Remember those heady days when the unelected bush II regime's massive incompetence and racist indifference to the sufferings caused by Hurricane Katrina made some people think that he was finished?
Remember when stephen harper's contemptuous treatment of Parliament was so glaring that even Andrew Coyne couldn't stomach it and we all thought he was on the way out?
Remember when the world-wide financial crisis and subsequent recession made us hope that people everywhere would stop believing in inhuman capitalism and that the utterly discredited neo-liberals would be forcibly removed from their positions of power?
I well remember personally thinking that the police failure at the G20 Toronto to prevent the vandalism they were paid over one-billion dollars to prevent and their later brutality against innocent people the next day would have Canadians up in arms.
Alas, alack. If I can afford a house, and the heating and food required to enjoy it, and you throw in the internet and the odd big-budget spectacular at the cineplex, you can do whatever else you goddamned please. That appears to be the attitude of most of us. Shit, just by sitting at my computer typing critical rants and attending the odd demonstration or lefty film-festival, I'm being way more "active" than the average Canadian.
But could the video evidence of Stacy Bonds' mistreatment at the hands of the pigs ... [my apologies to actual pigs, who, besides being delicious are generally clean and social creatures not given to the stupid posturing and cowardly bullying of those police officers on the Ottawa Police FORCE] ... lead, maybe to enough outrage, maybe even civic outrage in Ottawa itself, to at least get those pigs fired?* Or to force the Ottawa Police FORCE to have to take millions of dollars that would have gone to wages and pay it to Bonds? Or to get those individual pigs to have to bankrupt themselves to pay her damages?
Will the video evidence of a small, defenceless woman (and I'm not trying to be sexist here, I'm trying to point out how what happened violates all the "traditional values" of our society) by a gang of lazy-assed, cowardly thugs,turn enough Canadians' stomachs to make them realize that things are out of control? Ms. Bonds did not do anything. Even the pigs' version of the story (public intoxication and an open beer bottle) do not justify their consistently rough, disrespectful treatment of her.
And, given the long traditions of blatant lying by police: "The kid with the broken back was yelling 'kill cops' and stuff like that so I had to TASER him NINETEEN TIMES," or "he was behind me and strangling me so I had to put my gun in my 6-foot long arm and shoot him in the back of the head," I'm quite certain that their story about Bonds is bullshit. Actually, I'm sure it was bullshit. If Bonds had been walking down the street drunk with an open beer bottle, do you think she would have been stopped, asked to give her name, had it run through the police computer and then been sent on her way? Do you think if a black person is stopped by the police walking down the street with an open beer bottle, and they're stopped, checked, and then let go, that they'd turn around and ask the cops why they were stopped in the first place??? Do you think that if a black person walking around intoxicated with an open beer bottle was stopped by two cops who the odds are, are racist pigs, and was allowed to go free, that they'd not just count their blessings and head quickly home? My guess is that Bonds had had a couple of drinks at a friend's house, not enough to be drunk, but enough to give her the confidence to ask, when pulled aside for "walking while black" why they harassed her. And we just can't have that, can we? Young black women can't get it into their heads that when they're constantly stopped and bothered by the pigs that they can talk back and challenge this oppression.
One newspaper article about this story said that her treatment was similar to the way the racist police are thought to have treated blacks in Mississippi in the 1950s. (It's probably how they're treated across the USA even today!) This is supposed to be a different, better place. This is supposed to be Canada. As a Canadian, you're supposed to be free to walk around without fear. You're supposed to feel served and protected by your police service, NOT abused and intimidated by your police FORCE. That's what being a citizen with rights is supposed to be all about. Think about it! It's the difference between being able to disagree with your boss, or the government, without having to worry about some mercenary thugs coming over to the house and beating you and humiliating you in front of your family. Ask these guys. One of those guys Muayyed Nurredin, says that when he was being tortured in Syria and being asked questions that came from Canada, he was devastated. He had come to Canada as a refugee from Saddam Hussein's Iraq, fearing oppression and torture there. When he became a Canadian citizen, he believed that he was free from fear. He had rights. CSIS made him realize that the rights of a Canadian citizen are regarded as lower than shit in the eyes of our "security" elites.
