Fuck the Police State

[Cuchulain]

Obviously, discussing the 'police state' can cover a lot of interrelated areas. I thought I'd share https://www.youtube.com/user/HONORYOUROATH/videos with you all. The channel belongs to Jeff Gray. He goes around (mostly) Florida doing what he calls 'First Amendment tests'. The wildly excessive reactions he gets from security guards, police and sometimes even the military for the simple act of filming in public (a constitutionally protected behavior) is sometimes comical, sometimes infuriating.

Jeff does this stuff really well. He's calm, confident and never breaks the law although he does get arrested from time to time. He usually litigates those instances and he always wins. YouTube has a lot of similar posters but Jeff is the best, imo. I think what he does is important and I'm glad he's got the patience to do it right. What do you folks think?

[Cuchulain]

Here's one of my favorite examples of Jeff's work.

[buttslinger]

"Covered entities may disclose protected health information to law enforcement officials for law enforcement purposes as required by law (including court orders, court-ordered warrants, subpoenas)".....

MUCH of Obamacare is about preventive medicine. No doctor routinely tests for drugs, but if a patient obviously has track marks, and is in a sense killing himself, what does the doctor do? Watch his patient die? Scold him? Wait til the cops catch up to him after he robs lots of houses? I don't know.

[broncofan]

Here's one of my favorite examples of Jeff's work.

I've got to admit I enjoyed it. As long as he is recording and it uploads right away I suppose what happens is witnessed by recording. I would not be able to maintain my cool like that. My favorite part was when he asked the guy the statute he's violating and the guy says "security purposes". I personally don't think it's practical for the layman to take that risk but I understand your view and it's great to see heavy-handed abuse thwarted.

[Stavros]

I think a more objective view is needed here. If you were living in a police state, I doubt any of you would be posting messages on HungAngels, and would probably only have access to it through the 'dark web'. There is a point at which the data being collected on individuals, and the degree of intervention in daily life by law enforcement crosses many boundaries of what I assume Americans think is acceptable, but a police state is usually a one-party state which controls everything from the borders on the ground to the borders of your mind. You may have deep problems with law enforcement but I don't think that is even remotely close to the USA becoming a 'police state'. The irony is that in the UK we often feel the issue is one of police neglect to do their duty rather than being over-zealous...and as Cuchulain's posts try to point out, you do still have the legal, constitutional right to challenge law enforcement officers...courage!

[wearboots4me]

I think a more objective view is needed here. If you were living in a police state, I doubt any of you would be posting messages on HungAngels, and would probably only have access to it through the 'dark web'. There is a point at which the data being collected on individuals, and the degree of intervention in daily life by law enforcement crosses many boundaries of what I assume Americans think is acceptable, but a police state is usually a one-party state which controls everything from the borders on the ground to the borders of your mind. You may have deep problems with law enforcement but I don't think that is even remotely close to the USA becoming a 'police state'. The irony is that in the UK we often feel the issue is one of police neglect to do their duty rather than being over-zealous...and as Cuchulain's posts try to point out, you do still have the legal, constitutional right to challenge law enforcement officers...courage!

Yes, our country is not a real police state, thankfully. But police in some towns here in America do use unnecessary force regularly with impunity. Not to mention petty harassment of anyone considered "undesirables". Now that cellphone cameras record video, there is tons of video evidence of this online. We do have rights, trouble is, you need a lawyer to have these rights respected. Lawyers cost money, and in any case unless you are a lawyer yourself you can't have a lawyer with you 24/7. Sure, we have a lot of freedom compared to actual police states, but if a cop beats or chokes you to death because he thinks you're a "smartass", you are still dead, there's no appeal for that. So police accountability is important.

[Stavros]

Yes, our country is not a real police state, thankfully. But police in some towns here in America do use unnecessary force regularly with impunity. Not to mention petty harassment of anyone considered "undesirables". Now that cellphone cameras record video, there is tons of video evidence of this online. We do have rights, trouble is, you need a lawyer to have these rights respected. Lawyers cost money, and in any case unless you are a lawyer yourself you can't have a lawyer with you 24/7. Sure, we have a lot of freedom compared to actual police states, but if a cop beats or chokes you to death because he thinks you're a "smartass", you are still dead, there's no appeal for that. So police accountability is important.

I think that when you compare the situation today to what it was, say, before the civil rights movement reached its apex in the 1960s, there appears to have been a distinct militarization of policing -it has happened in the UK too, but not on the scale of the USA because most of our law enforcement officers are not armed with guns. Here, military-style policing tends to be limited to large demonstrations where 'kettling' is used, a manouevre using sticks and shields whereby the police 'corral' or 'kettle' people into a small space without exits which can then lead to tempers boiling over and in some cases, severe injury or death.

