上海的月亮: EN — Sample of the free E-Book: POLICE STATE AMERICA

Police State America

Volume 2

LARRY ROMANOFF

CONTENTS

Chapter 1 — Imaginary Rule of Law

Chapter 2 — The US and International Law

Chapter 3 — The International Criminal Court

Chapter 4 — (Corporate) Crime in America

Chapter 5 — Diplomatic Immunity, American-Style

Chapter 6 — Dealing With Dissidents

Chapter 7 — The Criminalisation of Protest in America

Chapter 8 — Police Brutality

A sample chapter of this book:

CHAPTER 8 – Police Brutality

Police Brutality

Police brutality is an everyday occurrence in most of the US today, perhaps most notably in Los Angeles, Houston, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and other major cities where there exist large communities of blacks and Latinos. These people, especially the young and poor and the new immigrants, are harassed, assaulted and killed on a daily basis, being easy targets and having little protection from police who terrorise and intimidate them with impunity. The extent and variety of police brutality today in the US is alarming. It isn’t only what the police do, but the freedom with which they do it, almost never held to account or punished even for killing people who are unarmed and restrained. A contributing factor is that in American cities, police shootings and violence are investigated by the police themselves, with the result that virtually all violence and other crimes and almost 100% of police shootings are ruled to have been “justified”. The Police Departments maintain the pretext of a war on crime or drugs, but the truth is that there is a war against minorities, with the police conducting themselves more like an occupation army than civilian police. Dr. Paul Craig Roberts noted in an article that “According to news reports, during eight years of what is called the Iraq War more US citizens were murdered by the police than US soldiers were killed in the war. In other words, US police are a greater threat to Americans than enemy forces are to US soldiers who have invaded a foreign country.”

US police forces have become increasingly militarised, with equipment like firearms, Kevlar body armor and armored vehicles, their behavior reflecting this apparent new perception of their role. Clearly, the people in a general sense have become “the enemy” whom the police are not charged to protect but to control. This militarisation is now extending itself to police interrogations, following the military practice of “conditioning” prisoners before questioning, using harsh methods, yelling, swearing, making threats to instill fear and disorientation. Humiliation is another method of this so-called conditioning, resulting in an exponential rise in strip-searches and body cavity searches, enforced nakedness being one of the CIA’s long-standing methods of preparation for interrogation now having been adopted by American police forces generally. One PowerPoint training manual informed police to “Get them naked”; strip prisoners before they are questioned, and maintain them in physical discomfort.

The general public view today in so many American cities is that the local police are often borderline psychotics, ready to shoot and kill on almost any pretext, and always immune from sanction. There are countless cases of police beating and tasering physically and mentally disabled people, from people in wheelchairs to diabetics in glycemic shock or experiencing epileptic seizures. The US media attribute this psychopathic behavior to “a woeful lack of training” but this level of inhumanity clearly does not result from substandard training. It is instead the natural outcome of a pathological fascism that has infected the entire US government and military, the police and espionage agencies, DHS and FEMA, and more. These animals are in fact responding appropriately to the planned training they received. They have been taught to brutalise, terrorise and kill, and are well-informed of their immunity. That’s why they do it. No sane person can accept that this widespread behavior would continue unabated if it failed to meet with high-level approval.

Another justified public conviction is that today all levels of the US criminal justice system are at least partially corrupt and that the system will lie and commit any number of progressive illegalities to protect itself from judgment or sanction. The politicians and the mass media ignore this alarming rise in police criminality and justice system corruption, and instead continue to propagate the myth of a need for more prisons and yet more police, for the sake of capitalism and feeding the private prison system. All this in a situation with an exponential rise in police crime and physical brutality revealing a rotten justice system saturated with corruption and violence, racism and injustice. Since the preponderance of police brutality is clearly racially-motivated, perpetrated against blacks and Latinos, and since the matters die without further complaint, we must assume this is acceptable to Americans, at least the white ones. Brigitt Keller, an American lawyer who works for increased police accountability, stated that “The willingness of police to use very harsh measures against people has definitely increased”, that there has been “a clear escalation of violence by police, particularly since 9/11“. The Justice Department, which keeps all kinds of statistics on every other kind of violent crime, claims it collects no records of individuals killed annually by police in the US, but other sources have documented at least 1,000 or more killings each year, many of which fail to reach the news media.

In late 2014 the Wall Street Journal began an article on police killings in America with the following: “When 24-year-old Albert Jermaine Payton wielded a knife in front of the police in this city’s southeast corner, officers opened fire and killed him. Yet according to national statistics intended to track police killings, Mr. Payton’s death in August 2012 never happened. It is one of hundreds of homicides by law-enforcement agencies between 2007 and 2012 that aren’t included in records kept by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” A WSJ analysis of data from some of the largest police forces in the US found more than 500 police killings that were missing from any list, and there are potentially hundreds or even thousands more, meaning it is impossible to know how many people are killed by the police in the US each year. As one measure of the insanity of this epidemic of police killing, in the 31 days of March 2015, police in the United States killed more than twice as many people as did the UK did in the past 100 years, and about the same number as did China in the past century. In fact, American police kill far more people in one year than do all the other countries in the world combined.

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