LAPD, SFPD Act Like Shameful Troglodytes

If there’s anything that civil rights movements have shown us, it’s that the police forces involved in suppressing protests and demonstrations (even peaceful demonstrations) behave with violence and inhuman lack of compassion.

With all this in mind, this week the LAPD and SFPD have displayed shamefaced bad behavior that reflects poorly on their departments and casts them and theirs into a very poor light.

The LAPD

Patrick Meighan, a writer for Family Guy, described his arrest and subsequent shamefully bad treatment at the hands of LAPD. Although it makes sense that the police may need to apply force to separate protesters who have linked arms in order to stay together to make arrest difficult, the level of sadism necessary to produce the sort of assault described is beyond the pale.

It was horrible to watch, and apparently designed to terrorize the rest of us. At least I was sufficiently terrorized. I unlinked my arms voluntarily and informed the LAPD officers that I would go peacefully and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyperextended my wrists into my inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he was doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain, the LAPD officer threw me face-first to the pavement. He had my hands behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really, really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and would not resist.

My hands were then zipcuffed very tightly behind my back, where they turned blue. I am now suffering nerve damage in my right thumb and palm.

I was put on a paddywagon with other nonviolent protestors and taken to a parking garage in Parker Center. They forced us to kneel on the hard pavement of that parking garage for seven straight hours with our hands still tightly zipcuffed behind our backs. Some began to pass out. One man rolled to the ground and vomited for a long, long time before falling unconscious. The LAPD officers watched and did nothing.

Shame on you, LAPD officers who brutally assault people who recoil from your careless use of zipcuffs. Shame on you, LAPD officers who fail to act like compassionate, proper human beings by leaving protestors to sit in squalor, vomiting, falling unconscious without seeking medial attention for them.

Your callous, inhuman behavior not only sets you apart as bad protectors of the public trust, but also makes me sad to think that you’re people worth believing serve that trust.

The SFPD

In another instance of police failing to stand up to their actual duties, SFPD sergeant Peter Thoshinsky has been caught on camera giving an illegal order to officers to commit what is essentially criminal battery.

“If they do not do what you tell them, strike them,” he ordered his officers at the line of a kettling of protestors demonstrating at Occupy San Francisco.

Assault is not necessary to affect the arrest of a nonviolent offender and assault is illegal when there is no case of arrest. This sergeant’s order may have been illegal, and in fact his officers may have been to intimidate the protestors, but both cases make Peter Thoshinsky an irresponsible, failure as a commanding officer.

Threatening protestors with violence won’t deescalate a tense situation, but it will make it scarier. This sort of intimidation endangers not just the protestors but the police officers that he commands. His action in saying that in front of protestors shows a vast failure of judgment and extremely poor leadership.

Both links LAPD, SFPD via Boing Boing.

Shame on you, Lieutenant Jon Pike

[Image credit, Brian Nguyen, student photojournalist.]

I may have titled this post reflecting the name and rank of the perpetrator of a violent chemical weapon assault on non-violent protesters on a UC Davis campus; but we’ll leave it there. This man is probably already subject to a multitude of ugly remarks regarding his shameful, immoral behavior and I cannot hope to offer an adequate mirror to display the open disgust that I have for this craven act.

Meanwhile, the next-best-thing we have as a society has been levied against him—and I wish against his commanding officer and the police commissioner for making apologetic excuses for it—in the form of a shame meme.

It’s almost beautiful.

Also, please stop ordering pizzas for him—this prank may be silly but it costs a pizza place money.

Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper condemning his actions—even better cc: it to UC President Mark G. Yudof, who is obviously a politician smart enough to immediately state that he was “appalled” by the behavior of the police. Unlike Police Chief Annette Spicuzza who decided to make apologetic excuses for the attack—who is now rightly been suspended from duty--or Chancellor Linda Katehi who failed to act like a human being in the face of this horrific act and condemn it for the vicious act it was.

Chancellor Katechi has since mended some of her bridges by coming forward and stating that she wants to advocate for the students injured in the attack; but people should be pressuring her as the beginning of her advocacy to unequivocally condemn the act of violently assaulting non-violent protestors with a chemical weapon.

Meanwhile, welcome Jon Pike to a special form of infamy. The Pepper Spraying Cop.

“I once heard a Python explain that the single goal in life of every British man is to make it safely to his grave without being the center of a major embarrassment. I think that needs to be updated in the wake of the OWS affair.

“It should be the goal of every person to make it safely to their grave without becoming a goddamn Internet meme that shows up on CNN.”

Politicians creep me out sometimes, from #OccupyDenver

After the City of Denver took action against Occupy protesters in Veteran’s Park this Friday morning, Governor John Hickenlooper had some irresponsible things to say about the police action.

The #OccupyWallStreet movement has hit a sort of mainstream stride, emerging in over 100 cities across the entire United States over the past two weeks. It’s slowly but surely becoming an unstoppable juggernaut of nonviolent resistance against—different city’s license to decide who can stay where and for what reason. Most nonviolent protests via peaceful resistance involve getting in the way so that people notice and the Occupy protests take that up a notch by putting people in place for days instead of hours.

Recently, protesters were arrested at a site in Denver—according to a news article on the subject 23 in total were arrested—and now the public (?) park they were staying in has been indefinitely closed by the city.

The bad behavior of the city to close a public park so that the occupy protesters cannot use it to demonstrate aside (as protestors could violate that order anyway to continue their peaceful resistance and protest making the city government even more of a villain) what really bothered me is the statement made by Gov. John Hickenlooper,

“Demonstrators in Lincoln Park were told every day this week they could not camp in the park. Yet each day the number of tents grew. Last night, and after multiple requests to follow the law, the Colorado State Patrol intervened. State troopers and Denver police demonstrated extreme restraint and professionalism as they encountered a very difficult situation.”

If by “extreme restraint and professionalism” he means that the police officers did not endanger the lives of protestors by committing vicious assaults or deploying non-lethal chemical weapons while breaking up a peaceful demonstration, I don’t think this man understands what these words mean. If Denver police and State Troopers are permitted to use extreme force against nonviolent protestors then perhaps they did show extreme restraint; however, in the case of police arresting people not violently resisting or rioting how much restraint does a person have to show not to behave violently in return?

Precisely how does the governor expect that the police should have acted if they did not use extreme restraint? What extreme things exactly does he expect that they restrained themselves from doing?

Law enforcement acting with the base level of professionalism should never need to include extreme restraint—anything worth being labeled extreme would probably also be rightfully labeled criminal.