Epic Hypocrisy by Tweet

‘As Chief Prosecutor, Klobuchar Declined to Bring Charges Against Cop that Killed George Floyd; While serving as Minnesota’s chief prosecutor between 1999 and 2007, Klobuchar declined to bring charges against more than two dozen officers who had killed citizens while on duty – including against the cop that killed George Floyd’, Alan Macleod, May 27, 2019

“The latest example of America’s racist police brutality problem was caught on camera in Minneapolis Monday, as Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on 46-year-old African-American George Floyd’s neck for over seven minutes until he passed out and died. In its headline on its website, Minneapolis police described the event as “man dies after medical incident during police interaction,” laundering themselves of any responsibility. Chauvin continued his assault even as Floyd desperately pleaded that he could not breathe, while bystanders protested his brutality. “You’re fucking stopping his breathing there, bro,” warned one concerned passer-by. Even after passing out, Chauvin did not release pressure on his neck. Chauvin has killed multiple times before while in uniform, has shot and wounded others and is well-known to local activist groups.

A history of racist policing, thanks to Klobuchar

Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, who Joe Biden recently asked to undergo vetting to be his running mate for November, issued a very tepid statement about the incident, describing the police killing of an unarmed black man over an alleged forged check as merely an “officer involved death,” – a copaganda word often used by police as a euphemism for “murder.”

Klobuchar also called for a “complete and thorough outside investigation into what occurred, and those involved in this incident must be held accountable.” However, this is unlikely to occur, in no small part because of Klobuchar herself and the precedent she set while serving as the state’s chief prosecutor between 1999 and 2007. In that time, she did not bring charges against more than two dozen officers who had killed citizens while on duty – including against Chauvin himself.”

Senator Hypocrite’s link goes to:

Minnesota lawmakers pass sweeping package of police accountability measures;n  Star Tribune, July 21, 2020, startribune.com

The bill, [<8-pge pdf] one of the most substantial changes to the state’s criminal justice system in years, includes a statewide ban on chokeholds and neck restraints — such as the one used on Floyd — and a prohibition on warrior-style training for officers. It enhances data collection around deadly force encounters, requires officers to intervene and creates a new state unit to investigate such cases. The bill boosts funding for crisis intervention training, creates a panel of expert arbitrators to handle police misconduct cases and establishes incentives for officers to live in the communities they police.

The House approved the measure 102 to 29 just before midnight. The Senate passed it 60 to 7 a couple of hours later and sent the bill this morning to Gov. Tim Walz.

The hard-fought passage came after weeks of legislative impasse that had already derailed another special session in June — one that was initially called to review Walz’s extension of his emergency powers. But the continuing outrage over Floyd’s killing kept up the pressure on the only divided legislature in the nation to find common ground when Walz extended the state of emergency again in July.”

Research Memo: HF 1 (Mariani) – The MN Police Accountability Act, startribune pdf, 8 pages, linked above.  A few excerpts, my bolds:

“It will require some data collection on officer misconduct and use of deadly force incidents. It will ban the use of chokeholds in most incidents and require officers to intervene when another officer is using excessive force.”

Sections 7 and 8 – Banning Chokeholds and Other Certain Restraints

Prohibits a peace officer from using certain neck restraints, unless section 609.066 [????] authorizes the use of deadly force to protect the peace officer or another from death or great bodily harm.

With the exception described above, officers will no longer be able to use chokeholds, they will not be able to tie all of the person’s limbs together behind the person’s back to render the person immobile, and they cannot secure a person I [sic] any way that results in transporting the person face down in a vehicle. The only time a peace officer can restrict free movement of a person’s neck or head is to protect the peace officer or another from imminent harm.

For the purposes of this section, chokeholds are defined as “a method by which a person applies sufficient pressure to a person to make breathing difficult or impossible, and includes but is not limited to any pressure to the neck, throat, or windpipe that may prevent or hinder breathing, or reduce the intake of air.” It also means, “applying pressure to a person’s neck on either side of the windpipe, but not to the windpipe itself, to stop the flow of blood to the brain via the carotid arteries.”