Could it be possible that in the case of Stacy Bonds, that the naked, blatant, cowardly bullying of these thugs (who acted like this was a TYPICAL day on the job) might finally bring a halt to the rise of state brutality, the increasing culture of impunity that allows our police forces to kill, our governments to lie, to break treaties, to torture abroad and at home, to kill us through deregulation, to spit on our (their) own political system?
Ontario Attorney General, Chris Bentley, should be among those shown the door, if we're going to finally have accountability somewhere. This asshole, seeing the same video evidence as we have, says that the Crown prosecutor was right to press assault charges against Ms. Bonds. He's obviously unfit for his role as the defender of the rule of law in Ontario. If a room full of black cops treated him that way, and if he was stripped in front of snickering black women, and then left half-naked in his own urine, do you think he'd agree that he should be charged with assault for having at one moment tried physically to assert his own rights and dignity as a human being in the face of naked abuse of authority? As Dr. Dawg also says, Bentley has presided over the blatant abuse of power against Alex Hundert, so this sickening disregard for the rights of Canadian citizens is all part of an authoritarian pattern for him.
Well, fuck you Chris Bentley! I truly hope that it ends here. That you are forced to resign. And, eventually, I hope that the system that you serve, the one where First Nations' rights are shat upon in the service of corporate polluters, where healthcare for the majority is dismantled so that the rich can get richer, the middle-class can be bankrupted, and the poor can die, where the rights of citizens are to be trampled in order that austerity and corruption can prevail unimpeded, comes crashing down.
*I'm using the old 1960s insult "pigs" in this case for a reason. And I'm tarring with a broad brush, even though my own encounters with the police have been 95% courteous and professional, because too many "good" or "okay" cops allow this sort of shit to continue. It's not like the police don't generalize (with disastrous results) about protesters or members of racialized minorities based on encounters with a few "bad apples." If decent cops don't want to get called "pigs" then they can damned well start doing something about the culture of arrogance and corruption and brutality that's gone unopposed for so long.
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19 comments:
Big props, thwapster. Blogosphere's been going apeshit all week about Stacy Bonds, and a lot of good stuff's been written, but you've just written the best post yet.
Thanks, Thwap. It needed to be said and like OB said, you said it best.
OB, Jymn,
Thanks people. I'm really upset about this, both for what it is as an "incident" and because it's all been part of the decline of our society.
I used to think, as recently as two years ago, that our political culture wasn't as debased as the all-capitalist USA (blatantly stolen elections, transparently stupid tales of WMDs as excuses for war, naked class war and quasi-fascist police-state tactics) but more and more I'm being proved wrong.
This isn't the first time this has happened to a Black woman on kkkanadian soil. Google Audrey Smith, public strip search. There isn't much on her but she's there. She predates Stacey Bonds by quite a bit of time. Bonds just happened to have been video taped or she would have been constructed as a crack cocaine dealer, too.
Dark Daughta,
When I was in a union, a black woman on the executive told me about showing up to rent apartments and being told through the intercom that the place she'd arranged to see was taken. As soon as the superintendents saw her at the door via their monitors, they decided they didn't want her.
I was appalled that this was happening and frequently, in the 1990s.
The Toronto Star printed a letter by a black Toronto male, who was an award-winning community leader and, among other things, played the lead in the stage version of "The Lion King" [ugh]. He recalled humiliating incidents of being handcuffed and placed on the floor of the lobby of his own building by police looking for someone who he barely matched.
I'm sure none of this is news to you, but hearing about this stuff, and starting to track it, it's made me a lot less trusting of our achievements as a society.
Cops are above the law.
http://www.thestar.com/news/article/882189--are-these-cops-above-the-law
“There appeared to be on the part of certain police witnesses and certain police associations an almost Pavlovian reaction against a civilian agency (the SIU) investigating the conduct of police officers ... and against the idea that such an agency could conduct an investigation which could be fair to police officers,” the judge wrote.
“This is particularly surprising when ... in about 97 per cent of the cases, the investigation exonerates the subject officer.”
