With the protests growing and moving from the local police precinct to downtown Baltimore, Democratic officials are raising the red herring of “outside agitators.”

More... (http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/04/25/balt-a25.html)

The 'rough ride' is an ancient 'tradition' with the Baltimore Police. Cuffed, and I think in this case leg shakled, they throw you in this metal box(paddy wagon in the day) and drive like hell with lots of sharp cornering and braking. You are flung all over the place, unable to stabilize oneself because of the restraints. It's a beating.

The 'rough ride' is an ancient 'tradition' with the Baltimore Police. Cuffed, and I think in this case leg shakled, they throw you in this metal box(paddy wagon in the day) and drive like hell with lots of sharp cornering and braking. You are flung all over the place, unable to stabilize oneself because of the restraints. It's a beating.

And a murder. How long can this shit continue? How long can uncle toms come on TV and cry, "Can't we just get along?" If the poor and non-white citizens haven't gotten it yet, what will it take? I know almost all have "gotten it", and it is the next step that is the stopper, but that next step will have to be taken sooner or later.

Democrats step up repression against protests over police killing of Freddie Gray
By Nick Barrickman
27 April 2015

Thirty-four people were arrested and six police officers were injured over the weekend after thousands marched against police brutality through downtown Baltimore, Maryland. The protest on Saturday was held nearly a week after Freddie Gray, a young African-American man, died from injuries sustained after being beaten by police in west Baltimore.

http://www.wsws.org/asset/ff14f4b5-3fda-42da-8558-f3e23937bebE/Rally+outside+city+hall.jpg?rendition=image480

The rally outside city hall
The protest, called by a coalition of local activist groups, was largely peaceful. It was the largest in a series of demonstrations against police violence that have swept the city since Gray succumbed to his injuries last week.

On Sunday, thousands of people attended a wake for Gray, who will be buried today.

A group of protesters broke away from the main march on Saturday and carried out minor acts of vandalism to storefronts and police vehicles. Police responded by sending helmeted officers to detain protesters and break up the march. Clashes between protesters and police continued throughout the night in parts of west Baltimore, near the area where Gray was beaten and killed.

The number of police flooding the streets over the weekend approached the number of demonstrators. Baltimore Police Chief Anthony W. Batts mobilized over 1,200 cops. He made the ludicrous claim that deploying police across the city would safeguard the protesters’ right of “peaceful expression.”

On Saturday night, a photographer from the Baltimore City Paper was arrested and beaten by police in front of the Western District Police Station. “They mobilized,” photographer J.M. Giordano said of the ordeal as he and a bystander were swept up by heavily armed police. “They just swarmed over me… I got hit. My head hit the ground. They were hitting me, then someone pulled me out,” he said.

Sait Serkan Gurbuz, a photojournalist for Reuters, was arrested by police at the same time.

Freddie Gray was beaten by Baltimore police April 12 after reportedly making eye contact with an officer and then fleeing. Six policemen gave chase and restrained the youth in a position that severely injured his spine. Gray was then tossed into the back of a police van and driven across town, unrestrained by a safety belt, for over half an hour, before being given medical help. The city has refused to release the names of the police officers involved, while suspending each with pay, pending an investigation.

At the protest on Saturday, representatives of local activist groups tied to the Democratic Party took turns making explicit appeals to leading Democratic politicians. Malik Z. Shabazz, head of one of the event’s organizers, Black Lawyers for Justice, appealed to Barack Obama and US Attorney General Eric Holder, and called on Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee for the 2016 presidential election, to come and address her “black Democratic voters” on the march.

Democratic Party officials, however, took the lead in praising the police. “I think they are doing the best they can under the circumstances,” said US Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, adding that the march had been disturbed by a “few people, mainly from out of town.”

The Baltimore Police Department issued a statement declaring, “While the vast majority of arrests reflect local residency, the total number of arrests does not account for every incident of criminal activity,” adding that the department “believes that outside agitators continue to be the instigators behind acts of violence and destruction.”

The claim that so-called disturbances of the peace are the work of “outside agitators” has been used by authorities against protest movements dating back to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The use of the term by African-American politicians and so-called “civil rights” leaders active within the milieu of the Democratic Party signals that the city’s black political establishment, no less than white officials of a past era, are preparing a wave of repression.

The disconnect between the political line of the organizers and those protesting police violence was clear in discussions held with those at the march. One resident of the west Baltimore district where Freddie Gray was murdered told the World Socialist Web Site that the police were “a gang in blue,” and that any investigation by the federal government into the circumstances of the man’s death would only be a “cover-up.” (See: “Baltimore residents speak out against police killing”).

Another Baltimore resident said, “If you are not totally subservient to them [the police], they will escalate the situation… this is a part of the plan to militarize the country and intimidate the population.”

Last Tuesday, the Justice Department said it would open a federal investigation into Gray’s death, following an open letter from Senators Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin, as well as Cummings and two other congressmen, Dutch Ruppersberger and John Sarbanes. The five Democrats suggested that such a move would “restore public confidence in the Baltimore Police Department.”

This follows the trend of other Justice Department investigations into police violence in places such as Ferguson, Missouri; Cleveland, Ohio; Albuquerque, New Mexico and elsewhere that reveal a record of systemic police corruption and brutality but result in no criminal prosecutions or serious action to halt the abuse.

The Obama administration is fully complicit in the reign of police violence in the United States. The Washington Post noted last week that despite its claims of sympathy for the victims of police violence, “at the Supreme Court... [the Obama administration’s] Justice Department has supported police officers every time an excessive-force case has made its way to arguments.”

The administration has set records in its efforts to militarize law enforcement agencies through programs such as the Department of Defense’s 1033 program, which over the past four years has distributed record amounts of military equipment to local police forces.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/04/27/balt-a27.html

A perspective from Crimea:

Riots in Baltimore

http://cdn4.img22.ria.ru/images/106127/20/1061272055.jpg

April 28, 10:41


Heap Americans gone, the case Ferguson is alive and well. Another murder Negro American police, resulted in riots in Baltimore, after which the city urgently needed to enter the National Guard.
The city began as usual arson, looting, fighting with the police. According to the results, a lot of the wounded, the city suffered significant property damage. Of course, this surge of discontent as arbitrary police and Ferguson will be suppressed, but the symptoms manifest themselves in the course of these disturbances is quite revealing. Of course, the Americans will now be tough troll about human rights abuses and suppression "gidnosti revolution." The most amusing that the number of racially motivated riots at a black president was more than at kondovogo imperialists Republican from Texas.

http://cdn.static1.rtr-vesti.ru/p/xw_1086425.jpg

http://abnews.ru/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/553ca987dc592.image_-300x200.jpg

http://www.1news.az/images/articles/2015/04/28/4372769300449.jpg

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/ws/624/amz/worldservice/live/assets/images/2015/04/27/150427235252_baltimore2_624x351_ap.jpg

http://m3.netinfo.bg/media/images/17508/17508328/655-402-baltimor-bezredici.jpg

http://info.sibnet.ru/ni/423/423018b_1430197867.jpg


http://youtu.be/owNYjAM1oAg

http://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/

oogle Translator

Other photos & video at link.

Some brief comments from a couple of Baltimoreans:

From my old buddy Mike:



"Getting hot here today. Looting, fires. Gee, everyone is so shocked. Overblown in media, too. Front page on Bright Bart."


"Poe leece not shy about attacking journalists and marchers, but standing back and letting looting and car burning proceed in the neighborhoods.

talking heads keep referring to "civilian" cars, "civilian" this and that. As opposed to military occupying force?"

A paraphrase from phone conversation with my sister:


"This ain't gonna end until the autopsy comes out and some police are charged"

National Guard deployed in Baltimore after anger erupts over police killing
By Jerry White
28 April 2015
Maryland Governor Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency in Baltimore and activated 5,000 National Guard troops Monday evening after popular anger erupted in the city over police violence and poverty. Baltimore, with a population of 620,000, is located only 40 miles from the US capital, Washington, DC.

Hundreds of high school youth walked out of school Monday and joined protests over the police murder of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, who died April 19 after suffering fatal spine injuries at the hands of the police. The unarmed man was arrested on April 12 for making eye contact with a police officer and allegedly running away. After being tackled by six officers, thrown into a police van and denied medical assistance, Gray fell into a coma and succumbed a week later.

The anger of the youth and others boiled over following Gray’s funeral, which was held earlier on Monday.

In announcing the state of emergency, Governor Hogan, a Republican, said he had spoken with President Obama, who strongly endorsed the deployment of troops and agreed that “we absolutely need to take control of our streets.”

Earlier in the evening, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Baltimore’s African-American Democratic Party mayor, denounced protesters as “thugs who only want to incite violence and destroy the city.” She promised that police and media video tapes would be reviewed and those responsible for violence would be “held accountable.”

Rawlings-Blake said she had requested the deployment of National Guard troops and announced a citywide 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew, to begin on Tuesday.

City Council president Jack Young added, “These are thugs who are seizing the opportunity to show anger and distrust toward the police.”

The inflammatory language of Rawlings-Blake and Young, echoed by virtually every other local and state official who spoke to the press, exposed the immense gulf that separates the city’s privileged elite, black and white, from the masses of youth and workers. These remarks make clear that the murderous actions of the police reflect the hatred and contempt for the working class felt by the entire political establishment of the city.

The protests began just blocks from the West Baltimore church where Gray’s funeral was held. In scenes reminiscent of last year’s lockdown of Ferguson, Missouri, militarized police with riot shields, backed by tactical armored vehicles and helicopters, fired tear gas and rubber bullets at youth who responded with rocks and sticks.

Phalanxes of riot police blocked streets and occupied intersections in the city’s impoverished working class neighborhoods.

The local and national news media seized on incidences of property damage to brand protesters as “looters” and “violent rioters” and demanded an even more severe crackdown. CNN “legal expert” Jeffrey Toobin denounced the “incompetent” response of the mayor and police chief. “Hour after hour, they allowed looting to continue in an uncontrolled way, with no police presence,” he complained. The lesson of Ferguson was that the National Guard could not stay in the background, but had to take control of the streets, CNN reporter Don Lemon insisted.

News reports invariably described injuries suffered by police officers, but not those inflicted on protesters by police firing pepper balls and tear gas and wielding police batons. As of Monday evening, at least 30 people had been arrested.

The appearance at the funeral of low-level Obama administration officials and discredited figures such as Jesse Jackson, along with promises of yet another Justice Department investigation, could not prevent the explosion of social opposition.

Police brutality was the immediate catalyst, but popular anger was fueled by wider causes, above all, deeply entrenched poverty and social inequality.

After decades of deindustrialization, including the demolition of steel mills and auto plants, conditions for the majority of young people are on par with, or even worse than those in Third World countries. A study of adolescents in low-income neighborhoods conducted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that youth in Baltimore fare worse, in terms of mental health problems, drug abuse, sexual violence and teen pregnancy, than their counterparts in Nigeria.

While certain parts of Baltimore have been gentrified for the wealthy elite that runs the city, the Democratic Party-controlled administration is carrying out austerity measures against the majority of the city’s inhabitants. Last month, residents protested the decision of the city to begin cutting off water to thousands of households that are behind in their water payments.

Incidents such as the events in Baltimore and Ferguson reveal at once the real state of class relations not just in these cities, but across the United States. If social opposition takes the form of riots, it is because there is no outlet within the political system, dominated by two right-wing, corporate-controlled parties, for it to find expression.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/04/28/balt-a28.html

The Fire This Time: The day of Freddie Gray's funeral ends in chaos

http://www.trbimg.com/img-553f5cde/turbine/bcpnews-the-battle-of-baltimore-in-photos-part-014/580/580x383

Looters and rioters take over North and Fulton with a fire barricade and destroy a police car. (J. M. Giordano / April 27, 2015)

published: 6:09 a.m. EDT, April 28, 2015
The city erupted in fire Monday.