Section 12 – Prohibiting Warrior-Style Training

Prohibits the use of warrior-style training by law enforcement. It also states that the POST board (Board) may not certify a continuing education course that includes warrior-style training; the Board may not grant continuing education credit to a peace officer for a course that includes warrior-style training; and the Board may not

reimburse a law enforcement agency or a peace officer for a course that includes warrior-style training.

Warrior-style training is defined in under this section as training for peace officers that dehumanizes people or encourages aggressive conduct by peace officers during encounters with others in a manner that deemphasizes the value of human life or constitutional rights, the result of which increases a peace officer’s likelihood or willingness to use deadly force.”

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RantingRooster's picture

I'm so cynical and disgusted right now it's pathetic. I'm in a constant state of WTF, are you kidding me?

The police in this country have become nothing more than jack booted thugs, if they were anything else I really don't know, because from my own experience, they have always been jack booted thugs.

This is all I got to say to them... We're coming for you!
10850055_1625167834363238_8535404286145741593_n.jpg

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C99, my refuge from an insane world. #ForceTheVote

wendy davis's picture

@RantingRooster

personal experience with thug cops (Pigs i'd call them, advisedly), but i've been following police state issues since albuquerque's in what, 1990? even though the ABQ PD was put under a federal consent decree..nothing changed for the better. UNM prof davis correa was point man on reporting from there, but i can't find any new twitter account he uses to discover what's up there now.

we live rural, and i will say that i was friends with one county sheriff, but that was over a decade ago. our black/azteca son has reported that cops are constantly parked along highways in NE CO, and he feels very...threatened by their presence, as he has indeed had wretched experiences with at least the Staties in SE colorado when he was in college. and er...security in stores of course.

so all in all, i can't blame you for your 'we're comin' for you', but tragically, they usually win. will there ever be a tipping point? i'd thought so when the anti-police states were global, now they seem not to be. and now RT.com has gone full-tilt fascist on anyone who claims to represent BLM, which of course is/was a catch-all sign slogan all over the world.

and a pardon me, but Pig in allentown, pennsylvania knelt on 'an arresstees' neck last week, but the bloke hadn't died, for whatever reason.

kelly thomas in fullerton, CA had also cried for his mum, begged for help, and told his six (?) assassins that he couldn't breathe, much like eric garner, save that kelly was on the ground the entire time, and possible mentally ill.

sorry to be so stream-of-consciousness; might be all that smoke in the air around me.

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@RantingRooster @RantingRooster @RantingRooster

My take is that they've gotten a lot worse over the last 50 years - at least to white people.

I had a few encounters way back, one outrageous, but I was never cuffed or physically abused. I recently watched several documentaries on the May Day event(s). This was an action specifically intended to shut down Washington. Just imagine how that would play today! The footage showed many, many people being taken into custody, but none were cuffed or assaulted. None of those plastic zip-tie thingies in sight.

Around that time the Stones released a song, Heartbreaker, about a police killing, an event rare enough to have a song made of it by a top act.

I recall a poster of a helmeted cop holding a freek against a wall with one arm, which seemed outrageous then, but doesn't compare to the shields, grenades, and "less-lethal" rounds today.

Seems to me that police behavior has gotten much worse over the decades. Less like a gang of thugs and more like a military occupying force.

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wendy davis's picture

@pindar's revenge

'worse over 50 years' timeline, but past shooting black panthers back in the day, i'd posit the advent of several ingredients leading to the increased barbarity of police.

on, of course was the Rise of the Warrior Cop (radley balko) that may have begun with the 1033 program: provide police with the unused weapons of war' including tanks, L-rad sound cannons, i've forgotten what else. when barack obomba came to power, he'd reviewed the program and tweaked it a bit: tanks on wheels were okey-dokey, but NOT tanks on tracks.

another ingredient is the fact that most major cities' PDs are trained by the IDF, and the NYPD even has an office in tel aviv. i think that was true for minneapolis, come to think of it.

at some point, immigration from the south increased, and my understanding is that US policy was at fault, but that's a whole n'other discussion. but obomba deported as many people, perhaps more, than trump even has, put them in concreted-floored cages as well (children, too; my media files have the photos). but that meant an increase in power, numbers, and ferocity for ICE, DHS, and customs and border patrol.

trump on twitter says he'll increase the federal police in major cities so they don't turn into Portland, but i'd look for all three agencies listed. the CPB seems to have been well-represented in portland, dunno about seattle CHAZ.