Testilying (a portmanteau of "testify" and "lying") is a United States police slang term for the practice of giving false testimony against a defendant in a criminal trial. It is typically used to "make the case" against someone they believe to be guilty when minor irregularities during the suspect's arrest or search threaten to result in acquittal on a technicality. Defendants who embellish their own testimony, particularly when no evidence contradicts them, can also be said to be testilying.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testilying
The LAPD is said to call the practice "joining the liars' club." In a 1996 article in the Los Angeles Times, "Has the Drug War Created an Officer Liars' Club?," Joseph D. McNamara, then chief of police of San Jose, said "Not many people took defense attorney Alan M. Dershowitz seriously when he charged that Los Angeles cops are taught to lie at the birth of their careers at the Police Academy. But as someone who spent 35 years wearing a police uniform, I've come to believe that hundreds of thousands of law-enforcement officers commit felony perjury every year testifying about drug arrests." He noted that "Within the last few years, police departments in Los Angeles, Boston, New Orleans, San Francisco, Denver, New York and in other large cities have suffered scandals involving police personnel lying under oath about drug evidence."
snip snip: Like the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex is an interweaving of private business and government interests.
Its twofold purpose is profit and social control. Its public rationale is the fight against crime.
http://www.greenleft.org.au/1998/328/20614
The Stanford Prison Experiment
A Simulation Study of the Psychology of Imprisonment Conducted at Stanford University
What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph? These are some of the questions we posed in this dramatic simulation of prison life conducted in the summer of 1971 at Stanford University.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
How we went about testing these questions and what we found may astound you. Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated.
In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress.
Milgram Experiment (1961)
The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
Before conducting the experiment, Milgram polled fourteen Yale University senior-year psychology majors as to what they thought would be the results. All of the poll respondents believed that only a few (average 1.2%) would be prepared to inflict the maximum voltage. Milgram also informally polled his colleagues and found that they, too, believed very few subjects would progress beyond a very strong shock.[1]
In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40)[1] of experiment participants administered the experiment's final massive 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment, some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment.
Charles Sheridan and Richard King hypothesized that some of Milgram's subjects may have suspected that the victim was faking, so they repeated the experiment with a real victim: a puppy who was given real electric shocks.
They found 20 out of the 26 participants complied to the end. The six that had refused to comply were all male (54% of males were obedient;
- all 13 of the women obeyed to the end, although many were highly disturbed and some openly wept.
snip snip: In a presentation he made to a lawyers' conference in 2004, Scott, who once worked as a prosecutor, noted police officers accused of using excessive force stood a less than one-in-five chance of facing the same level of justice as civilians accused of similar crimes.
“It is an ineffective use of state resources to investigate, charge and prosecute cases in which the high probability is acquittal,” Scott wrote in 2004.
http://www.thestar.com/news/article/882189--are-these-cops-above-the-lawSee More
This is more G20 related:
the Miami Model
When police stick to phony script
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/torontog20summit/article/828876--porter-when-police-stick-to-phony-script
What is the Miami Model?
I called Naomi Archer to find out. She is an indigenous rights worker from North Carolina who happened to be giving a lecture on the Miami Model yesterday at the U.S. Social Forum — the G20 for community activists.
Archer, who was in Miami as a liaison between protesters and police, has a 40-box checklist to identify the Model. Here are the main themes.
• Information warfare. This starts weeks before the event. Protesters are criminalized and dehumanized, and described as dangerous “anarchists” and “terrorists” the city needs to defend against.
“Often, a faux cache is found,” says Archer. “They are usually ordinary objects, like bike inner tubes, camping equipment, but the police make them out to look threatening. It lays the groundwork for police to be violent and it means there’s a reduced accountability of law enforcement.”
• Intimidation. Police start random searches of perceived protesters before any large rallies. They are asked where they are staying, why they are walking around. Police raid organizer’s homes or meeting places, “usually just before the summit, so there’s maximum chaos organizers have to deal with,” says Archer.
“All this is meant to dissuade participants. The best way to make sure you don’t have a critical mass of people taking over the streets like in Seattle is to reduce the numbers at the outset.”
This is usually made possible by last-minute city regulations, curtailing the right to protest. In Miami, the city commission passed a temporary ordinance forbidding groups of more than seven to congregate for more than 30 minutes without a permit.