In the USA there were major demonstrations against the US involvement in Vietnam as well as Civil Rights, and I wonder if policing changed in order to deal with large gatherings of people in a relatively limited space, and how this 'militarization' of tactics in public spaces was extended to cover areas of town with gangs and drugs problems, although I think that as in the UK the epidemic of hard drug dealing and addiction took off in the 1980s, and is either coincident with, or caused by the war against the USSR in Afghanistan, as the demand for the locally grown poppies used to make heroin fuelled the 'war economy' with drugs and weapons as the main sources of revenue. Perhaps one reason why Afghanistan continues to be so difficult to rule is that farmers prefer poppies to tomatoes, though guns have always been part of the furniture in that country.

What this suggests, is that if military policing has become part of the overall policing culture, some culture change will be needed to remove the worst excesses that we associate with violent attacks on law enforcement on the one hand, and the unreasonable harassment of civilians by law enforcement on the other. But I also wonder if these trends in society are linked to what I perceive to be a decline in the concept of citizenship in which we, as citizens in a pluralist, liberal democracy expect and are expected to play a more direct role in local and national decision-making than we now do.

I think on both sides of the pond there is a feeling among many ordinary citizens that we no longer matter outside of election day, that major decisions are made by Central government in the interests of 'big capital' and interest groups with the money and power to successfully lobby legislators, be it on oil and gas exploration techniques such as 'fracking', or campaigns against abortion and planned parenthood. It is in a way ironic if one can point to gay marriage as an outcome of popular mobilisation, for it may be an isolated case of government recognising how society has changed.

It is when you look at issues such as jobs, housing and education that I think there is a widening gap between people which undermines a collective idea of citizenship as something that we share. The 'free market' culture has tended, in the UK in particular to create a more selfish agenda in which what once was considered good for society as a whole is now limited to what I think is good for me and my family. Saul Alinsky became the object of loathing among free market individualists because he believed in collective action, yet he never formed a political party or a social movement because he believed citizens had to do these things on their own initiative, if they wanted to, and crucially, organised people not to attack the state but to claim their constitutional rights and often rights available in local areas, such as Chicago which were not implemented by the city council for political or financial reasons. In this sense, citizenship empowered people to demand changes to housing and education which they already had a right to, but the weakest area is simply that nobody can create jobs on demand.

Technology is removing the human element from a substantial part of production, so that more and more jobs are found in the service sector or the 'knowledge economy' which is great if you can fit into those, but if you can't then chronic unemployment and welfare becomes the norm, as do depressed communities where communal life at its worst may be characterised by gangs and drugs -something that one associates with Baltimore, but is also common in the cities of the UK.

If there are no significant long term changes to the jobs environment, and if lawlessness continues to encourage military style policing, and if citizens continue to feel left out, these problems will not be remedied, but I feel gloomy because I don't see where enough jobs for low-or-unskilled people are going to come from to give people a daily occupation with a living wage.

A rather long winded way of saying, in this context, that policing is a reflection of social and economic change, rather than being a cause of it.

[buttslinger]

The People already have The Power, but The Police would have to bomb Pearl Harbor before the sleeping giant awakens and see the police as a real threat to them. I don't even think Black People hate the police as much as they hate whitey in general, and when an unarmed black male gets gunned down by the police, that's the perfect time to vent their rage and take it to the streets.
If THE PEOPLE screamed loudly enough against the ONE PERCENT, it wouldn't matter that they had Congress in their pocket, Congress would have to enact laws that stripped Big Business's unfair advantage.
You'll never hear white America admit that it kind of likes cops busting a few heads in the ghetto, but they do. You won't hear church ladies give an AMEN when the cops round up a bunch of tranny cocksuckers on backpage. The police and the one percent are in charge of the vengeance and avarice natures of the American public. They do the dirty work so white America can keep it's hands clean.

[Stavros]

Well at least America has the Oath Keepers, clad in body armour and sporting automatic weapons to protect them...as one of them in Ferguson said when asked

“We are not a bunch of thugs. We are trained, we are patriots, we love our country, our constitution and our fellow men and we want people to behave themselves,”

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...tomatic-rifles

[broncofan]

About a year or so ago there was a rancher named Cliven Bundy who did not want to pay to have his cows graze on federal land. We had a thread about it here and one of our former members seemed to be a big fan of the Oath Keepers. I had not heard of them until then, but they played a role as agitators in that situation, and have arrived in Ferguson looking for attention.