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@wendy davis

Yes, I was careful to distinguish the behavior of cops towards black folks from that towards white folks. Murdering Panthers in their bed, breaking heads at Selma, vicious dogs, etc. (To this day, I notice black folks avoiding me and my big (gentle) dog. Oral history.)

Makes me think of the Rall cartoon: black guy and white guy watching news. White guy:"I'm scared of the police". Black guy: "I'm scared to DEATH of the police."

I was thinking about the Israeli connection. When did the IDF start training American police?

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wendy davis's picture

@pindar's revenge

i'd said i had no clue about your 50 yr timeline. as for the PDs trained by the IDF, i'd covered it on one or another of my diaries, but i can't recall the dates (memory like swiss cheese, at best).

i do remember that the IDF had trained to federal troop in mexico to bomb and strafe the Zapatista villages in chiapas, and that would have been just a bit after NATA had taken effect in 1994.

i suppose that bingling 'which US PDs did the IDF train? might bring some hits, but i'm far too exhausted after a long day to do it myself.

thanks, pindar's revenge. ha! i just found the lyrics to 'pindar's revenge'! kewl.

i'd thought this might be a good closing song for the current zeitgeist:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOWfCVQBixs]

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wendy davis's picture

@pindar's revenge

and it seems that the IDF trainings of US 'peace officers' began in 2002, but has been rampeed up of course since then. one of my links had featured the ADL 'being proud that the IDF had trained over 120,00 cops. or maybe it was tat their own website.

now Shamnesty Int'l usually bats for the Western Hegemon, but on I/P they do get it right for some reason.

But what hasn’t received as much attention is where Baltimore police received training on crowd control, use of force and surveillance: Israel’s national police, military and intelligence services.

Baltimore law enforcement officials, along with hundreds of others from Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington state as well as the DC Capitol police have all traveled to Israel for training. Thousands of others have received training from Israeli officials here in the U.S.

Many of these trips are taxpayer funded while others are privately funded. Since 2002, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee’s Project Interchange and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs have paid for police chiefs, assistant chiefs and captains to train in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).

their 'here in the US' link is broken, but at one point i'd had that list, dagnabbit.

the other huge factor i'd left out in the rising police barbarity is that most PDs give preferential hiring to war veterans, who arguably: i) know best how to use the 'surplus' 1033 weapons on war, and ii) are trained very specifically as to who 'the enemy is', as in: The Other. how many of them suffer from PTSD is likely a rhetorical question.

but one cannot be faulted for knowing that the massive numbers of po-po added to the large number of federal troops actually is about a 'counter-insurgency' given the many ways in which the citizenry is suffering. homelessness, hunger, extreme poverty, incarceration, no health insurance, covid lockdowns, racial disparity in all categories...

there is the old saying that the people finally revolt when they have nothing left to lose.

congress? oh, yes: the D team has our backs!

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@wendy davis
I hate the thought of things getting that bad. A lot of suffering that would eclipse what we've seen already. Like a drunk "hitting bottom", we might not survive. I can't offer a good alternative plan, except to keep resisting. I have an omega symbol (electrical resistance) on a hardhat for demos.

Yeah, "Pindar's Revenge" is from an obscure solo album by Ed Sanders, notable for being David Bromberg's first album appearance. Nice twist on mutant country&western. The song itself should be on (shudder) googletube somewhere, maybe under "Sanders Truckstop". Good contrast to my Beefheart sig line, "Smithsonian Institute Blues".

