One of the few defenses society has against this kind of abuse is the Streisand effect - their attempts to suppress this kind of speech only make it have more effect. Because of that I'm all for giving this kind of story more exposure.
Actually, it's the judge and the prosecutor who are on the hook more for this use of Cyberstalking (and likely ultimately terrorism laws) to umask a critic using their First Amendment rights.
The prosecutor is at risk for losing their qualified immunity, since he is using his position to commit a civil rights crime.
Prosecutors have absolute immunity which is incredibly difficult to overcome. Even falsifying evidence doesn't seem to do it unless there's a "pattern of abuse" which is practically impossible to prove.
http://www.scotuswiki.com/index.php?title=Pottawattamie_Coun...
Prosecutors do not have absolute immunity when it comes to crimes that are only possible with their office.
If they do something bad in a case, they have absolute immunity, but if they break the law under the guise of law enforcement, they don't. Same as cops.
425-430-7500 option 8 is the number for the police department in question. I think that people tend to act differently if they know they are being watched so I called and talked to the person who answered to (a) confirm the story and (b) express my concerns about the abuse of power.
The guy's screaming "Dad! Dad! Dad!" ... that breaks my heart.
One bystander wisely asks "How do you resist when they're on top of your back?" and then wonders why they don't just put the cuffs on him and be done with it. That's a common theme I've noticed with these incidents: the assailants keep saying "stop resisting! stop resisting!" But I imagine it's kind of hard to stop struggling and moving around when you're terrified, in excruciating pain, and being crushed with body weight like that.
Wrongful and unwarranted arrest is bad enough, but this sadistic torture and power-play brutality has got to stop.
>One bystander wisely asks "How do you resist when they're on top of your back?
Convulsions from multiple tazering and hits into the head and spine. It is a catch-22 for the victim - police tazers you, you convulse, ie. resist, thus giving them plausible cause to tazer you more and/or in this particular case to hit your head, neck into the curb, etc... when they hit your head (or kidneys - they professionally trained and very experienced in how to hit you) the brain and spine nervous tissue shock make you convulse, ie. resist, ... loop continues.
Right, well put ... and to the bystander's credit, he was asking the question rhetorically. But you're right: basically your own death throes become "resistance".
And to answer my own question: I'd like to think I'd step forward as a witness, even though it might mean a few years of harassment.
More sickening still: many people's reaction to this magnitude of brutality (or, actually, to any magnitude of law enforcement's abuse of power) is to rationalize it by saying that the victim was "a criminal".
The unstated logic behind this argument is that, by breaking the law, you forfeit all rights. Poppycock: Nuremberg trials.
(And yes, it is true that the victim is often not, in fact, a criminal. But that has no bearing on whether this sort of treatment should be tolerated.)
He died three days later from the beating. Even after he was handcuffed, the officers beat him repeatedly with flashlights and the butt of their tasers. Just tragic.
This has caused quite a stir here in SoCal. The Fullerton PD is now under investigation by the FBI, the officers in the video are in hiding due to death threats, and three of the city council members are being targeted for recall.
From the article: "illicit relations between a female cop and a police officer"
...are female cops not police officers? Are police officers never female? I hope I'm missing some detail in terminology because this smacks of sexism on the part of the author.
No, I think it's just sloppy, probably the same incident from this quote (later in the article):
Chief Prosecutor Shawn Arthur writes, "[The videos] discussed a past incident tha has already been investigated.. regarding a dating relationship (a female detective) had with a suspect."
If you can't distinguish between a woman deviously driving a vulnerable girl to suicide and a satirist doing cartoons about public scandals, I can't imagine you've put much thought into the subject.
One of the ideas in the theory of government is that it exists to have a monopoly on violence and so forth. It's murder if you do it once, it's not if the state does it a few hundred thousand times.
To an extent, police abusing power and inducing fear in the populace is "working as intended" if it keeps the state in power. But our ideals tend to be such that we think the state should function with greater respect for human rights and individual freedoms.
Also, these wahoos are just a bunch of loose cannons. It's embarrassing the state, not serving it.
Human rights and individual freedoms are not just ideals. They are crucial checks which insure that the government doesn't go "rogue" and abuses the power it's been given.
I wouldn't be too quick to write all cops off as bad. There are definitely a good number of "good" cops. We should make sure not to stereotype policemen because a few of them do something idiotic.
I think a big problem with a lot of government positions or other legal positions are that a noticeable (hence this situation) percentage of the people are power-hungry, or have a chip on their shoulder.
Which results in unspeakable, completely illogical results like this - torturing someone to feel like you have power, and then being able to get away with it because of an obfuscating and broken legal system, filled with good law people and bad law people.
> I wouldn't be too quick to write all cops off as bad. There are definitely a good number of "good" cops.
"Good" and "bad" are very complicated. Nobody is purely good or purely bad. But police corruption was universal in US police departments until 1971, when http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Serpico became the first US policeman to testify against his colleagues, for which he got shot in the head. Up to that point, every US policeman was engaged in a cover-up operation to protect other corrupt policemen. Since then, there are a few exceptions; now, it's only nearly every US policeman who engages in such cover-ups.
But it's important to understand that the people who do this believe that what they are doing is good. The Blue Code of Silence is not merely enforced by intimidation and threats of violence. It's a matter of honor.
"Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority."