On Monday morning, police announced a “credible threat” posed by members of the Black Guerilla Family, Bloods, and Crips joining together to “take-out” law enforcement officers. Other sources claiming gang ties have told City Paper they are aware of a truce to protest the death of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old who died from a severed spine in police custody, but knew of no plans for violence.

But the police request for national media to make the information known seemed like it was trying to start something. There were reports of an Instagram post that read “All High Schools Monday @3 We Going To Purge From Mondawmin To The Ave, Back To Downtown,” referring to the film series where there is a single night a year in which there is no law.

Around 3 p.m. police and several large groups of kids were locked in battle in the area surrounding Mondawmin Mall. But if the police were the highly militarized victors at the Battle of Sandtown Saturday night, the kids seemed to be beating them here, throwing a large number of rocks that actually had the police retreating. When they fought back, the police used rubber bullets, pepper spray, and tear-gas canisters. Once, when they seemed to directly hit a protester with a gas canister, all the police began cheering and running until a lieutenant ran and got them to stop. But they seemed horribly disorganized and ill-equipped against the young kids, who had control of the streets. They were a guerrilla band, able to disperse quickly. The police couldn’t, or didn’t, use the kind of pincer tactics that would block the kids in. I only saw two people arrested—a guy who was taking pictures and one kid, lying sadly on the ground, his face smashed against the pavement. “I ain’t even a protester,” he said.

No one, it seemed, was a protester and everyone was a combatant.

An hour or so after we arrived at Mondawmin, we began seeing plumes of smoke coming from the direction of North Avenue. City Paper Photo Editor J.M. Giordano, a couple of other photographers, and I began to run in that direction. At North and Pennsylvania avenues, the scene was entirely out of police control. A Maryland Transportation Authority Police car and a van were in flames on the side of the road. People were running out of the busted-up CVS Pharmacy with armfuls of paper towels, detergent, toilet paper, and lighter fluid. They wrapped tape around Coleman stove fuel tanks and tried to light them. One kid took yellow police tape and wrapped it around the block. The police stood in formation up the street and did not move.

The windows of a check-cashing place were smashed and people ran in and out. The same thing happened to a pharmacy. A white photographer was beaten and then rescued. Giordano was among those who hoisted him out of the fray of the intersection. A man in all red—presumably a member of the Bloods—tried to keep people calm and help the photographer. Motorcycles roared by. Police still did nothing up the hill, even though an estimated 10 vans of backup arrived.

I talked to an older guy named Lucky Crosby. He is a safety officer for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and he heeded the call of religious leaders for older men to come out and try to take control of the kids before the destroyed the neighborhood. “This is sad and tragic because this didn’t have to go like this,” he said as a young man poured more lighter fluid on a fire in the street in front of the CVS. “This community has been raped of resources by our black politicians. We live in a city where all the highest offices are held by African-Americans who look down on the working and poor in the city. And because Sandtown was a historically great community, look how low they let it come and now we looking at the police and I don’t see what the police can do. They waiting for the state police that up [at] Mondawmin protecting Reisterstown Road because the people up Reisterstown Road, their lives more valuable than ours.’”

But late in the afternoon, a group of clergy included Rev. Jamal Bryant and members of the National of Islam did march through the streets arm-in-arm, aiming to calm the violence. (Baynard Woods)



Saturday, April 25

At around 5:30 p.m. Monday, as the chaotic battle between police officers in riot gear and a group of young people continued on North Avenue, a picture on Twitter showed a separate group near downtown running south on St. Paul Street toward the Inner Harbor. A walk down Charles Street showed the broken windows in stores, bars, and restaurants left behind.

The 7-Eleven convenience store at North Charles and West Saratoga streets had its front door smashed in with a garbage can, the shards of glass and contents of overturned shelves still scattered across the floor.

Police, including an armored truck from Howard County, quickly moved west, apprehending a young man just outside the Royal Farms Arena, and then running to pursue a group a few blocks north, on West Fayette Street. Four officers were able to pin one of the men on the ground and place him in plastic handcuffs. More than a dozen onlookers soon gathered, holding up their phones to take pictures and record video while also jeering the officers, included one who shouted several times, “He didn’t do shit!”

People began to walk away after a few minutes, but not before a woman nearby yelled, “You cops are causing the riots!” which was soon followed by a man yelling, “You’re burning your own city!”

Just up the street at Lexington Market, a large group of riot police with shields and batons, backed by a fleet of cars and armored vehicles, formed a tight line outside the iconic market. But the large group they were seemingly waiting for never showed up—there was only a handful of people, all of them curious to see what would happen.

A man walked up, pulled out a camera, started taking pictures, and told the phalanx of police, “I would say thank you, but you’re not doing the will of the people.”

Soon after, it was announced that the game between the Orioles and White Sox would be postponed, sending a small contingent of fans in bright orange back to their cars. Otherwise, the sidewalks of downtown were mostly desolate, the air continually punctuated with the sound of sirens.

Down at the Inner Harbor, three separate groups of riot police stood watch, one between the two Harborplace pavilions, one outside the entrance to the Gallery, and one at the Brio Tuscan Grille just across Calvert Street from the shopping mall. The group outside the Italian restaurant stood idly with a young man in handcuffs, but there were otherwise no signs of the damage that happened several blocks north, let alone the turmoil in the northwest part of the city.

Two men walking east on Pratt Street stopped to take pictures of the assembled officers. They soon struck up a conversation with a nearby man, who offered to take them up the street to a restaurant that might still be serving dinner, walking right by the young man still in handcuffs and the officers in their helmets carrying shields.

A van pulled up and the officers loaded the young man into the back. Perhaps aware of the few reporters and photographers nearby, they made a point to strap him in. (Brandon Weigel)

http://www.citypaper.com/news/features/bcpnews-the-fire-this-time-the-day-of-freddie-grays-funeral-ends-in-chaos-20150428,0,1094921.story

How drunk sports fans helped spark Saturday night's post-protest violence

http://www.trbimg.com/img-553f395a/turbine/bcpnews-how-drunk-sports-fans-helped-spark-sat-001/580/580x327

A bar patron moments before she hurls a stool at the author (Brandon Soderberg / April 28, 2015)

Related

A widely circulated Facebook message and picture
By Brandon Soderberg

City Paper

published: 4:22 a.m. EDT, April 28, 2015
On Saturday night, following the violence that broke out near Camden Yards, a photo of me supposedly protecting a woman from violent protesters surfaced on BuzzFeed and then trickled down to the conservative armpit of the internet where it was mischaracterized. In the photo, I look strangely heroic, and the picture was quickly co-opted by those who like to present an all-too-common and easy narrative: white people being terrorized by black people.

The truth, or as much as I have been able to cobble together from my own memory and notes, videos online, video I shot, and videos from City Paper’s Managing Editor Baynard Woods, is far less interesting, though much more important than “white dude saves white lady.”

I’m not exactly sure how the violence broke out around 6 p.m. in front of Pickles Pub on Washington Boulevard and traveled up the street to The Bullpen, Sliders Bar & Grill, and Frank & Nic’s West End Grille then down Howard Street. I know a small group of protesters and a small group of baseball fans started whipping bottles at one another and brawling. When the protesters turned the corner onto Washington Boulevard from Camden Street chanting “black lives matter,” some baseball fans applauded and a few angrily chanted back, “We don’t care”—someone who worked at The Bullpen confirmed this for me. He also said that some patrons chanted “run them over,” and one yelled “go get them.” Other protestors, including City Paper contributor D. Watkins and gang members interviewed on WBAL, recall bar patrons calling them “niggers,” among other racist epithets.

I don’t know who threw something first, but I heard a shift to jeers and boos from the people drinking and ran right over to it and saw beers being tossed from behind a gate that keeps Pickles drinkers from standing in the road and bottles being whipped back at the drinkers. Some people at Pickles stood up and moved toward the protesters though they were protected by the gate. Then, protesters pulled away the gate protecting Pickles customers from the street. Men from Pickles and elsewhere charged toward the protesters and the protesters charged the Pickles customers. It was at this point that I stopped being a journalist and became someone who was trying to help out.

A young woman from the bar threw a stool at me and others, and then affected a “come at me bro” stance. At the same time, many protesters were trying to tell the ones who were fighting and throwing things to stop causing trouble and keep moving. Some protesters began to grab bags of peanuts from a small stand and throw them at the people at the bar. The woman who threw the stool got hit in the face with a bag of peanuts and she went down. I helped her back up.

I retreated and noticed another woman from the bar, who earlier had thrown a chair, was now following the group as it moved up Washington Boulevard, pleading with them to stop. I ran up to her and told her to get back. She pushed me away, which is both a reasonable response to someone screaming at you and also a completely bizarre response to someone who is telling you to go inside, you’re going to get hurt.

At some point around here, a fight started in front of Sliders. Protesters and bar customers were fighting. The videos show people on both sides who wanted to fight and were excited to fight and embraced the opportunity.

The pleading woman followed the protesters up to the bar Frank & Nic’s. She was reaching out at people and yelling. I stopped her from walking toward a protester who was throwing a chair at a window, and that’s when the picture was taken. City Paper contributors Caitlin Goldblatt and Gianna DeCarlo were also talking to the woman at this point and a protester with a big bag and a bottle of vodka that he clearly stole from one of the bars (it has a pourer on it) approached her. That’s where we got the image of a protester, who was most certainly looting, who looks like he’s stealing a purse, but I was there and I’m really not sure if that’s what is happening.

In part, it also seems like it was a failure of security, who didn’t stop customers from jeering at the protesters. I was also told by employees at the bars that they had a discussion beforehand about how bad it would be if O’s fans who “every game, drink way too much” encountered protesters. The protesters who got violent weren’t from “out of town,” by the way. Some of their faces were recognizable to me as people who had been with the protests. Here were drunk, angry, white baseball fans and bar-goers who were equally guilty for the violence that happened that night and embraced the chance to fight and provoked some of it, and any accurate narrative must acknowledge that and barely anyone has acknowledged that. If you’d like to call Baltimore County whites and Boston Red Sox fans “outside agitators,” then you’ve got your outside agitators.


http://www.trbimg.com/img-553f395b/turbine/bcpnews-how-drunk-sports-fans-helped-spark-sat-002/580/580x388

A widely circulated Facebook message and picture


A tweet from City Paper contributor D. Watkins:

Some of the Oriole fans who got their asses whipped this weekend were taunting protesters , calling us “Apes, Niggers and Monkeys”

— D. (@dwatkinsworld) April 27, 2015

http://www.citypaper.com/bcpnews-how-drunk-sports-fans-helped-spark-saturday-nights-violence-20150428,0,75331.story

City Paper photo editor J.M. Giordano beaten by police at Freddie Gray protest


(video at link)
By Evan Serpick

published: 11:36 a.m. EDT, April 26, 2015
City Paper Photo Editor J.M. Giordano was tackled and beaten by Baltimore City police outside of Western District headquarters last night while covering protests over the death of Freddie Gray in police custody.

In a video shot by City Paper Managing Editor Baynard Woods you can see Giordano, wearing a green jacket, and a protester, both of whom had just been knocked to the ground by police, being beaten as Woods yells, "He's a photographer! He's press!"

Giordano says he was standing next to the protester in the video, facing the police line, at about 12:30 when someone threw a rock which hit a police officer’s shield.

“They mobilized,” he says. The police line moved forward and Giordano did not move fast enough for them. “I always move at the last second,” he says. Five or six police officers in riot gear hit Giordano and the other protester with their shields, knocking them to the ground.

“They just swarmed over me,” he says. “I got hit. My head hit the ground. They were hitting me, then someone pulled me out.”

“I kept shooting it,” he says. “As soon as I got up I started taking pictures.” He says the guy who was next to him (who did not throw anything, he is sure) got arrested and was loaded into a van. Joe was not. He thinks it is because police recognized him as a local reporter and figured arresting him would cause a backlash.