And that 50 year timeline is rough, just based on what I've witnessed. Oral history is important.

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wendy davis's picture

@pindar's revenge

and imagine it as well. but given congress and the white house not having 'the consent of the governed' as required, or so we're told, somethings gonna pop, whether soon of due to coming depression, i can't say, but this house is house is seriously on fire. yes, i get that courtesy of prof. richard wolff, this site is at last getting that the fault is 'capitalism'.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxu0H42-hek]

and pindar's revenge, bless your heart:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xP8r6wFvaU]

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@wendy davis

"42 zap!". Years before the HitchHikers Guide. Hmm.
Authentically scratchy copy there. Good ol' analog.
Good material on the album, some very dated. They're Cutting My Coffin At The Sawmill is good.
Very NSFW, mostly.

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wendy davis's picture

@pindar's revenge

and thanks for the introduction! hadn't Hitchhikers Guide also claimed that the purpose of life was to move bags of water from place to place (save that all answers boiled down to '42'? lotta years ago, so i may woofin'....

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magiamma's picture

@wendy davis . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Sanders

Edward Sanders (born August 17, 1939) is an American poet, singer, social activist, environmentalist, author, publisher and longtime member of the band the Fugs. ... Sanders received a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry in 1983, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry in 1987. His Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century, Selected Poems 1961–1985 won an American Book Award in 1988

I remember the fugs from wayback. Who knew

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wendy davis's picture

@magiamma

what a CV! who knew i right. we were listening to the Fugs in a closed closet in betsy stephen's house in...freshman year? thank you.

pretty subversive counter-culture dude. 80 now'd be about right.

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@wendy davis

Still maintains a web presence, and sells poetry, books, etc.
http://www.woodstockjournal.com/
Founding member of Yippie. Levitator of the Pentagon. "Out, demons, out!"

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wendy davis's picture

@pindar's revenge

with abbie hoffman and jerry rubin then? i swear some peeps thought they could make it happen. showmanship rules!

thanx for the link. in any event, i hope in one of his books he'd said that the purpose of humans was that they were bags of water to move it from place to place. ; )

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@wendy davis
Some newer material on his website. The Fugs performing an exorcism of the White House in 2017, 50th anniversary of exorcising the pentagon.
https://youtu.be/b1AQ4NuJUA8
or mebbe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1AQ4NuJUA8&feature=youtu.be

And I should have posted Tuli's wiki. It's kinda short.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuli_Kupferberg

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wendy davis's picture

@pindar's revenge

i'll check them out soonish. RL duty calls 4 now. ; )

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@wendy davis

The Fugs reformed (new personnel, plus Sanders) and did a memorial concert when Tuli Kupferberg died ten years ago. Big loss.
Tuli left a whole buncha googletubes. I especially liked his parody of This Land Is Your Land.
Fugs stuff is on cd now. Box sets. I guess we all get old.
from the wiki:
"Kupferberg reportedly appears in Ginsberg's poem Howl as the person "who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer." The incident in question actually occurred on the Manhattan Bridge.[3]"
These guys were important bridges between beat culture and counterculture. Continuity. "Nobody who lived through the '50s thought the '60s could've existed. So there's always hope."

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wendy davis's picture

@pindar's revenge

and again, thanx for the introduction; i'd never heard of him.

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@wendy davis
rings a bell.
I think I used the "I think rain is wet, so what do I know?" for a sig line a while back.

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travelerxxx's picture

@wendy davis

... their 'here in the US' link is broken, but at one point i'd had that list, dagnabbit.

Yeah, it's broken for me, too. I did a mite of snooping about and found this page at the JINSA site. Is that the list you had, or similar to it?

***

As an aside, I almost didn't want to let my computer connect to that JINSA site. Who knows what kind of malicious cookies, etc, they install on my browser. I had to go to my browser preferences and delete all cookies set since I went there. Even that probably isn't good enough.

