Watch this video and see if it makes you feel any safer as a Black man in the United States of America, when you are expressly called "the most dangerous of subjects".
Expect the deaths and misuse to continue - and we’ll hear less about it if they circle the wagons. Soon we won’t have to worry about humans shooting humans with the release of this weapon of nervous system assault from Taser (it was pulled from its web site once word got out about its portrayal of “the most dangerous subjects” as a big black man).
"The day is fast approaching when robots will perform the most dangerous missions by engaging the most dangerous subjects…Taser and Irobot have formed a strategic alliance to make that day a reality."
In the above video, we see a Fresno, CA police officer punch a homeless man at least four times while he is lying on the ground on his side, and then once more when the man is face-down on the ground with his hands behind his back.
At the end of the news report, notice the after-the-fact pretext that the police department offers and that the news dutifully reports: there was another fight between this man and police five years earlier. Is this supposed to reassure and convince us that if a person has EVER previously had a fight with police than ANY level of force is permissible in subsequent altercations?
Wasn't the police report that supposedly "explains" today's beating written by the police themselves? It's a trite formula now that whenever the police exceed by a mile their authority, they offer some past alleged bad act by the victim to justify the police behavior of present.
"Yeah, we shot him in the bag, but he was arrested for possession of marijuana back in 1966." Often the police offer mere past allegations and privacy-protected documents from secret files to justify behavior.
This video shows vividly why police should not have access to electrocution devices. Although punching a man repeatedly when he is defenseless is cowardly, yet it is not as likely to kill the victim repeated 50,000 volt shocks with an electrocution device.
Just remember this: Every member of the public has a right to self-defense when police exceed their authority to use force. And every member of the public has a right to defend another member of the public when police exceed their authority to use force. Once members of the public defend themselves from police, police will charge them with assaulting an officer, etc., and usually the charges stick. So members of the public have to choose between being beaten senseless and offering no resistance or defending themselves first on the street and then once again in a court of law.
"Defense of another." No member of the public is obliged to stand by and helplessly watch police brutality occur. In fact, public action in the face of excessive police force may save your life or someone else's.
One has to wonder how many Black men are in prison simply because white (and Black) people have a tendency to perceive a Black man as a criminal, and more easily so than they perceive white men this way. There's an excellent article at MSNBC exposing this question, and I quote from it here liberally:
PHILADELPHIA - It's an old lie, claiming that The Black Man Did It.
But it was trotted out again last week when a white mother from suburban Philadelphia said two black men snatched her and her 9-year-old daughter from their SUV and abducted them in the trunk of a black Cadillac.
Blacks across the country were outraged after Bonnie Sweeten was found in a luxury hotel at Disney World. Authorities quickly unraveled the hoax, but not before an Amber Alert, frantic searches and national news coverage that played into images of marauding black men.
The Black Man Did It lie last made news as recently as October, when a John McCain volunteer claimed a 6-foot-4 black man carved a B into her cheek (For Barack, evidently). Charles Stuart told it in 1989 after he killed his wife in Boston. Susan Smith told it when she drowned her sons in 1994 in South Carolina. Unknown numbers of black men were hanged for it back when lynching was a common practice.
And those are the ones we heard about. Law professor Katheryn Russell-Brown documents 67 racial hoaxes in the period between 1987 and 1996 in her book "The Color of Crime." MSNBC
If white and even many Black people are primed to see Black men as criminals, then how many Black men are in jail simply because the hoaxes were not discovered before their cases went to the (frequently all-white) juries? And how many Black men are in jail longer because when Blacks and whites are convicted for the same crimes, whites are more likely to be perceived as susceptible to change and progress, simply because they are white?
The outrageous number of Black people in prison in the United States is directly related to answers to the above questions.
The above film is from an unrelated police shocking incident in Orange County, CA.
I live in Brazil and I just saw a scene on the nightly news here, from the US state of Texas (click here for video), that disgusted me, and will shock and astound Brazilians nationwide. A Texas police officer was arguing with a elderly white woman during a highway traffic stop, stemming from a speeding ticket. The police officer is easily a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than this slightly built white woman, and yet he ultimately fires an electrocution device at her and she can be seen falling to the ground. She is a wrinkle-faced white woman who is seventy-two years old.
Would the police officer have shot this woman with a handgun had he not had an electrocution device available? Of course not! Police officers don't shoot elderly white women at traffic stops. So, the electrocution device served as a new tool of curbside behavior management and pre-trial punishment that, unfortunately, often results in death or serious injury.
Should you really risk killing an elderly woman as part of issuing a traffic ticket?
There is no good reason for "Tasers" to exist in the USA today, any more than there was "an appropriate law enforcement role" for gas chambers in Auswhich, Germany. While it's true that people who died in the gas chambers escaped being burned at the stake, that is not a sufficient rationale for the existence of gas chambers. And the threat of being shot to death is not a sufficient rationale for being electrocuted instead.
Even as President Obama attempts to change the world's impressions about America's ruthlesseness and violence, local police officers are making television news around the world, electrically shocking little old white ladies into submission.