“They [police] tried to block me from shooting.”

He says Reuters photographer Sait Serkan Gurbuz, who was standing nearby, did get arrested and taken away in the police van, and was later released and cited for disorderly conduct.

Police did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the incident. Giordano suffered minor injuries on his arm, but will continue documenting the protests.

http://www.citypaper.com/blogs/the-news-hole/bcpnews-city-paper-photo-editor-jm-giordano-beaten-by-police-at-freddie-gray-protest-20150426,0,229974.story

Baltimore Riots: Stunning Comments By Orioles Owner’s Son
Political elite "plunged tens of millions of good hard-working Americans into economic devastation," says Angelos by Zero Hedge | April 28, 2015

The day after violent protests left Baltimore burning in the wake of a funeral held for Freddie Gray who died after sustaining a spinal injury while being taken into policy custody, Americans are struggling to explain how the events that transpired on Monday evening are possible in modern day America.
While most are united in their condemnation of indiscriminant violence, many still feel a palpable sense of injustice after witnessing multiple instances of alleged police misconduct over the past year.

In this context we present the following culled from Twitter messages posted by Orioles Executive Vice President John Angelos, son of majority owner Peter Angelos:

“Brett, speaking only for myself, I agree with your point that the principle of peaceful, non-violent protest and the observance of the rule of law is of utmost importance in any society. MLK, Gandhi, Mandela, and all great opposition leaders throughout history have always preached this precept. Further, it is critical that in any democracy investigation must be completed and due process must be honored before any government or police members are judged responsible.

That said, my greater source of personal concern, outrage and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle class and working class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others, plunged tens of millions of good hard-working Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.

The innocent working families of all backgrounds whose lives and dreams have been cut short by excessive violence, surveillance, and other abuses of the Bill of Rights by government pay the true price, an ultimate price, and one that far exceeds the importance of any kids’ game played tonight, or ever, at Camden Yards. We need to keep in mind people are suffering and dying around the U.S., and while we are thankful no one was injured at Camden Yards, there is a far bigger picture for poor Americans in Baltimore and everywhere who don’t have jobs and are losing economic civil and legal rights, and this makes inconvenience at a ball game irrelevant in light of the needless suffering government is inflicting upon ordinary Americans.”

Not exactly what the US Department of Truth wanted to hear.


http://www.infowars.com/baltimore-riots-stunning-comments-by-orioles-owners-son/

One half honest booj cannot absolve his class but it is good that he said it. Must also note that the "political elite" are the trusted servants of the economic elite.

(Yeah, I know, Alex Jones, machine problems today, this worked.)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CDqKfb8UgAA564o.jpg

One half honest booj cannot absolve his class but it is good that he said it. Must also note that the "political elite" are the trusted servants of the economic elite.

You're right. And this Angelos dude is right. The problem is he can't quite get the class thing right. "Shipping jobs overseas to third world countries" is not THE problem, just a symptom of THE problem (as well as a parochial, chauvinistic construct) . The oppression and violence against the working class (the forbidden phrase) is not THE problem, but a symptom of THE problem. He is railing against the "injustice" of the US government and its "political class", when this government and its political class are in essence agents of the source of "injustice". And, as the Kid is wont to say on many occasions, capitalism is not "unfair" or "unjust", per se. It is the operational functioning of the established socioeconomic system - it is what everyone has signed-up for.
Mr. Angelos, junior, is saying that he wants a different, socialistic, system to rectify the inequality and social misery inflicted upon working class people - he just doesn't know that is what he is saying (and, of course, would deny it vehemently if told so).

Here's today's good one from the WSWS:

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/04/29/pers-a29.html

I liked this particular conclusion:

"The fight against police violence is fundamentally a class question. In the methods deployed on the streets of Baltimore, the ruling class is demonstrating what it is prepared to do in response to all opposition to its policies of war and social counterrevolution.

The eruption of anger in Baltimore, however, is the expression of these sentiments in a form that lacks political direction. Police violence, inequality, poverty and unemployment cannot be ended in this way. This requires a political movement of the entire working class, which must come to the defense of the workers and youth of Baltimore.

The fight against police brutality and murder must be connected to a conscious political mobilization of the working class, independent of the Democratic and Republican Parties, and aimed at the overthrow of capitalism and the reorganization of society on a socialist basis."

When the Trots are right, they're right. IMHO, anyway.

Here's today's good one from the WSWS:

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/04/29/pers-a29.html

I liked this particular conclusion:

"The fight against police violence is fundamentally a class question. In the methods deployed on the streets of Baltimore, the ruling class is demonstrating what it is prepared to do in response to all opposition to its policies of war and social counterrevolution.

The eruption of anger in Baltimore, however, is the expression of these sentiments in a form that lacks political direction. Police violence, inequality, poverty and unemployment cannot be ended in this way. This requires a political movement of the entire working class, which must come to the defense of the workers and youth of Baltimore.

The fight against police brutality and murder must be connected to a conscious political mobilization of the working class, independent of the Democratic and Republican Parties, and aimed at the overthrow of capitalism and the reorganization of society on a socialist basis."

When the Trots are right, they're right. IMHO, anyway.

In this case you are completely right.

More personal communications:

"I've heard this from other sources, but MJ has a good article on how things started yesterday. Basically, the cops bottled up hundreds of kids in Mondawmin after school let out -- stopped buses, wouldn't let them go home.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/how-baltimore-riots-began-mondawmin-purge

"When school let out that afternoon, police were in the area equipped with full riot gear. According to eyewitnesses in the Mondawmin neighborhood, the police were stopping busses and forcing riders, including many students who were trying to get home, to disembark. Cops shut down the local subway stop. They also blockaded roads near the Mondawmin Mall and Frederick Douglass High School, which is across the street from the mall, and essentially corralled young people in the area. That is, they did not allow the after-school crowd to disperse."

Geraldo shows his stuff...Is it OK to call him a 'cunt'?


http://youtu.be/UTcJwYVHi6w

Geraldo shows his stuff...Is it OK to call him a 'cunt'?


http://youtu.be/UTcJwYVHi6w

He's always been one, so why not.

Here he is in all his cuntiness.

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--fRoU_oN3--/bi0pxpc8dnieq9ozdir9.jpg

You’d be surprised who the outside agitators in Baltimore really areMax Blumenthal, AlterNet
29 Apr 2015 at 04:56 ET

http://2d0yaz2jiom3c6vy7e7e5svk.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/2015-04-29T033144Z_1_LYNXMPEB3S034_RTROPTP_4_USA-POLICE-BALTIMORE-800x430.jpg
A protester raises his hands as clouds of smoke and crowd control agents rise shortly after the deadline for a city-wide curfew passed in Baltimore, Maryland April 28, 2015, as crowds protest the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died in police custody. (REUTERS/Adrees Latif)

On Monday, the country watched as a band of outside agitators descended on the streets of Baltimore, attacked locals with blunt force, intimidated innocent bystanders, and even threw rocks at native residents. Every day, these gun-toting rogues come from as far as New Jersey and Pennsylvania to intimidate the good people of Baltimore, forcing communities to cower under the threat of violence. The agitators are known for their menacing dark blue garb, hostile behavior and gangland-style codes of secrecy and silence. Though many of these ruffians have attempted to conceal their identities from their victims, they can be easily spotted by the badges that signify membership in the widely feared Baltimore Police Department.

According to data posted on the city of Baltimore’s OpenBaltimore website in 2012, over 70 percent of Baltimore Police Department officers live outside city limits, with at least 10 percent living over state lines, in places as far away as New Jersey and Pennsylvania. By contrast, almost all of those arrested in ongoing protests sparked by the police killing of the unarmed Baltimorean Freddie Gray reside firmly within the city. These facts were apparently lost on Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake when she blamed “outside forces” for all the looting of local businesses and attacks on cops. Similarly, the Baltimore Police Department claimed that “outside agitators continue to be the instigators behind acts of violence and destruction,” even as it conceded in the same statement that “the vast majority of arrests reflect local residency.” No evidence of outside agitation was produced by the mayor or the police, and none was demanded by much of the media covering the ongoing troubles.

This week’s scenes of mostly white cops battling the African-American youth of Baltimore captured a legacy of deeply entrenched racism that stretches back to Maryland’s Antebellum days. Though Maryland ended the slave trade in 1783, over 40,000 slaves remained in bondage in its Eastern Shore, near the border of Virginia, until Emancipation Day. When the Sixth Massachusetts Militia marched through Baltimore on April 19, 1861 on its way to protect Washington DC from advancing Confederate forces, the Union troops were attacked in the center of town with rocks, bricks and even pistols by local Southern sympathizers. Maryland’s last recorded lynching of a black man occurred in the town of Princess Anne on the Eastern Shore in 1933, when a thousand whites dragged assault suspect George Armwood from his jail cell, tortured him, hacked his ear off and hung him from a tree. It was the 33rd documented lynching in the state since 1882.

Gerald Horne, a professor of history and African American Studies at the University of Houston, sees the legacy of slavery as an underlying factor in the policing of majority black cities like Baltimore. “The origins of the urban police department lies precisely in slavery,” Horne remarked in a recent interview with The Real News founder Paul Jay. “That is to say, slave patrols that were designated to interrogate, to investigate Africans who were out and about without any kind of investigation. You fast forward to 2015 and you still see more than remnants of that particular system.”

The Gilmor Homes area where Freddie Gray was violently apprehended and later killed by Baltimore police officers is one of the city’s most heavily policed areas. Eddie Conway, a local civil rights activist who served 43 years in prison after a dubious conviction for killing two cops, explained in an interview with Democracy Now! that Gilmor Homes is “a ‘broken windows’ police area in which people and residents in that area are arrested for sitting on their own steps. They are loitering in their own community, on their own steps, and they’re harassed constantly.”

“[Cops] won’t let us go nowhere,” one young Gilmore Homes resident complained to The Real News, “They’ll tell us, ‘Move, we gotta go here, you gotta move off there.’ We ain’t doing nothing!”

When Paul Jay relocated The Real News operations to Baltimore in 2013 and initiated a series of roundtable discussions with local cops, he learned about the hostile racial attitudes white officers were importing into the city. “I’ve talked to some black cops in Baltimore and one of them told me that in the locker room,” Jay said, “and when they’re getting ready to go on their shift, some of the white cops joke…’Time to go back to work in the zoo.’”

While the Baltimore Police Department recruits its manpower outside city limits, its leadership is regularly junketed to training tours in Israel, the occupying power whose hyper-militarized settlers act as some of the Middle East’s most aggressive outside agitators. In September 2009, members of the Baltimore PD “toured and met with their Israeli counterparts to exchange information relating to best practices and recent advancements in security and counterterrorism,” according to the trip’s sponsor, Project Interchange. A separate Israel tour organized by the neoconservative Jewish Institute for National Security saw members of the Baltimore PD “begin the process of sharing ‘lessons learned’ in Israel with their law enforcement colleagues in the United States.”

Back in Maryland, the rate of citizens killed by police officers is skyrocketing. A report by the ACLU has found that 109 people died after encounters with Maryland police between 2010 and 2014, that almost 70 percent of those who died were black, and that over 40 percent of them were unarmed. In Baltimore alone, the city was forced to pay $5.7 million in lawsuits by suspects who accused police officers of beating them brutally and without cause.

Even after the National Guard vacates the streets of Baltimore and the state of emergency is lifted, vast swaths of the city will remain under occupation. Rather than return to a deadly status quo, the city could start answering the crisis by enacting residential requirements that force police officers to live in the neighborhoods they patrol.

Outside agitators have caused enough trouble in Baltimore. It’s time to send them back where they came from.