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wendy davis's picture

@travelerxxx

although mine was formatted differently. but thar she blows 2017: Minneapolis!

thank you so much for risking life and limb. fuck me; microsoft no longer supports their own
windows 7! i downloaded total AV, but it looks as though it's worthless in real time unless....premium. ah well, i'll run their scan soon...if i can remember to. been workin' on a complicated Post Office story, eyes just about burned out.

thanks, busta keaton.

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travelerxxx's picture

@wendy davis

I had to peruse around on their site to find it. Wasn't in the same place as the link you'd given.

I see our own Houston PD has recently been there... Gad.

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wendy davis's picture

@travelerxxx

had may have been at the original ADL braggers site. no surprise: houston's a huge city. sorry. ; )

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Just overhead. Some people have recommended that all cops be required to buy malpractice insurance. They never pay the cost at any level when people successfully sue them.

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wendy davis's picture

@MrWebster

paid by the cities, no? if i'd ever known, i've forgotten it, although i vaguely remember stats quoted as to how many millions NYC has paid out. and of course the po-po unions pay for indicted and tried police assassins.

yeah, that sounds like bullshit to me, esp. with the many caveats. the definition of Warrior Training made smoke come out of my ears. not a word about weapons, tanks, L-rads, 'less than lethal weapons', a community-elected over-sight body to determine who should NOT be hired (vets, for instance), psych evaluations...oh yes, it's about as minimal as it could be.

thanks, Mr Webster.

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wendy davis's picture

footage has been watched by a very limited audience, but has not yet been released to the public. but the gist of the combined reports who did watch, not copy, the footage provided some damning evidence, including that chauvin's knee was on george floyd's neck for nine and a half minutes; the footage does not show Floyd acting aggressively toward officers or threatening them; Floyd struggled to breathe, and said “please” to officers 50 times before he died.

"The officers tried to push him into the car but Floyd yelled in agony “I can’t breathe” telling officers he would lie on the ground instead. Floyd fell out of the passenger side and onto the asphalt near the car’s back tire, telling the officers, “Thank you.”

At this point, Chauvin put his knee on Floyd’s neck for nine and a half minutes. Chauvin asked the other officers if they were okay, to which Lane replied, “My knee might be a little scratched but I’ll survive,” as Floyd slowly runs out of air beneath their weight.

Floyd was heard saying he could not breathe several times, and begged for water, to which Chauvin responded in a mocking tone, “takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to say that.”
...........................
The video shows Lane asking Chauvin twice to flip Floyd onto his stomach, but being denied each time. According to media reports, however, there was no sense of urgency on the part of Lane. Nor was there any speed from the paramedics, who nonchalantly arrive late after first going to the wrong address. Three minutes went by before any of them attempted CPR on Floyd, who had already been unconscious for several minutes by then.

Lane would later enter the ambulance to perform CPR on Floyd, who was pronounced dead at the hospital at 9:25 p.m."

i grabbed a link at the star tribune concerning the minneapolis city council's vote to end the police dept. there, but it's in the beginning stages, complicated, and i've worn out my welcome on all 4 of my browsers already. so it's seems silly to paste in the bits i'd copied already.

but oh, my stars: a large 4-point stag in velvet stopped by this morning to nibble some leaves from our camperdown elm. dunno why they love that tree so much. they grow with their branches heading down to the ground like an umbrella. ours is deer-fenced, but only in a 5' diameter, so its branches will never touch the ground.

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wendy davis's picture

"in the News" column, and got to wondering the genesis of it. Yes, 'defund the police' has become quite the rallying cry this year, but as with Bill deBlasio's definition of of in NYC, the devils in the details. last i'd seen on his Twit account, he'd defund to some unstated dollar amount, and use the funds for (perhaps) black youth programs.

i remember bernie sanders havin said that police should be funded further, so that they would be professionally trained, or some such. so i let my fingers do the bingling...

but here's Trump's ad on 'defunding the police', and according to hot air, dementia Joe did advise the same.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=30&v=oa7w_nJDK8Q&feature=emb...

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