• “They threw rocks.” That’s the line police use after tear-gassing or beating protesters most times, Archer says. Urine and human feces are variations on the theme. But it’s always the protesters who triggered the violence. A popular police tactic is called “kettling.” Officers on bike or horses herd protesters into an enclosed space, so they can’t leave without trying to break through the police line. Take the bait; you provoke a beating or arrest. And of course, there are the famous agent provocateurs, outted publicly two years ago in Montebello. Police officers dressed up like militant protesters to protect the peaceful crowd, they say; Archer says it’s to instigate trouble.
Prisons are big business, and business is good. The coming years look positively rosy for the private prison industry as it anticipates - and lobbies for - a wave of immigrants and prisoners of the war on terrorism.
Essentially, the "corrections" industry makes money by putting people behind bars for the government. Following the logic of the market, prison companies turn more profit with more people in jail.
Stricter laws, longer sentencing and new categories of criminality are all positive signs in this "growth industry." Prison profiteers may be filling a dubious public need for more jails, but at the same time, they are driving expansion by creating the beds and then forcing the public to fill them.
It's the old story of, "If we build it, they will come."
http://www.dailytexanonline.com/opinion/beware-of-private-prisons-1.1268764
Judge Jim Gray
on The Six Groups Who Benefit From Drug Prohibition
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6t1EM4Onao&feature=player_embedded
In 1992, Jim Gray, a conservative judge in conservative Orange County, California, held a press conference during which he recommended that we rethink our drug laws. Back then, it took a great deal of courage to suggest the war on drugs was a failed policy.
Today, more and more Americans are coming to the realization that prohibition's costs—whether measured in lives and liberties lost or dollars wasted—far exceed any possible or claimed benefits.
A law enforcement group claims passage of Prop 19, the marijuana legalization initiative on California's November ballot, would decriminalize an estimated 60,000 drug arrests made in the Golden State each year.
So, who is the face of the nonprofit Law Enforcement Against Prohibition? None other than former prosecutor and Orange County Superior Court Judge Jim Gray.
"I was a drug warrior until I saw what was happening in my own courtroom,'' Gray said at a news conference announcing his group's endorsement of Prop 19 (via the Los Angeles Times' Catherine Saillant.)
As the sometime Libertarian or Republican candidate for political office has been saying for years, he discovered as a judge that the so-called "War on Drugs" was not working.
Indeed, Gray maintains current laws make it easier for children to get pot, not more difficult. That would change if weed was taxed and regulated by the government as tobacco and alcohol are, according to the former jurist.
He was joined by former San Jose Police Chief Joseph McNamara, who cited White House statistics that show 60% of drug cartel money stems from marijuana sales.
Using history as a guide, the cartels would disappear if grass was legal, said McNamara, noting that the bootleggers vanished after Prohibition ended.
While Massachusetts-based Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which was founded in 2002, endorses Prop 19, the California Police Chiefs Association has come out against it.
According to Saillant's piece, Gray believes many in law enforcement support legalization but can't say so.
"They have a political job, so they can't tell the truth," he reportedly said. "People are free to speak out honestly only after they are retired."
Private Prisons: Profits of Crime
Private prisons are a symptom, a response by private capital to the "opportunities" created by society's temper tantrum approach to the problem of criminality.
http://mediafilter.org/CAQ/Prison.html
Thanks for all that. I've read it all before, but it's nice to see it all at once, especially in this context.
Will the Stacy Bonds case change anything?
Yes, it alredy has. The question, as you say, is - will it be enough?
Before the last few days' big media blitz about Bonds shifted google standings in their favour, blogs which had written about Bonds were averaging well over a hit a minute for ten days from google searches for her name.
That's a google search every minute for 10 days - over 15,000 people - and in a country as complaisant as Canada where we prefer to mostly ignore our governments, and consequently, our relationship to social justice.
Last night on the evening news CTV ran this appalling video of an RCMP beating the crap out of a prisoner about to be released while two other RCMP looked on.
It's going to get harder and harder for people to ignore this stuff if the media get onboard.
Alison,
I just watched that video. Holy shit. What's going through those idiots' heads, engaging in such behaviour in front of their own cameras?
Steroids?
It was good to hear those anchorpeople not providing any euphemisms for that ape's brutality.
They need to put two-and-two together. Our police are out of control
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