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/04/youd-be-surprised-who-the-outside-agitators-in-baltimore-really-are/

All true, but missing the point. The ruling class will get it's enforcers from [i]somewhere, and if a 'guard's quarter' in the city will pay face value to this complaint then good enough.

I heard this morning on the nationalist news that the Baltimore pigs are saying that Gray was trying to hurt himself in the back of the pig van and that is how he got hurt. Is this shit coming to a head? Or will all the tame, paid for "community leaders" whimper the resistance down?

I heard this morning on the nationalist news that the Baltimore pigs are saying that Gray was trying to hurt himself in the back of the pig van and that is how he got hurt. Is this shit coming to a head? Or will all the tame, paid for "community leaders" whimper the resistance down?

Fuckin' ludicrous, that's all they got? Ain't gonna sit well and it ain't helping those "community leaders" one bit. If they toe that line their credibility takes big hit.

Funny, four years ago them cell phones was gonna make revolution....then the owners & government showed the benefits of ownership. With these cameras almost univerally present it's another story, unless the providers implement onerous censorship which may damage their 'business model' and profits it's gonna be hard to suppress this information and graphic imagery which leaves no doubt about what's going on. Unless they come up with some sort of tech fix for this they're selling rope.

The social eruption in Baltimore, Maryland

29 April 2015

The eruption of mass anger in Baltimore, Maryland over the police murder of Freddie Gray, and the subsequent military-police takeover of the city, have once again revealed the reality of social life in America. The United States is a seething cauldron of social discontent, over which a frightened and isolated ruling class rules ever more nakedly through the methods of violence and repression.

Two thousand National Guard troops, many of whom were previously deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, have poured into one of America’s largest cities, only 40 miles from the nation’s capital. A curfew has been imposed, and anyone found after dark without a driver’s license and a document from their employer attesting to the fact that they work after hours will be arrested.

The entire political and media establishment has seized on the rioting and unrest following the funeral of Gray to declare their support for the paramilitary occupation of the city. The gamut of opinion represented on the television news ranges from full support for the crackdown to criticism of Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake for not having called in the National Guard earlier.

On Tuesday, President Obama, who has fully backed the crackdown in Baltimore, weighed in with his own remarks, delivered at a press conference announcing a new military agreement with Japan. Obama took the occasion to denounce youth in Baltimore as “criminals and thugs” and said that there is “no excuse for the kind of violence that we saw yesterday.” He added that the violence “robs jobs and opportunity from people in that area.”

To say that there is no excuse is to say that there is no reason, that the social eruption in Baltimore is simply the product of “thugs”—a term used ubiquitously by the political and media establishment over the past several days. In fact, the cause of the unrest in Baltimore is not hard to locate. It is the product of intense anger over poverty, unemployment, social decay and the unending reign of police violence and murder in Baltimore and cities throughout the United States.

For the youth targeted by the police crackdown, there are no “excuses,” but for Obama, and the corporate aristocracy and the military-intelligence apparatus that he represents, excuses abound. The United States government is built on a mass of excuses for all the crimes of the ruling class.

Just last week, Obama excused the fact that a drone strike he ordered in January killed two hostages, with the bland declaration, “During the fog of war mistakes happen.” There is no shortage of excuses for the hundreds of thousands killed as a result of US military operations.

And there are plenty of excuses for the real criminals in Baltimore: the police, armed to the teeth with military gear provided by the Obama administration. The killing of Gray—an act that has yet to result in any arrests or charges—is only the latest in a long string of daily harassment, brutality and abuse, in Baltimore and throughout the country. Those responsible are almost never held accountable. Following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri last year, the Obama administration worked closely with local and state officials and prosecutors to ensure that his killer was exonerated.

As for Obama’s claims that the actions of youth in Baltimore “robs jobs and opportunity,” this comes from the chief representative of a financial aristocracy that has laid havoc to Baltimore and countless other cities.

For decades, the ruling class in America has carried out a policy of deindustrialization, shutting down entire sectors of the economy. Obama himself has presided over the largest transfer of wealth into the pockets of the rich in US history, even as he has overseen the destruction of wages and the decimation of social services. Since Obama came to office, Baltimore has lost 80 percent of its manufacturing jobs, and thousands of children are homeless and tens of thousands live in poverty.

The events in Baltimore reveal starkly the fraud of identity politics, based on the claim that race, not class, is the fundamental social category in America. Obama’s denunciation of young people in Baltimore mirrors that of the entire African-American political apparatus in the city, which has responded to the protests with a combination of hatred, rage and fear.

In her press conference Tuesday, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake repeatedly referred to young people expressing their anger over police violence as “thugs” in announcing the imposition of a curfew and the calling in of the National Guard. She was flanked by Patrol Chief Darryl De Sousa, the City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young, and City Council member Brandon M. Scott, all of whom were black, with the latter two also calling the demonstrators “thugs.”

This coming August will mark the 50th Anniversary of the Watts rebellion, a wave of social unrest that engulfed the predominantly African-American neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1965. The Watts rebellion, sparked by an incident of police brutality, was followed in the coming years by a series of uprisings in urban centers throughout the country, including Baltimore.

Two social phenomena characterize the subsequent decades. First, the extraordinary growth of social inequality. The conditions of workers and working-class youth, including African Americans, are worse today than they were a half century ago. Second, the ruling class has integrated into positions of power and privilege a layer of the black upper middle class, which has presided over an economic and cultural catastrophe in city after city.

In its response to the eruption of police violence over the murder of Freddie Gray, the black political establishment, headed by the first African-American president, has shown itself exactly for what it is: corrupt, self-interested and utterly hostile to the interests and aspirations of the poor and workers, black and white.

The fight against police violence is fundamentally a class question. In the methods deployed on the streets of Baltimore, the ruling class is demonstrating what it is prepared to do in response to all opposition to its policies of war and social counterrevolution.

The eruption of anger in Baltimore, however, is the expression of these sentiments in a form that lacks political direction. Police violence, inequality, poverty and unemployment cannot be ended in this way. This requires a political movement of the entire working class, which must come to the defense of the workers and youth of Baltimore.

The fight against police brutality and murder must be connected to a conscious political mobilization of the working class, independent of the Democratic and Republican Parties, and aimed at the overthrow of capitalism and the reorganization of society on a socialist basis.

Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/04/29/pers-a29.html

Protests grow in Baltimore in defiance of police-military siege
By Jerry White
30 April 2015
Thousands of workers and students demonstrated in Baltimore Wednesday, defying the military-police crackdown in the city of 622,000.
Solidarity protests, including those demanding the removal of the National Guard from Baltimore, spread to other cities, including New York City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Washington, DC.
While the police murder of 25-year-old Freddie Gray was the trigger of social opposition, the outpouring of protests is driven by deeper social causes.
In addition to police violence, angry youth on the streets of Baltimore spoke out against deteriorating schools, impoverished neighborhoods, poverty level jobs and the vast social chasm that has produced “two Baltimores”—one for the rich and powerful, the other for the poor. They complained of the indifference of the political establishment in the city, which has long been dominated by a corrupt layer of African American Democratic Party politicians.
As the immense class tensions that characterize American society are beginning to rise to the surface, the ruling class is responding with violence and repression.
Maryland’s Republican Governor Larry Hogan and Baltimore’s Democratic Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, consulting closely with President Obama, used incidents of looting on Monday night to declare a state of emergency, deploy the National Guard throughout the city, including outside public schools, and impose a 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew.
Military humvees monitored protests closely on Wednesday, and police helicopters flew overhead. Meanwhile, police cracked down on solidarity protests involving some 300 demonstrators Tuesday night in Ferguson, Missouri. The St. Louis suburb was the scene of militarized police repression of protests after the police killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
Authorities and the media are seeking to condition the population to accept routine police state measures and the suspension of democratic rights.
Governor Hogan said Wednesday that the National Guard would remain “until the violence ends,” and warned that there were still “Hostility, anger and people who want to make trouble and don’t want to go in a peaceful way.” While state authorities would “permit” protests, the governor declared that the curfew remained in effect.
Expressing the sentiments of many workers and youth in Baltimore, protester April Love told CNN, “The system is corrupt. We have waited too long for them to sweep this murder under the rug. The youth have been forgotten. We vote these politicians in and then they forget about you.”
Another resident noted how outrageous it was for young students to leave Frederick Douglass High School only to be confronted with National Guard troops toting automatic weapons. “These are kids seeing armed guards.” Referring to Mayor Rawlings-Blake, she added, “She is not doing anything for us. She is only worried about making herself look better. Make this city safe. It is already profitable. Make it thrive for us.”
Much of the media coverage Wednesday was characterized by a self-congratulatory tone over the success of the military-police crackdown and the supposed popular support for the dispatch of armed troops.
Nearly 300 people have been arrested since Monday evening, including an estimated 35 after the curfew went into effect Tuesday night. Police are reviewing security and news media videotapes of clashes Monday night, and CNN announced “hundreds more” could be jailed.
Among the arrests were 35-50 juveniles, including 21 with no prior criminal records, who appeared in court Wednesday shackled with chains on their ankles. One youth told CNN that he felt like he had been caged like an animal. Judges began processing others, demanding $10-15,000 bonds to post bail.
While the full weight of the criminal justice system is being meted out to impoverished workers and youth—denounced by the mayor and President Obama as “thugs”—the six police officers responsible for Gray’s death have gone uncharged. Much of the popular anger is fueled by anticipation that they will be exonerated like other killer cops across the country.
Authorities said they were lowering expectations about Friday’s pre-announced conclusion of the police department’s internal investigation in Gray’s death. Baltimore Police Department Captain Eric Kowalczyk said Wednesday afternoon that the report would not be released to the public. “We know people want answers but we cannot release all this information to the public. If there is a decision to charge, the integrity of the investigation has to be respected.”
In an effort to preempt protests while making more police forces available to monitor schools and neighborhoods, Baltimore’s professional baseball team held a previously cancelled game Wednesday afternoon in an empty Camden Yards stadium after police banned any public attendance to the game—for the first time in the history of the sport.
Captain Kowalczyk declared Wednesday that police were “monitoring social media” and that “we have resources on the ground where students congregate or are dismissed from school.”
The eruption of mass anger in Baltimore and the subsequent police-military deployment have exposed the fundamental class divide in America—between millions of workers on the one hand, and a corporate and financial aristocracy that controls both big business parties, on the other.
In Baltimore, the Democratic political establishment has starved essential services of funding while handing over large tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy in the name of “improving business climate.” Development has focused on sports, tourist attractions and commercial projects in the downtown and the Inner Harbor areas.
Nearby areas that once contained dockyards, shipbuilding and repair facilities, steel, auto and other manufacturing plants, employing tens of thousands of workers, have long been abandoned along with working class neighborhoods that lack the most basic necessities of life.
Baltimore’s infant mortality rate compares with underdeveloped countries like Belize and Moldova. Freddie Gray’s Sandtown neighborhood has a jobless rate of over 50 percent, a median income of $24,000—compared to $40,803 in the city as a whole—and life expectancy of only 68.8 years, according to the Justice Policy Institute and Prison Policy Institute.
A Johns Hopkins study noted that a matter of just six miles—the distance between affluent and poor neighborhoods in the city—means a difference of 20 years in life expectancy.
The ruling class has nothing to offer to address the social catastrophe created by the capitalist system. The corollary to the redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich—massively accelerated since the 2008 economic crisis—is the build-up of the instruments of repression in response to the inevitable eruption of class struggle.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/04/30/balt-a30.html

So, mebbe we got ourselves a scapegoat....


