers’ union and school district. Usually arbitrators’ decisions split the difference and result in suspensions or fines rather than dismissal.
As a result of such protections, New York City infamously put hundreds of teachers in “rubber rooms,” where they were paid full salaries and accrued benefits but could not interact with kids. This “program” cost the city some $800 million a year. Unable to end it fully, the city converted it into the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR), which continued to pay teachers not to teach to the tune of $105 million a year. In 2019, 930 teachers held spots in the ATR—perhaps 25 of whom were there because of charges of misconduct—costing the city nearly $100 million in salaries and benefits.
Within the confines of collective bargaining, public executives need to push for a recovery of management rights. Only then might school principals and police chiefs have a fighting chance of improving their organizations. Going further, states may want to revisit the extent to which work rules that establish disciplinary procedures should even be the subject of collective bargaining. Greater accountability in state and local government would be better for everyone, good teachers and cops included. Weeding out poor performers will improve public services, protect communities, boost organizational morale, and spur upward mobility. It’s time to put the mission of public agencies ahead of job protections for public workers.
Daniel DiSalvo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and professor of political science at the City College of New York-CUNY.
No comments:
Post a Comment