The Shooting Gallery: Police Violence MEGATHREAD

[Razgovory]

I don't think I want to watch that.   From the description sounds like a domestic call.  Those things are shit.

[mongers]

Good grief, on the face of it not good PR and suggests one or tow twisted cops are in that department:

Florida police shot images of black men in training

US police officers have been criticised for using mug shots of black suspects for target practice in Florida.

The images used by North Miami Beach Police were discovered by a female soldier who used the firing range after a police training session.

Sgt Valerie Deant recognised her brother as one of the target images, according to NBC Miami.

Police Chief J Scott Dennis said that his officers had used poor judgment but denied racial profiling.

He told NBC that using real suspect images was an important part of training for his sniper team and that his officers had not violated any policies.

"There is no discipline forthcoming from the individuals who were involved with this," he said.

A police spokeswoman added on Friday that officers use targets of all races and genders in their training sessions.
'Speechless'

The six targets left behind by police were found last month by Sgt Deant, a band member of the Florida Army National Guard.

"I was like, why is my brother being used for target practice?" she told NBC Miami on Friday.

The photo of her brother Woody Deant had been taken after his arrest as a teenager for drag racing. It had been shot several times.

Mr Deant said he was "speechless" when he heard the news.

"Now I'm being used as a target? I'm not even living that life according to how they portrayed me as. I'm a father. I'm a husband. I'm a career man. I work nine to five."

Police Chief Dennis said that was they were "very very concerned" that one of the targets had been of a man who would be on the streets of North Miami Beach.
...

Full article here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-30860057

[jimmy olsen]

The fact that we don't have solid numbers on police shootings really disturbs me.

You can watch a video of the speech here
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/us/politics/fbi-director-comey-speaks-frankly-about-police-view-of-blacks.html?_r=0

Surprising Speech by F.B.I. Chief Focuses on Police and Race

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDTFEB. 12, 2015

WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, on Thursday delivered an unusually frank speech about the relationship between the police and black people, saying that officers who work in neighborhoods where blacks commit crimes at higher rates develop a cynicism that shades their attitudes about race.

He said that officers — whether they are white or any other race — who are confronted with white men on one side of the street and black men on the other do not view them the same way. The officers develop a mental shortcut that "becomes almost irresistible and maybe even rational by some lights" because of the number of black suspects they have arrested.

"We need to come to grips with the fact that this behavior complicates the relationship between police and the communities they serve," Mr. Comey said in the speech, at Georgetown University.

While officers should be closely scrutinized, he said, they are "not the root cause of problems in our hardest-hit neighborhoods," where blacks grow up "in environments lacking role models, adequate education and decent employment."

"They lack all sorts of opportunities that most of us take for granted," Mr. Comey said.

Mr. Comey's speech was unprecedented for an F.B.I. director. Previous directors have limited their public comments about race to civil rights investigations, like those of murders committed by the Ku Klux Klan and how the bureau wiretapped the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The surveillance of Dr. King is considered one of the F.B.I.'s greatest overreaches of power. Mr. Comey, who has led the F.B.I. for about 18 months, has said that as part of his job, he wants to foster a national debate about law enforcement issues that state and local authorities across the country are facing.

He said that he decided to give the speech because he felt that in the aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., the country had not "had a healthy dialogue," and that he did not "want to see those important issues drift away."

One remedy, Mr. Comey said, would be for the police to have more interactions with those they are charged to protect. "It's hard to hate up close," he said.

Mr. Comey said there was significant research that says all people have unconscious racial biases. Although people cannot help their instinctive reactions, law enforcement needs "to design systems and processes to overcome that very human part of us all," he said.

"Although the research may be unsettling, what we do next is what matters most," Mr. Comey said.

He said that law enforcement agencies across the country needed to be compelled to report shootings that involve police officers so there can be a baseline to measure the issue.

"It's ridiculous that I can't tell you how many people were shot by the police last week, last month, last year," Mr. Comey said.

In addressing race relations, Mr. Comey was trying to do something that politicians and law enforcement leaders — including his boss, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. — have failed to do without creating significant backlash.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story

After the fatal shooting in Ferguson, Mr. Holder was widely criticized by police organizations and Republicans for a series of comments he made that were seen as unfairly critical of the police. Before the results of an investigation into the Ferguson Police Department were complete, Mr. Holder said that the department needed wholesale changes, that he stood with the people of Ferguson and that he had been profiled by the police.

Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York faced a crisis with his police department for comments he made after a grand jury on Staten Island declined to indict a police officer whose chokehold led to the death of an unarmed black man. Officers also stopped enforcing low levels crimes.

Mr. de Blasio said that he and his wife, Chirlane McCray, had instructed their son, Dante, who is biracial, "on how to take special care" during his interactions with the police. The mayor said that he worried about whether his son was safe at night. The police responded by turning their backs on Mr. de Blasio at the memorial services for two police officers who were killed in December.

Mr. Comey has shown a willingness to weigh in aggressively on race issues as far back as college.

As a student at the College of William and Mary, Mr. Comey was a co-author of a 1980 editorial in the school's newspaper that took the college to task for its lack of efforts to foster diversity. He said that the college had set aside millions of dollars to improve its athletics programs, but that it had not dedicated nearly as much money to its recruiting budget for members of minority groups.

"So, if the college wants to enroll more black students, what is the holdup?" the editorial said. "Is the college unable to provide the resources necessary for an effective recruiting program? Unable, no. Unwilling, yes."

It added: "We think that a lack of commitment is the problem. The college, it seems, is only committed to staying out of the courtroom. We wish we attended a college committed to its social responsibilities."

[Valmy]

Better late than never.  Since Ferguson people seem to be taking this issue much more seriously.  That's excellent, glad to see the FBI taking the lead.

[Razgovory]

The guy isn't really that white either.

Apparently white enough to fit the "white men gunning down black youths" narrative.

Well I guess he's not invited to the country club then.

[CountDeMoney]

That's excellent, glad to see the FBI taking the lead.

Maybe next up they'll start addressing their own shooting investigations.  But hey, baby steps.

[Syt]

Thanks to Scips for putting this on Facebook:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/in-fairfax-va-a-different-no-less-scary-police-shooting-1.2960995

In Fairfax, Va., a different, no-less-scary police shooting

White privilege didn't protect John Geer.

That's not to say he didn't have it. As a middle-class kitchen designer living in the pleasant Washington suburb of Fairfax, Va., he had nothing whatsoever in common with the impoverished black men killed by police in Missouri and Brooklyn last year.

Those deaths triggered riots, marches and demonstrations across America, and interventions by the White House.

But Geer, pierced 18 months ago by a police bullet as he stood inside the screen door of his own home, his hands raised, begging not to be shot, simply disappeared into the emotional mixing bowl of American news and political priorities.

That should not have happened. The killing of John Geer is probably the clearest and most compelling example of what amounts to police impunity in recent American history.

He committed no crime the day he was killed. Even the officer who shot him acknowledges that. There was no struggle. The details are not murky.

But because no one was marching in the streets on behalf of John Geer, because he was absent from national headlines, the system was able to make his outrageous death go away by the simple expedient of doing nothing and refusing to discuss it.

Here are the facts:

In August 2013, Geer's common law wife, who was breaking up with him and moving out, called police to report he was angrily throwing her possessions onto his front lawn.

Asked whether Geer had weapons, the woman answered yes, but they were legally owned and secured. No, he hadn't been drinking.

Two squad cars — four officers —  initially responded. Geer, on seeing them, retreated into his home, refusing to answer questions.

A few minutes later, Officer Rodney Barnes, a trained police negotiator, arrived, and as the four other policemen stood close behind him with weapons drawn, he began trying to coax John Geer out onto the porch.

Barnes would later recall that Geer was polite, but reluctant to leave his home, saying repeatedly he was frightened of being killed.

He said "I don't want anybody to get hurt," the negotiator told investigators a few months later. "I don't want to get shot."

'I know I can get shot'

Barnes asked Geer if he owned a pistol. Geer said yes, and fetched it. He held it up, holstered, for Barnes to see and set it aside, raising his hands again. He offered to let Barnes come into the house and retrieve the weapon.

He asked for permission to scratch his nose, Barnes said, and did it slowly, then raised his hands again. He asked to reach into his pocket for his phone; Barnes asked him not to, and he obeyed.

"He said 'I know if I reach down or drop my hands I can get shot," Barnes told detectives later. "I said, hey, nobody's going to shoot you..."

But Geer pointed to one nearby officer in particular: Adam Torres, who kept raising his Sig Sauer pistol from the "ready" position (pointed at Geer's legs) to aim at Geer's chest.

Please ask him not to point his gun at me, Geer begged Barnes. Geer even offered to come out and be handcuffed voluntarily if Torres and the other patrolmen would agree to move "way back."