Cop Who Arrested Freddie Gray Had Guns Confiscated Over Mental Health


http://a2.img.talkingpointsmemo.com/image/upload/c_fill,fl_keep_iptc,g_faces,h_365,w_652/qzsfy2nkbwyjb8ireqly.jpg
AP Photo / Patrick Semansky ByJEFF HORWITZ, JULIET LINDERMAN and AMANDA LEE MYERSPublishedApril 30, 2015, 5:39

BALTIMORE (AP) — The highest-ranking Baltimore police officer in the arrest that led to Freddie Gray's death was hospitalized in April 2012 over mental health concerns for an unknown duration and had his guns confiscated by local sheriff's deputies, according to records from the sheriff's office and court obtained by The Associated Press.

Lt. Brian Rice, who initially pursued Gray on a Baltimore street when Gray fled after Rice made eye contact April 12, declared three years ago that he "could not continue to go on like this" and threatened to commit an act that was censored in the public version of a report obtained by the AP from the Carroll County, Maryland, Sheriff's Office. Rice lived in the county, about 35 miles northwest of Baltimore. At the time, deputies were responding to a request to check on his welfare by a fellow Baltimore police officer who is the mother of Rice's son.

Deputies reported that Rice appeared "normal and soft spoken" and said he had been seeking "sympathy and attention." But citing "credible information," the deputies confiscated both his official and personal guns, called his commanding officer and transported Rice to the Carroll Hospital Center. The weapons included his .40-caliber police pistol, a 9 mm handgun, an AK-47-style rifle, a .22-caliber rifle and two shotguns.

It was not immediately clear how long Rice was at the hospital or whether he went on his own accord. Rice declined to speak with the AP or discuss allegations in a subsequent court filing that he had behaved in erratic or threatening ways toward family members. When the AP visited Rice's home last week and left a note requesting an interview, Rice called the sheriff's department to report the visit as trespassing. Karen McAleer, the mother of his son, also declined to speak with the AP.

The events described in the 2012 report provided the basis for one of at least two administrative suspensions for Rice in 2012 and 2013, a person familiar with the police department staff said. This person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential personnel matters.

The incidents described in the sheriff's report and court records involving Rice's personal problems portray allegations of concerns about self-control and judgment, as Baltimore police and the Justice Department investigate the injuries that Gray, 25, sustained in police custody. Police have said Gray ran after making eye contact with Rice. After a brief chase, Gray was arrested "without force or incident," according to a report filled out by one of theofficers, though witness video shows officers kneeling around Gray while he screams. After being transported in the back of a police van, Gray was found unable to talk or breathe and died one week later from spinal trauma.

It also was not immediately clear whether or when all of Rice's guns were returned. The sheriff's report said the weapons "should be returned back to owner pending determination of the (censored)." But Rice was accused in June 2012 of removing a semi-automatic handgun from the trunk of his personal vehicle and threatening McAleer, according to a complaint filed in 2013. A police report about that June 2012 incident omitted any reference to allegations that Rice brandished a weapon but noted that officers who responded spent hours searching for Rice over concerns for his welfare.

Baltimore police were made aware of worries that Rice might pose a risk to himself or others, according to the April 2012 sheriff's report. Sheriff's deputies spoke to a police commander for the city's western district, where Rice worked, who initially requested that deputies not fax the report with details about their experiences with Rice because he would make arrangements to pick up a copy of the report and Rice's service weapon. The official, whose name is twice misspelled, appeared to be James Handley, a police major who now heads Baltimore police's property division.

A police spokesman, Capt. John Kowalczyk, said he could not comment on matters that might involve an officer'spersonnel file. Speaking generally of department procedure, Kowalczyk said that the department had overhauled its procedures for dealing with discipline and employees who need help with personal matters since the arrival of Police Commissioner Anthony Batts in September 2012.

"These are tremendous changes to how we hold people accountable," Kowalczyk said. He credited the changes for what he said were recent declines in complaints about officer misconduct and an increase in the percentage of disciplinary actions sustained by the police department's trial board.

An attorney representing Rice, Michael Davey, did not respond Thursday to phone calls from AP asking to discuss the sheriff's report about Rice's hospitalization or gun seizures. Earlier in the week, he dismissed the significance of Rice also being placed on administrative leave as a result of a complaint in January 2013 by McAleer's then-husband, Andrew, a former Baltimore firefighter who said Rice threatened him and asked for a court protective order. Those threat claims were initially reported by The Guardian newspaper.

Andrew McAleer, who did not respond to a note left at his last known address in court records, wrote to a judge that Rice had been transported in the earlier incident "to a local hospital for a mental health evaluation." A judge granted the protective order but allowed it to expire after one week.

"People file peace orders all the time," Davey said. "The only thing I'd comment on is, any issues similar to this had nothing to do with his ability to perform his duties as a Baltimore police officer."

The Carroll County Sheriff's Office did not explain why it censored parts of the report it provided to the AP. Maryland law allows law enforcement officials to protect details about a person's medical or psychological condition in public records.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/baltimore-police-officer-arrested-freddie-gray-menta-health-concerns

So, mebbe we got ourselves a scapegoat....

Yeah, this guy is going to be trotted out as the culprit - but he's mentally unstable, dontchaknow. Why he was allowed to carry lethal weapons and subject citizens to his mental illness is another question.

The thing that I have not heard expanded on is this, "He made eye contact and then ran." business. Since when is that an offence worthy of arrest? Anyone who takes off quickly in the presence of a cop is subject to arrest and execution? I have heard no where that Gray was suspected of anything or that he was doing anything unlawful - and if he had of been, it would have been all over every report. So, all of us are subject to unprompted arrest and subsequent injury or death at the hands of the cops and we are all supposed to be calm and nonviolent? How do people square this fact with any kind of ideas of "freedom" or "liberty" that so many folks tout as "'Merikans god-given right"?"

This is getting worse by the day and the authorities" have only one response - more oppression, more violence.

Yeah, this guy is going to be trotted out as the culprit - but he's mentally unstable, dontchaknow. Why he was allowed to carry lethal weapons and subject citizens to his mental illness is another question.

The thing that I have not heard expanded on is this, "He made eye contact and then ran." business. Since when is that an offence worthy of arrest? Anyone who takes off quickly in the presence of a cop is subject to arrest and execution? I have heard no where that Gray was suspected of anything or that he was doing anything unlawful - and if he had of been, it would have been all over every report. So, all of us are subject to unprompted arrest and subsequent injury or death at the hands of the cops and we are all supposed to be calm and nonviolent? How do people square this fact with any kind of ideas of "freedom" or "liberty" that so many folks tout as "'Merikans god-given right"?"

This is getting worse by the day and the authorities" have only one response - more oppression, more violence.

Never, ever make eye contact with a predator unless you're prepared to kill it. Gray fucked up, that's applied Social Darwinism for ya.

Six Baltimore officers charged in death of Freddie Gray
Mosby announces criminal charges in Freddie Gray death, city reacts

Updated 51 minutes agoThe six Baltimore police officers involved in the arrest of Freddie Gray – who died last month after being injured in police custody – have been charged criminally, State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced Friday.

Mosby's announcement on the steps of the War Memorial Building was greeted with cheers and applause. Mosby said she told Gray's family that "no one is above the law and I would pursue justice upon their behalf."

Desmond Taylor, 29, shouted in jubilee in front of the War Memorial Building.

"I did not expect this, but I prayed for it," he said. "This day means that your actions bring consequences in Baltimore City."

Word traveled quickly of the charges against the officers. In West Baltimore, cars honked their horns. A man hanging out of a truck window pumped his fists and yelled; "Justice! Justice! Justice!"

At the corner where Gray was arrested, 53-year-old Willie Rooks held his hands up in peace signs and screamed, "Justice!"

Reacting to news of the charges, President Barack Obama called it "absolutely vital that the truth come out.

"What I think the people of Baltimore want more than anything else is the truth," the president said. "That's what people around the country expect."

Officer Caesar Goodson Jr., 45, who was the driver of a police van that carried Gray through the streets of Baltimore, was charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter, second-degree assault, two vehicular manslaughter charges and misconduct in office. A man who answered the phone at Goodson's home declined to comment and hung up the phone.

Officer William Porter, 25, was charged with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault and misconduct in office.

Lt. Brian Rice, 41, was charged with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault and misconduct in office.

Sgt. Alicia White, 30, was charged with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault and misconduct in office.

Officer Edward Nero, 29, was charged with second-degree assault and misconduct in office.

Officer Garrett Miller, 26, was charged with second-degree assault, misconduct in office and false imprisonment.

If convicted of all charges, Goodson would face up to 63 years in prison. Rice would face up to 30 years and Porter, Nero, Miller and White would face up to 20 years.

Warrants were issued for the arrest of all six officers. It wasn't immediately clear where the officers were Friday morning.

"We're not sure what time they are coming in. They will go through the process like anyone else," said Gerard Shields, a spokesman for the department of Public Safety and Correctional Services.

After the officers are arrested they will go to Baltimore Central Booking and Intake Center downtown to be processed and where they will have their bail set by a court commissioner within 24 hours. If they are not released or cannot post bail, they will go before a judge in District Court the next business day.

If they are held, Shields wouldn't say where they would be placed in the jail, citing "security reasons."

Gray, 25, was chased down and arrested by Baltimore officers on April 12 and died a week later. His family has said he suffered a spinal cord injury and a crushed voice box.

Just before Mosby announced the criminal charges, the Fraternal Order of Police defended the officers involved.

"Not one of the officers involved in this tragic situation left home in the morning with the anticipation that someone with whom they interacted would not go home that night," Gene Ryan, president of FOP Lodge 3, wrote in a letter to Mosby. "As tragic as this situation is, none of the officers involved are responsible for the death of Mr. Gray."

After bystander video of the April 12 arrest surfaced, showing Gray dragging his feet as he was put in a police transport van, there have been cries for charges against the officers.

Mosby said Gray was improperly arrested because officers had no probable cause to detain him. Officers found a knife in Gray's pants, but it was not a switchblade, as police previously said, and was legal under Maryland law.

In a detailed recounting of the events, Mosby described Gray being repeatedly denied medical attention by police officers, even as he asked for medical help and later was unresponsive in a police van.

Gray suffered a "severe and critical neck injury" as a result of being handcuffed, shackled and being unrestrained in the van.

Mosby said an investigation found officers placed Gray in wrist and ankle restraints and left him stomach-down on the floor of a police van as they drove around West Baltimore. Despite his repeated requests for medical attention, they did not provide it and continued to drive without securing him in the van, she said.

Officers on at least five occasions placed Gray in the van or checked on him and failed to secure him, she said. By the time they reached the Western District police station, he was not breathing and was in cardiac arrest, she said.

Mosby said her office did a "comprehensive, thorough and independent" investigation that began April 13, the day after Gray was injured.

"My team worked around the clock, 12- and 14-hour days," she said.

Mosby worked quickly in filing charges. Baltimore Police handed over their investigation to her office Thursday, one day earlier than they had promised.

The Fraternal Order of Police asked Mosby to appoint an independent prosecutor in the case, citing her ties to the Gray family's attorney, William Murphy, as well as her lead prosecutor's connections to members of the local media. Murphy donated $5,000 to Mosby's campaign and served on her transition committee.

"While I have the utmost respect for you and your office, I have very deep concerns about the many conflicts of interest presented by your office conducting an investigation in this case," Ryan wrote in his letter.

The FOP letter also expresses concerns regarding Mosby's marriage to Baltimore City Councilman Nick Mosby.

"Most importantly, it is clear that your husband's political future will be directly impacted, for better or worse, by the outcome of your investigation," the letter states. "In order to avoid any appearance of impropriety or a violation of the Professional Rules of Professional Responsibility, I ask that you appoint a Special Prosecutor to determine whether or not any charges should be filed."

Mosby responded to that request by saying: "The people of Baltimore City elected me and there is no accountability with a special prosecutor."

"I will prosecute any case within my jurisdiction," she added.

Following Gray's death, demonstrations and protests began peacefully but turned violent on Saturday and Monday. Monday's events included rioting, arson and property damage in pockets of the city.