In the above video, a white-skinned police pig attempts to mace a Black womam for riding her bicycle on the sidewalk. So intent is the pig on macing her rapidly that he accidently sprays the mace backward, into his own face.
In retribution for what he has done to himself, the pig is then seen punching the black woman four times or more while she is being restrained face-down by two other officers.
I believe that when three officers arrest womnan for riding her bike on the sidewalk, Black communities are in need of self defense.
Some will say that this woman should have submitted earlier. Some will say that rape victims should have sbmitted to avoid angering the rapists. I don't compare ant behavior to rape lightly, but I believe that Black comunities across the country are being serially raped by pigs with guns, badges, and now 50,000 volt electrocution devices which sometimes fail and leave victims alive to face charges in court.
Forty-five years ago, Black Panthers used the slogan, "Off the pigs!" precisely in response to cases far worse than the one videotaped above. At that time, police typically explained shooting Blacks in the back by asserting that the victims were trying to run away.
I wonder if the police officer in the above video regretted spraying the mace after he had sprayed himself in the face? I wonder if officers regret taking outh their electrocution devices in those cases when members of the public get control of the devices and use them to shock the police officers.
America has a Black president and a Black Attorney General, both do gooders of gret courage, but it seems to me that the only thing that has chaged over the 45 years since the Panthers began acting in aemed self defense is that police now videotape their behavior so that all white juries can ignore what they see and "convict the man of darker skin."
I don't think the word "pig" is extreme in light of the "under-color-of-law" behavior to which individual Blacks and our communities are being subjected. If they don't want to be called pigs, they should stop behaving like pigs.
Today, my friend and afrosphere colleague African American Political Pundit announced that he has launched a new Tasered While Black Internet Radio Show, which I hope will include some call-ins by people who have actually had the experience of being tasered.
As I commented at AAPP's blog, I don't think you have to have been personally murdered to understand that murder is bad. Likewise, those of us who haven't been shocked with 50,000 volts yet need to work to make sure that it never happens to us, our children or our neighbors. Because often "tasering" results in electrocuting and dying. And that IS bad.
Of course AAPP and I differ on the role of electric shocks in law enforcement. AAPP believes that they can be used as an alternative to deadly force, but I think that, like choking, the application of 50,000 volts of electricity to people whose physical condition is a mystery to police is a practice that is inherently dangerous and inherently has a high risk that many people will die among those who are shocked. Particularly since that is sometimes the INTENTION of the police who use these weapons.
I don't think electrical shocks have any place in law enforcement, grammar schools, mental hospitals or playgrounds. Electrical shocks are inherently dangerous. Police in the United States operated for 300 years without these weapons.
AAPP says he is willing to see these weapons used as an alternative to deadly force. If he can show me ONE example of a city where deadly force decreased after police had access to electric shock devices, then I might be willing to listen to that argument. However, I suspect that police are continuing to shoot people and, in addition, are electrocuting people who would never have been shot.
Again, I challenge anyone to show me statistics that prove that police shootings decrease when police have access to taser electrocution devices. That's about as likely as rapists using less physical force because they have access to handcuffs. Let's give rapists handcuffs and see if that reduces the physical force used in rapes?
With the US Supreme Court as the ultimate arbiter of criminal justice cases in the United States,Black bloggers are lining up in support of "wise Latina woman" Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination for the US Supreme Court.
Holland says he hopes the petition, which is reprinted below, will gain thousands of signatures from people of all skin colors, ethnic backgrounds and genders, just as President Barack Obama received pluralistic support across the board in November's presidential election:
The petition says:
Petition to Confirm Wise Latina Woman Judge Sonia Sotomayor Now
I strongly support and urge immediate Senate confirmation of President Barack Obama’s nominee for the US Supreme Court: “wise Latina woman”, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who now sits on U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
At present, the US Supreme Court has nine members, of whom seven are white men. This is unfair and unbalanced. According to the US Census, the nation is less than 33% white male, while it is approximately 51% female, 15% Latino and 13% Black. Although white males are the minority of America, they remain the vast majority of the US Supreme Court, just as was the case before women and minorities gained the right to vote.
It is impossible in a pluralistic society for a Court comprised of 78% white men to make wise, reasoned and sound decisions affecting the lives of a nation which is less than 33% white male. A wise and just Supreme Court requires a diversity of experiences, with the participation of representatives of the majority of Americans.
For far too long, there has been a quota system at the United States Supreme Court. The de facto quota system required that all or the vast majority of the nine members of the Court be white males. In the history of the nation, there have never been more than three members of the court who were not white males at any one time. The anachronistic white male quota system is no longer tenable as the nation strives to treat all Americans equally and to have a government all of whose branches have the consent and participation of the nation’s diverse populace.
The US Supreme Court cannot function wisely, justly, and fairly without the full participation of wise women and wise members of the nation’s minority groups, including the nation’s largest minority – Latinos. Therefore, we urge our elected representatives in the US Senate to immediately confirm the “wise Latina woman” who has earned our respect and support: soon-to-be US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