Then he asked to scratch his nose again. Barnes consented. And Torres fired.

Geer, grabbing his wound, screamed in pain and stepped back, slamming his door.

"And I'm like, who the fuck shot?" Barnes told detectives later. "I kinda got a little pissed."

Torres acknowledged it had been him, and began muttering how he was sorry, and that his wrist was hurting. Then, unbidden, he told Barnes how he'd had a fight over the phone with his wife just before arriving on the scene.

Everyone else is wrong

Asked by Barnes why he'd fired, Torres said Geer had dropped his hands to his waist suddenly, that he appeared to be going for a weapon.

"I said I didn't see that," said Barnes later. "You know, and I never took my eye off him (Geer)."

The other three officers who'd been present told investigators the same thing. So did two civilian witnesses.

But prosecutors and police commanders and county officials buried the case.

Fairfax County's top prosecutor declared a conflict of interest and referred the shooting to federal authorities.

The police department stonewalled reporters.

Federal investigators did investigate, and have reported to the U.S. attorney in Virginia, who has done nothing.

And all this was done under a cloak of secrecy, until, earlier this month, a judge finally ordered disclosure of nearly 11,000 documents, containing interviews with nearly everyone involved.

Torres, it turns out, stuck to his story that the other four officers were wrong.

Does he regret having shot Geer? "I don't feel sorry for shooting the guy at all."

Why did he tell Barnes immediately afterward he was sorry? He was concerned about having upset Barnes by shooting, he said.

Why did he talk about his wrist hurting? He doesn't remember. Why did he immediately say he'd just had a fight with his wife? "I don't know why."

Under the radar

The judge's disclosure order has created a bizarre situation: Nearly all the available evidence, including audio of the witness statements, is now available on the Fairfax County website.

According to those official documents, the shooter — a cop with significant anger issues (he once screamed and cursed at prosecutors in open court) — is contradicted by four fellow officers and two civilian witnesses. That sort of rank-breaking is practically unheard of.

And yet there has been no judicial action, and almost no public uproar. Most politicians have remained silent. Those who have marched against police shootings in the past have been largely uninterested.

A protest at Fairfax police headquarters drew a couple of dozen people. Only the Washington Post has taken a serious interest in the case.

But the killing of John Geer should frighten everyone. It is the best example yet that while police often target minorities disproportionately, their basic and overriding demand is total and unquestioning submission to their authority.

Resist, however peacefully and even in your own home, and heaven help you, no matter what your skin colour.

[garbon]

What a bizzare news item.

[The Brain]

I don't fully understand the situation. They don't have to investigate murders and prosecute murderers?

[Valmy]

Um I think we all knew unarmed white men get shot by the police, it is just it happens to unarmed black men more often.  Slightly annoyed that the CBC has latched on such a poorly defined concept as "white privilege" but that's neither here nor there.

[MadImmortalMan]

I wonder if his "wife" has any remorse.

[CountDeMoney]

I wonder if his "wife" has any remorse.

When your wife fights with you when she's moving out, does she expect you to be executed by the police for throwing her stuff out in the yard?

[jimmy olsen]

Make 'em squeal! 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/02/us/justice-department-report-to-fault-police-in-ferguson.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Justice Department to Fault Ferguson Police, Seeing Racial Bias in Traffic Stops


By MATT APUZZOMARCH 1, 2015
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has nearly completed a highly critical report accusing the police in Ferguson, Mo., of making discriminatory traffic stops of African-Americans that created years of racial animosity leading up to an officer's shooting of a black teenager last summer, law enforcement officials said.

According to several officials who have been briefed on the report's conclusions, the report criticizes the city for disproportionately ticketing and arresting African-Americans and relying on the fines to balance the city's budget. The report, which is expected to be released as early as this week, will force Ferguson officials to either negotiate a settlement with the Justice Department or face being sued by it on civil rights charges. Either way, the result is likely to be significant changes inside the Ferguson Police Department, which is at the center of a national debate over race and policing.

Ferguson erupted into angry, sometimes violent protests after a white police officer, Darren Wilson, shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, in August. The Justice Department investigated that shooting, and officials have said they will clear the officer of civil rights charges. That finding is also expected soon.

But the report into the broader practices of the local police department will give the context for the shooting, describing the mounting sense of frustration and anger in a predominantly black city where the police department and local government are mostly white.