Officials responded by declaring a state of emergency, instituting a nightly curfew and calling in help from state troopers and the Maryland National Guard.

Mosby called on the public to remain calm.

"I heard your call for 'no justice, no peace,'" she said. "Your peace is sincerely needed as I work to deliver justice on behalf of this young man."

Demonstrations were planned in Baltimore for Friday night and Saturday, well before Mosby made her announcement of criminal charges against the officers.

A group called the Bmore United Coalition plans to meet at the state's attorney's office at 3 p.m. and march to City Hall. The People's Power Assembly plans a protest at the Inner Harbor at 5 p.m.

MayorStephanie Rawlings-Blake said she is "sickened and heartbroken" over the charges against the officers, five of whom are already in custody.

"No one in our city is above the law," she said. "Justice must apply to all of us equally."

Gov. Larry Hogan, who has been in Baltimore all week, said he had no immediate reaction to the officers being charged. He said his sole job is to keep the peace.

Hogan said he has faith in the justice system and his primary goal is to urge people to react peacefully.

Baltimore City Councilwoman Helen Holton called Friday's announcement of charges "a defining moment for Baltimore. We should all be proud."

"This is a good day," she said. "I'm excited for my city. This speaks to decades of problems we have faced in this city and we're beginning a new chapter today into real justice. This will allow us to begin to address the systemic problems that make us a tale of two cities."

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said Mosby deserves to be congratulated but cautioned the criminal charges are only a start to a "lengthy process."

Shouts of "thank you" and "hallelujah" broke out among bystanders who pressed as close as they could to the media scrum around Mosby.

"I got hugged by someone I don't even know," said Kristyn Porter, 23, of East Baltimore.

Porter had business nearby but when she heard the announcement would be made at War Memorial, she stopped to listen.

"I'm happy justice was served, and things can calm down now," Porter, who works in security, said. "The only other thing people are angry about is the curfew."

She and her friend, and Raquel Burke, 23, also of the East Side, said they hadn't been able to attend any of the marches so far.

"Now I want to go to this one," said Burke, eyeing a flyer someone gave her for a rally at City Hall at 2 p.m. on Saturday.

Reactions on the streets were a mix of celebration and lingering concern.

In Gilmor Homes, the neighborhood where Gray was arrested, things were quiet Friday, with a police helicopter circling overhead. At the intersection of North Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue, the focus of rioting Monday and demonstrations all week, traffic moved through with many motorists honking their horns.

Meecah Tucker, 23, wearing a T-shirt that read, "I Bleed Baltimore," said: "If it was one of us doing that against a police officer, it would be first-degree murder."

Waiting to catch a bus near the Western District Police Station, Joann El-Amin said her husband called to give her the news about the officers being charged. "Everyone should be punished if they did something wrong," she said.

But she wasn't keen on the protests that turned violent.

"I just wish they'd stop this foolishness; the people tearing up their own neighborhoods. It makes no sense. I told my son, who works downtown, to go home and not get caught up in it. ...You don't know if the crowd is peaceful or full of foolish people. I didn't need to protest. I knew it would come out in the wash," she said.

Dwayne Wright, 44, said: "An indictment is not a conviction. They had to do something. I definitely feel leaders could have done it in other cases."

Michael Hall, 52, said he hoped the charges weren't filed just in an attempt to calm violence in the city.

"I hope she doesn't pin it on one of them when it's time for trial," he said. "Are they gonna stick by these charges?"

Ronald Blake, a special project manager for the city's Housing Authority, attended Friday morning's announcement. He said he was not surprised that all six officers were charged.

"I think they wanted to make this decision to more move on. That's the concern now, what will people do with information? Now I am concerned about the police and how that will impact them and their safety," he said.

This story will be updated.

Baltimore Sun reporters Yvonne Wenger, Meredith Cohn, Erica L. Green, Jessica Anderson, Kevin Rector, Erin Cox, Justin Fenton, Mark Puente, Doug Donovan, Liz Bowie, John Fritze, Jean Marbella and Alison Knezevich contributed to this report.

pwood@baltsun.com

http://touch.baltimoresun.com/#section/830/article/p2p-83434308/

Meanwhile the right wing wankers are declaring it a 'war on police'. Careful what you wish for, assholes.

The man who filmed the Freddie Gray video has been arrested at gunpoint

Arrest comes in spite of his cooperation with the police
CHRISTOPHER HOOTON Author Biography Friday 01 May 2015


Kevin Moore, the man who filmed Freddie Gray's brutal arrest, has now himself been arrested following "harassment and intimidation" from Baltimore police.

Moore was arrested at gunpoint last night along with two other members of Cop Watch, agroup dedicated to filming and documenting police work.

His video of Gray's arrest was shot shortly before the man suffered spinal injuries while in police custody that led to his death.

Our We Copwatcher Chad from Ferguson and Kevin Moore (one of the people who Copwatched and documented Freddie Gray) were...

Posted by We Copwatch on Thursday, April 30, 2015

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-man-who-filmed-freddie-gray-video-has-been-arrested-at-gunpoint-10217973.html

"That'll teach 'em." Fuckin' Gestapo.

It has been reported that the serious violence began when the policed attempted to 'kettle' several hundred kids coming out of Frederick Douglas High, essentially herded them towards Mondawin Mall. It has been speculated that this was due to some modelling error in a DHS program meant to predict these sort of things, but I don't think so. Rather, what we got here is an application of the wilderness fire-fighting concept of the 'back burn'. Small fires are set to pre-empt the spread of the fire into larger areas by consuming the fuel on the ground. This works on not just a physical basis, indeed at this level the goal is more psychological, by creating a counter narrative blaming the populace the waters are muddied and state violence is obscured and vindicated.

With the charges in place we find ourselves in a situation not unlike Ukraine. The indictments have bought the state a truce, and like the fascists junta the state will use the time to gun up. Be assured that when the verdicts are to be announced that Baltimore will be thoroughly militarized.

Rather, what we got here is an application of the wilderness fire-fighting concept of the 'back burn'. Small fires are set to pre-empt the spread of the fire into larger areas by consuming the fuel on the ground. This works on not just a physical basis, indeed at this level the goal is more psychological, by creating a counter narrative blaming the populace the waters are muddied and state violence is obscured and vindicated.

With the charges in place we find ourselves in a situation not unlike Ukraine. The indictments have bought the state a truce, and like the fascists junta the state will use the time to gun up. Be assured that when the verdicts are to be announced that Baltimore will be thoroughly militarized.

Dead-on. Great analogy with the "back-burn" method. I agree, Baltimore will be a thoroughly militarized zone by mid-summer.

American political commentator Don DeBar says the American people will “take more desperate acts” because they are facing “more desperate conditions.”

Commenting on the recent angry protests in Baltimore over the police killing of a black man, he said, “Consequently, you’re going to see more and more desperate acts taken by people.”

He made the comments on Sunday in response to House Speaker John Boehner’s description of the worsening relationship between law enforcement and the African-American community as a national crisis.

“John Boehner hit on an essential truth even as he attempts to deny the reality of the conditions facing particularly black folks in the cities in the country,” the radio host said, adding that the majority of the crisis in the US stems from the government’s policies.

“There is indeed a crisis. The crisis is a product of long standing policy. Housing policy, job creation policy, education policy, [and] healthcare policy. All of the things that are required as fundamental human rights for life in the 21st century,” he stated.

“There’s also the crisis of mass incarceration of particularly black and brown men and the crisis of police murder with impunity,” he added.

In the United States, the government uses an international and a national policy of using violence to achieve its goals, the US commentator said.

When the government kills people randomly but at a steady rate with impunity, “there becomes a “consciousness or an awareness of the fact that your situation is desperate enough to risk your life because it’s already at risk,” he said.

"As much of a crisis as that indicates, it actually shows the real crisis, which is the crisis of legitimacy of this entire system that is coming to the fore,” he said.

“There are people that are lining up and beginning to organize resistance to that and it appears that the line between non-violent and violent resistance is becoming less and less defined,” DeBar explained.

http://news786.in/article.php?id=MTU5ODY=

Not sure if this guy doesn't see the class war in this or just chooses not to bring it up; but it is there in every sentence he speaks. Will the ruling class step back and try to ameliorate the damage and try to smother it with money or will what is left of the gloves come off and put an end to any pretense remaining? It feels like things are coming to a head.

Baltimore police just shot a man in the back and are macing onlookers.

http://t.co/g39RIkDyqp

Baltimore police just shot a man in the back and are macing onlookers.

http://t.co/g39RIkDyqp

There appears need for a correction:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/05/04/video-eyewitness-swears-she-saw-police-shoot-unarmed-man-in-the-back-in-baltimore-theres-just-one-problem/

On second viewing the man on the ground did not appear to be shot or bleeding. But here lies a big problem, ya just can't trust the cops.

There appears need for a correction:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/05/04/video-eyewitness-swears-she-saw-police-shoot-unarmed-man-in-the-back-in-baltimore-theres-just-one-problem/

On second viewing the man on the ground did not appear to be shot or bleeding. But here lies a big problem, ya just can't trust the cops.

Yeah. I haven't been able to find out what is actually wrong with the guy. He was unconscious, immobile and required an ambulance and hospital visit. He wasn't shot, so what was wrong with him? When the cops fell to macing everyone within reach, regardless of what the person was doing, it just looked wrong.

When you lose the trust of the citizenry, you are just an occupier.

A 5-Step Guide to the Police Repression of Protest From Ferguson to Baltimore and Beyond
It's now predictable for peacefully protesting citizens to face military-grade weaponry and paramilitary-style tactics.
By Michael Gould-Wartofsky / TomDispatch May 5, 2015

Last week, as Baltimore braced for renewed protests over the death of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) prepared for battle. With state-of-the-art surveillance of local teenagers’ Twitter feeds, law enforcement had learned that a group of high school students was planning to march on the Mondawmin Mall. In response, the BPD did what any self-respecting police department in post-9/11 America would do: it declared war on the protesters.

Over the course of 24 hours, which would see economically devastated parts of Baltimore erupt in open rebellion, city and state police would deploy everything from a drone and a “military counter attack vehicle” known as a Bearcat to SWAT teams armed with assault rifles, shotguns loaded with lead pellets, barricade projectiles filled with tear gas, and military-style smoke grenades. The BPD also came equipped with “Hailstorm” or “Stingray” technology, developed in America’s distant war zones to conduct wireless surveillance of enemy communications. This would allow officers to force cell phones to connect to it, to collect mobile data, and to jam cell signals within a one-mile radius.

“Up and down the East Coast since 9/11, our region has armed itself for that type of emergency,” said Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. She was defending her police department’s acquisition of this type of military technology under the Department of Defense’s now infamous 1033 Program. It sends used weaponry and other equipment from the battlefields of the country’s global war on terror directly to local police departments across the country. “But it’s very unusual,” Mayor Rawlings-Blake added, “that it would be used against your own citizens.”

It is, in fact, no longer unusual but predictable for peacefully protesting citizens to face military-grade weaponry and paramilitary-style tactics, as the counterinsurgency school of protest policing has become the new normal in our homeland security state. Its techniques and technologies have come a long way in the years since Occupy Wall Street (and even in the months since the first protests kicked off in response to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri). Here, then, is a step-by-step guide, based on the latest developments in the security sector, on how to police a protest movement in the new age of domestic counterinsurgency.

1. Equate Dissidents With Domestic Terrorists.

Since 2012, law enforcement and intelligence agencies have repeatedly sought to link street activism with domestic terrorism and radical activists to “violent extremists.” For instance, one memo from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Intelligence and Analysis attempted to tie events in Ferguson last year to recruitment efforts by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS): “Although at this time, violence in Ferguson has largely subsided... radical Islamists [have] used social media to urge others... to conduct Jihad.” A separate arm of DHS, the Threat Management Division, issued an ominous warning around the same time:

“Currently there is no indication that protests are expected to become violent. However, current civil unrest associated with the incident in Ferguson, MO, presents the potential for civil disobedience... Absent a specific actionable threat, you should refer to the list of suspicious activity indicators in identifying and mitigating threats. Some of these behavioral indicators may be constitutionally protected activities.”

Earlier this year, amid the fallout from the refusal of a grand jury to indict a police officer in the Eric Garner “chokehold” death, New York City Police Department (NYPD) Commissioner Bill Bratton proposed the creation of a new special ops unit he called the Strategic Response Group. It was to be “designed for dealing with events like our recent protests, or incidents like Mumbai or what just happened in Paris.” The group would be “equipped and trained in ways that our normal patrol officers are not,” and outfitted “with the long rifles and machine guns.” Though Bratton, facing a public outcry, later walked his statement back, his conflation of events involving unarmed protesters and armed militants was clearly no coincidence.

In recent years, the war on dissent has hit ever closer to home, with police departments importing some of the practices first pioneered in counterterrorism operations overseas.

One of these is the use of “black sites” for the temporary disappearance and detention of political dissidents. Anti-war activists learned this lesson firsthand during May 2012 protests against the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) Summit in Chicago, when nine demonstrators were arrested by the police and transported to a warehouse in Homan Square. Three would be held incommunicado for nearly 24 hours, shackled to a bench and kept in a wire cage before being charged with material support for terrorism, conspiracy to commit terrorism, and possession of incendiary devices -- devices constructed with the assistance of undercover officers in what turned out to be an elaborate act of entrapment in the run-up to the NATO Summit.

2. Arm the Police With “Less-Lethal” Weapons (Which Can Actually Create More Lethal Situations).

Under the 1033 Program, more than 460,000 pieces of “controlled property” -- that is, military-grade weaponry and other equipment -- have been transferred from the Pentagon to local police departments since 1997. That includes 92,442 small arms, 44,275 night-vision devices, 5,235 light armored cars, 617 tank-like vehicles, and some 616 aircraft. More than 78,000 such transfers were reported for 2013 alone. As the White House admitted in a recent report, programs like 1033 “do not necessarily foster or require civil rights/civil liberties training,” and “generally lack mechanisms to hold [law enforcement] accountable for the misuse or misapplication of equipment.”

The DHS has an even more expansive mandate to deliver the militarized goods to local law enforcement by way of its Homeland Security Grant Program (HSGP). In 2014 alone, the HSGP gave out over $1 billion in grant funding, with special provisions for “high-threat, high-density urban areas.” The list of DHS-authorized equipment provided to local police departments includes everything from Bearcats and helicopters to battle dress uniforms, body armor, ballistic helmets, and shields. Other agencies, like the Bureau of Justice Assistance (the funding arm of the Department of Justice), dole out hundreds of millions of dollars annually to police departments -- about 10% of which goes toward controlled equipment like armored vehicles, explosive devices, firearms, and “less-lethal” weapons like tear gas and TASERs.

This scenario has made for some lucrative investment opportunities. In the wake of the Baltimore riots, TASER International has seen its stock price spike. One market report noted that as “unrest spreads [and] as these issues continue to boil to the surface, investors are betting that will lead to more sales and profits.” After all, the market for less-lethal weapons alone is expected to more than double in the next five years, while the broader market for what are now called “homeland security products”is projected to grow to more than $107 billion by the year 2020.

Today, private arms developers are perfecting a new generation of “less-lethal” weapons: that is, weapons designed to incapacitate their targets but with a lower likelihood of fatalities. The latest model is known as the “Bozo bullet” for reportedly looking like a clown’s nose, and is currently undergoing its first test run in -- you guessed it -- Ferguson. It would allow the police to repurpose their service weapons at will, docking the “Bozo” on the barrel of a normal handgun to deliver a “less-lethal” payload. But critics argue that, by disarming the ordinary bullet of its psychological impact, such equipment will encourage police officers to reach for their guns more quickly and so serve to make the use of force more likely.

Meanwhile, peace officers in the thick of recent protests seem to be reaching for those guns ever more quickly, no matter how lethal the payload. At a December demonstration in downtown Oakland, California, an undercover officer was, for instance, photographed pointing a pistol at unarmed demonstrators. At a February march in Manhattan, a Port Authority officer was caught on video cocking a shotgun and asking protesters, “Are you scared?” In Los Angeles last summer, an officer with the Federal Protective Service, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security tasked with policing federal government facilities, admitted to actually opening fire with a handgun on a truck full of pro-Palestinian protesters.

3. Wage Wave Warfare.

Long-range acoustic devices (LRADs), also known as “sound cannons,” have been on American streets in times of protest since the Republican National Convention in 2004. Though the machine is capable of transmitting tones that can cause excruciating pain, until recently, its use against civilians had been limited to communicating police orders at a distance. That changed last year, when the LRAD’s “sound deterrent feature” -- originally designed for military use against “enemy combatants” in the Persian Gulf -- was deployed as an “area denial device” against protesters, first in the streets of Ferguson, then in the streets of Manhattan.

The sound cannon works as a form of wave warfare, concentrating and directing acoustic energy at a volume of up to 152 decibels. Even the NYPD’s own Disorder Control Unit has acknowledged that it can “propel piercing sound at higher levels than are considered safe to human ears.” It can also cause those subjected to it permanent hearing damage.

And this is just considered a beginning in what might be thought of as the domestic sensory wars. Novel forms of wave warfare are currently under development by the Pentagon’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program. One such innovation, known as “Active Denial Technology,” works much like a microwave oven -- with the waves directed at the skin of a target to produce an “intolerable heating sensation.” A more portable version of this technology, branded the Assault Intervention System and sold by defense contractor Raytheon, has already been made available for domestic deployment in Los Angeles County.

Another innovation, known as “Skunk,” is a type of stink bomb that has been described by those in the know as an irresistible combination of “dead animal and human excrement.” In response to recent urban uprisings, police departments across the country are reported to be eagerly stockpiling the stuff. “We’ve provided some Skunk for the law enforcement agencies in Ferguson,” says Stephen Rust, program manager at a Maryland-based company that manufactures the malodorant. “I’m going to be able to drill [a target] with a round while I put him in the dirt. I can mark him with Skunk and he will be easy to locate when the crowd disperses.”

4. Replace Humans with Robots and Predictive Technology.

Increasingly, law enforcement is moving to replace human “deterrence” with robotic versions of the same -- remotely piloted aircraft, remotely operated vehicles, and other robotic platforms are to become domestic standbys in support of police surveillance missions and SWAT operations. Such platforms have been deployed, on the ground and in the air domestically, to conduct routine surveillance of protest activity, while in other countries they are already being weaponized with pepper spray and other projectiles.

From 2012 to 2014, the Federal Aviation Administration considered requests from at least 19 police and sheriff’s departments, as well as National Guard units in nine states, to fly drones in domestic airspace. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) recently acquired two Draganflyer X6 drones for use during large protests and other “tactical events.” And while the NYPD has refused to release any documents on its own drone program, officials have stated that they are “supportive of the concept of drones, not only for police but for public safety in general,” and that they are currently looking into “what’s on the market, what’s available.”

Support for such surveillance is on the rise. DHS has made millions of dollars available annually for “forward-looking” police forces to procure the latest robotic systems, along with “software upgrades, engine upgrades, arms, drive systems, range extenders, trailers, etc.” Also included is “surveillance/detection” equipment in which drone technology may be integrated with audiovisual systemsand with “optics capable of use in long-range, sometimes long-term, observation."

In recent years, a new frontier has opened up with the advent of “predictive policing” (or “PredPol,” in industry parlance), which aims to use big data and complex algorithms to forecast when and where a crime is likely to be committed, and who might be a likely culprit. The practice started out as a project of the Army Research Office (a centralized science laboratory under the purview of the Pentagon), was converted to civilian use by Bill Bratton during his tenure as commissioner of the LAPD, and has since spread to over 150 departments nationwide.

Take the NYPD. In the immediate aftermath of the Occupy protests, the department entered into an unprecedented partnership with Microsoft to develop a predictive policing technology known as the Domain Awareness System. It “aggregates and analyzes existing public safety data streams in real time,” drawn from thousands of closed-circuit television cameras, license plate readers, and criminal history databases, and is intended to give intelligence analysts “a comprehensive view of potential threats.” Though we don’t yet know the extent to which it has been deployed during protests, we do know that Domain Awareness Systems have been popping up in protest hubs around the country, including Baltimore, Chicago, and Oakland.

5. Make “Friends” and “Follow” People.

Considered “open source intelligence” (or “OSINT”), social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube have proven veritable gold mines for intelligence analysts attempting to track protest events in real time. They have also provided police detectives with a rationale to question individual protesters about their political activities.

Just last week, we learned that amid the protests in New York City following the acquittal of the officers who killed Eric Garner, at least 11 arrestees were interrogated in this manner prior to their release from police headquarters, including several who were asked explicitly about their online activities on social media sites. As Deputy Commissioner Lawrence Byrne tells it, when detectives started seeing threats on social media, “The Detective Bureau began a process of interviewing defendants arrested during the protests... in an attempt to obtain information about the specific acts... as well as the general threat environment relating to such acts.”

Since 2012, the NYPD’s Intelligence Division has officially encouraged its employees to engage in “catfishing” on social media sites “for investigative or research purposes,” which, with the permission of police brass, may include “investigations involving political activity.” Increasingly, such catfishing has become common practice among police and private security forces nationwide. In Bloomington, Minnesota, for example, intelligence analysts working for the Mall of America’s Risk Assessment and Mitigation unit and in conjunction with members of the local Joint Terrorism Task Force (a collaborative intelligence operation anchored by the FBI) reportedly used fake Facebook accounts to build dossiers on at least 10 area activists. This was ahead of a protest on police accountability (or the lack of it) slated to take place on Mall of America property.

The Department of Homeland Security, for its part, continues to develop its Media Monitoring Capability to impressive effect, “leveraging news stories, media reports and postings on social media sites... for operationally relevant data, information, analysis, and imagery” including “partisan or agenda-driven sites” as well as those that “reflect adversely on DHS.” Many of the nation’s “fusion centers,” set up in the aftermath of 9/11 to encourage collaboration among intelligence agencies, have partnered with social media sites to monitor Occupy-style activism. “Such websites can provide crucial information during civil unrest,” notes Dale Peet, a veteran of Michigan’s statewide fusion center and now an employee of SAS, a private firm that performs social media analytics for the state.

And that’s only a beginning when it comes to social media surveillance. Its future is already being written in the labs of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the national intelligence community’s blue-skies research arm. One recent project seeks to match online and offline “behavioral indicators,” including “ideology or worldview.” Another extracts geolocation information from posts, photos, and videos that users might prefer to keep private. Yet another, known as Open Source Indicators, analyzes social media data to “anticipate and/or detect significant societal events, such as political crises [and] riots.” The project’s goal, in the words of its true believers, is ultimately to “beat the news,” giving the government new leverage over alleged enemies of the state.

What we are seeing in the dark corners of cyberspace is of a piece with what we are seeing in the streets of our cities: the leading edge of a new age of domestic counterinsurgency. From black sites to Bearcats, sound cannons to stink bombs, drones to data mining, the component parts of a new police counterinsurgency program are being assembled with remarkable speed. While the basic architecture of this program has been in place ever since 9/11, it is being built up in new and ever more sophisticated ways. The point of all of this: to keep an eye on our posts and tweets, intimidate protesters before they hit the streets, pen them in on those streets, and ensure that they pay a heavy price for exercising their right to assemble and speak. The message is loud and clear in twenty-first-century America: protest at your peril.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/5-step-guide-police-repression-protest-ferguson-baltimore-and-beyond

A Racially Blind Night in the Life of the “P”BS Newshour
Submitted by Paul Street on Wed, 05/13/2015 - 09:59

http://blackagendareport.com/sites/default/files/styles/image-400x300/public/STREET_feb28syriaifill.jpg?itok=E1iiHyGK

by Paul Street
The rich son of the owner of a major league baseball team seems to have a better understanding of race and class in America than the Black co-anchor of Public Television’s premier news show. John Angelos “placed the real and underlying blame” for unrest in Baltimore “on the investor class’s globetrotting thirst for cheap labor.” Gwen Ifill only wanted to know when the next Orioles home game was scheduled.