While the Justice Department's exact findings are not yet known, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who is expected to leave office in the next few weeks, and other officials have said publicly that their investigation has focused on the use of excessive force and the treatment of prisoners in local jails as well as the traffic stops.

Blacks accounted for 86 percent of traffic stops in 2013 but make up 63 percent of the population, according to the most recent data published by the Missouri attorney general. And once they were stopped, black drivers were twice as likely to be searched, even though searches of white drivers were more likely to turn up contraband.



For people in Ferguson who cannot afford to pay their tickets, routine traffic stops can become yearslong ordeals, with repeated imprisonments because of mounting fines. Such fines are the city's second-largest source of revenue after sales tax. Federal investigators say that has provided a financial incentive to continue law enforcement policies that unfairly target African-Americans.

In an unrelated but similar case, the Justice Department recently filed court documents in a lawsuit over whether the city of Clanton, Ala., is running a debtors' prison. The lawsuit says city officials there keep poor people in jail simply because of their inability to pay fines.

"Because such systems do not account for individual circumstances of the accused, they essentially mandate pretrial detention for anyone who is too poor to pay the predetermined fee," wrote Vanita Gupta, the top civil rights prosecutor at the Justice Department, who is also supervising the Ferguson inquiry.

Investigators do not need to prove that Ferguson's policies are racially motivated or that the police intentionally singled out minorities. They need to show only that police tactics had a "disparate impact" on African-Americans and that this was avoidable. Nevertheless, the Justice Department's report is expected to include a reference to a racist joke that was circulated by email among city officials, according to several law enforcement officials.

James Knowles III, the mayor of Ferguson, said last week that he did not know what the Justice Department had found or would conclude. But he criticized Mr. Holder for saying recently that wholesale change was needed in Ferguson's police department.

"How come they haven't told us there is something that needs to be changed as they found it?" Mr. Knowles asked. "Why have they allowed whatever they think is happening to continue to happen for six months if that's the case?"

Mr. Holder has stood by his remarks, saying they were based on his deep understanding of the case. "The reality is, I've been briefed all along on this matter," he said at a news conference recently.

The Ferguson case will be the last in a long string of civil rights investigations into police departments that Mr. Holder has directed during his tenure. Since he became attorney general in 2009, the Justice Department has opened more than 20 such investigations and issued strong rebukes of departments in Cleveland and Albuquerque, accusing them of excessive force and unwarranted shootings.
 
The Ferguson report, however, is expected to more closely resemble last summer's report into police activities in Newark. There, as in Ferguson, the police stopped black people at a significantly higher rate than whites. "This disparity is stark and unremitting," the Justice Department wrote in that report, which concluded that African-Americans "bear the brunt" of the city's unconstitutional police practices.

In some cities investigated by the Justice Department, such as Albuquerque and Portland, Ore., city officials have said they are open to making changes and quickly reaching an agreement with the department to fix problems. Others have taken a more confrontational approach, did not settle and faced a federal civil rights lawsuit. The Justice Department has four such lawsuits open, including one against Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., and another against Sheriff Terry S. Johnson of Alamance County, N.C.

Mr. Knowles said he would not speculate on how Ferguson would respond to the report. "The City of Ferguson is going to make its decisions based on what its residents and the people in this region feel is necessary to move us forward," he said.

Mr. Knowles said the city hoped to increase diversity on its police force and was considering creating a board of citizens to help oversee it. He said the city was also considering creating a police youth program.

For Mr. Holder, the nation's first black attorney general, the Ferguson shooting was a signature moment. Already the most outspoken member of the Obama administration on issues of race relations, Mr. Holder became the president's emissary to Ferguson and helped calm tensions amid protests after the shooting. He spoke in personal terms about being stopped by police as a college student and again as a prosecutor in Washington.

"I wanted the people of Ferguson to know that I personally understood that mistrust," Mr. Holder said last summer after returning from Missouri. "I wanted them to know that while so much else may be uncertain, this attorney general and this Department of Justice stands with the people of Ferguson."

Comments like these attracted criticism from some police groups who said Mr. Holder was taking sides and casting aspersions on police officers. Mr. Holder has pledged that the Ferguson investigation — by far the most closely watched during his tenure — would be fair and independent. "I'm confident people will be satisfied with the results," he said.

John Eligon contributed reporting from Kansas City, Mo.

[derspiess]

They couldn't find a way to bring charges against Zimmerman or the Ferguson cop, so I guess this is something of a make-up call.  Probably won't placate the mob though.

[CountDeMoney]

Yeah, that must be it.