A Racially Blind Night in the Life of the “P”BS Newshour
by Paul Street
This article previously appeared in TelesurEnglish.

“Ms. Ifill seemed taken aback by the elementary observation that mass structural unemployment might have anything to do with urban protest and violence.”
The reluctance of “mainstream” United States media to deal forthrightly and seriously with U.S. racism, deeply understood, can be quite pronounced. Consider the “Public” Broadcasting System’s nightly Newshour episode for Thursday, April 30, 2015. It aired one day after Baltimore’s Major League Baseball (MLB) franchise, the Orioles, took the unprecedented, MLB-approved step of banning fans from a game. The Orioles determined that protests and riots sparked by the Baltimore police’s murder of the young Black man Freddie Gray threatened the safety of the Orioles’ mostly white fans. And so the Orioles played the Chicago White Sox in an eerily “closed” game at Baltimore’s showcase Camden Yards.

“When the Jobs No Longer Exist”

The Newshour featured a remarkable interview with Orioles Vice President John Angelos, son of the team’s owner. Reflecting on the unrest that brought the National Guard into Baltimore, Angelos spoke to Newshour host Gwen Ifill about how “the system has failed Baltimore.” Angelos’ comments were not the sort of thing you commonly hear from members of the U.S. economic elite: “… the system is failing … the diminution of manufacturing jobs and good, high-paying quality jobs in cities like Baltimore and regions throughout the country …. The massive loss, the exportation of good, high-paying jobs for working-class people has been a tremendous source — in fact, the most significant source – of civil unrest, civil misery … Having grown up here as a native and seeing the difficulties of factories moving from Baltimore, the shipyard areas, the manufacturing areas, relocating to foreign parts of the globe, [I think] it’s difficult to ask people to work hard and pull themselves up when the jobs that used to be here for prior generations no longer exist.”

There’s no small and welcome distance between Angelos’ rueful reflections on capital’s abandonment of the urban working class and the standard elite charge that inner city-poverty is primarily the result of poor folks’ own culture, values, and “bad choices.” Angelos placed the real and underlying blame on the investor class’s globetrotting thirst for cheap labor. Interestingly enough, his father, Orioles owner Peter Angelos, grew up working class and made his treasure in labor law.

Rich Ironies

Beyond John Angelos’s candor on capitalist failure, three other remarkable things stood out in the Newshour’s Angelos interview. The first such aspect was the skepticism towards the younger Angelos’s analysis displayed by Gwen Ifill. A longtime hack who can barely contain her love for the United States’ corrupt major party electoral politics, Ms. Ifill seemed taken aback by the elementary observation that mass structural unemployment might have anything to do with urban protest and violence. She also suggested that Angelos’ comments might be seen as “politicizing a tragedy” – as if the murder of Freddie Gray and the riots and marches that followed were not already a thoroughly political and politicized news story.

“Stadiums have become strategic hamlets of gentrification and displacement.”
The second remarkable thing about the Ifill-Angelos dialogue was the opportunity it provided for a top Orioles executive to shed what many Baltimore residents might understandably see as crocodile tears over the terrible consequences of neoliberal capitalism for working people. As the Left sports and politics commentator David Zirin noted in an incisive commentary at The Nation, Camden Yards and other shiny and largely publicly financed ballparks built in major U.S. cities in recent decades are monuments to post-industrial “sports-driven apartheid.” As Zirin explains, these stadiums were sold to metropolitan citizens and authorities with the misleading assurance that they would anchor a robust “service economy that could provide jobs and thriving city centers” to help make up for the disappearance of manufacturing employment. In reality, “this sports-centric urban planning has been a failure. It’s been an exercise in corporate welfare and false political promises. What the stadiums have become instead are strategic hamlets of gentrification and displacement. They have morphed into cathedrals to economic and racial apartheid, dividing cities between haves and have-nots, between those who go to the game to watch and those [predominantly white and affluent and largely suburban fans] who go to the game looking for low-income work.” And nine years ago, Zirin added, the Orioles waged a vicious struggle against Camden Yards employees (“some of whom lived in area homeless shelters”) when those workers organized to demand a living wage.

Deleting Racial Oppression

The third remarkable feature of the Ifill-Angelos exchange was its total avoidance of race and racism and their central relevance to the disorder in Baltimore. The protests and riots in the city were sparked, after all, by a recent and gruesome episode in a long and ongoing record of “law enforcement’s” use of deadly force against U.S. minorities and most particularly against young Black men. The Freddie Gray murder is just the latest in a seemingly endless string of such police killings to receive national media attention and to spawn mass protests and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Four decades of cross-racial job loss resulting from capitalist “de-industrialization” and (more accurately) globalization certainly has naturally created relevant structural and historical context for any “civil misery and unrest” that emerges in contemporary Baltimore or in any other major U.S. metropolis. But let’s keep it real about who the system is most particularly failing and subjugating in not-so “post-racial” America. White working class people are up against terrible odds, thanks primarily to the amoral depredations of big capital and its corporate-financial Deep State. It’s silly to call such folks “privileged” just because they are Caucasian. Still, working class whites do not remotely face the same level of oppression, bias, and inequality as what the Black working class experiences in the U.S. today. The long, deadly, and newly publicized record of police violence against Black Americans takes place in a context of persistent harsh racial segregation and intimately related racial inequality so steep that the median wealth of white U.S. households is 22 times higher than the median wealth of black U.S. households. The Black joblessness rate remains more than double that of whites – as usual. The Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) reports that an astonishing 40 percent of the nation’s Black children are growing up beneath the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level. Roughly one in five Black and one in seven Hispanic children live in “extreme poverty” – at less than half the poverty measure – compared to just more than one in 18 white, non-Hispanic children. This radical race disparity both reflects and feeds a four-decade long campaign of racially disparate hyper-incarceration and criminal marking. More than 40 percent of the nation’s 2.4 million prisoners are Black even though Blacks make up less than 12 percent of the nation’s population. One in three black adult males carries the crippling life-long stigma (what law Professor Michelle Alexander has famously termed “the New Jim Crow”) of a felony record. Criminal marking is a lethal barrier to employment, housing, education, voting rights and more for the nation’s giant and very disproportionately Black army of “ex-offenders.” It makes “reintegration” next to impossible for many, feeding a vicious circle of poverty, crime, joblessness, family disintegration, jailing, and recidivism.

Separate, Unequal

Contemporary U.S. policing is about keeping Blacks in their place in more ways than one. The Baltimore metropolitan era is the nineteenth most segregated metropolitan area in the U.S. It has a Black-white residential “segregation indice” of 65.4, meaning that two-thirds of the region’s Blacks would have to move to a different neighborhood be geographically distributed exactly like whites. Such extreme residential segregation has little to do with Black choices. It reflects class and racial bias in the operation of real estate markets and home lending and the persistent reluctance of many Caucasians to live in racially mixed communities. It is highly relevant to the nation’s steep racial inequalities because place of dwelling is strongly connected to social and economic status and opportunity. As sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton noted in their important 1998 book American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, “housing markets…distribute much more than a place to live; they also distribute any good or resource that is correlated with where one lives. Housing markets don’t just distribute dwellings, they also distribute education, employment, safety, insurance rates, services, and wealth in the form of home equity; they also determine the level of exposure to crime and drugs, and the peer groups that one’s children experience.”

“One in three black adult males carries the crippling life-long stigma of a felony record.”
By concentrating poor and working class Black people in a certain restricted number of geographical places, American de facto-apartheid reinforce Blacks’ persistently disproportionate presence in the lowest socioeconomic places. That basic underlying concentration of poverty and its many ills (including crime, addiction, and family fragility) is deeply reinforced by the nation’s four-decade campaign of “racially disparate” (racist) mass imprisonment and felony branding, conducted under the cover of a “war on drugs.”

The prevailing pattern of harsh racial de facto apartheid predates the relative disappearance of manufacturing and shipping jobs that John Angelos bemoans. It also postdates that de-industrialization, exacerbating the impact of “good job” loss on Blacks, who have far less access to such viable job networks as can still be found in urban America is the new neoliberal/global era.

“All of Your Questions”

In a chillingly Orwellian commercial that “P”BS has run for years, Gwen Ifill declares that she loves her Newshour job because it allows her to “ask not only all of my questions but also and more importantly all of your questions.” Really, Gwen? I would have followed up John Angelos’ reflections on the terrible impact of capital disinvestment and job “exportation” by asking him to elaborate on the distinctive barriers to opportunity and equality faced by Black people in urban America. This is what Ms. Ifill (herself Black) asked Angelos instead: “That said, when will the Orioles be back at Camden Yards?”

The New Jim Crow Minus Race

The Newshour was not through doing somersaults to avoid race and racism after the Angelos-Ifill interview last April 30th. The show’s next segment presented viewers with a curious display of “left-right unity” regarding the problems of over-incarceration and felony marking in the U.S. Representing “the right” was Mark Holden, a policy staffer from Koch Industries, owned by the arch-reactionary Koch brothers. Standing in for “the left” was Neera Tanden from the centrist Center for American Progress (CAP), corporate Democrat Hillary Clinton’s favorite think-tank. Here was the Newshour’s set-up for the segment:

“The figures are staggering … While the U.S. accounts for 5 percent of the world’s population, it houses more than 20 percent of its prisoners. In a significant shift, groups on opposite sides of the political spectrum, that often find themselves at odds – like Koch Industries from the right, and the Center for American progress from the left – are coming together with a common goal — to overhaul the country’s criminal justice system. Together they’ve launched the ‘Coalition for Public Safety.’”

The Coalition is dedicated to reducing the imprisonment of nonviolent offenders and to cutting barriers to employment and reentry for people with prison histories and felony records. As Ms. Tanden explained, “we’re concerned with the challenges of rising inequality and how the criminal justice system is actually increasing poverty…when you have a young person who goes into the prison system, that affects…their ability to get a good-paying job the rest of their lives. So you’re not just burdening that person, you’re burdening their families. You’re burdening the communities.”

That’s no joke. Ms. Tanden is quite correct, as a significant body of research (including material I have produced) demonstrates. And it is arguably a good thing to see arch-Republicans and corporate Democrats agree on the need to lessen the burden placed on poor Americans by mass incarceration and criminal marking.

“Race and (more to the point) racism are highly pertinent factors across the broad spectrum of socioeconomic disparity in the savagely unequal U.S.”
Still, there was something very odd about this Newshour piece, something stranger even than calling the Center for American Progress “left”: a breathtakingly total deletion and avoidance of race in connection with the problems of mass imprisonment and the difficulties faced by “ex-offenders” in the U.S. It was an extraordinary omission. Race and (more to the point) racism are highly pertinent factors across the broad spectrum of socioeconomic disparity in the savagely unequal U.S. inequality, but nowhere are they more overwhelmingly and (one would think) inescapably relevant than in the nation’s “New Jim Crow” criminal justice system – from surveillance and arrest through jail, bail, trial, conviction, sentencing, probation, imprisonment, parole, felony marking, and execution both within prison walls and on the streets.

It might seem bizarre to see race and racism omitted from discussions of urban poverty and the New Jim Crow criminal justice system on the supposedly liberal “public” broadcasting network. In reality, the omissions are consistent both with the deep, privilege-friendly conservatism of “P”BS and with the post-racial mythology of reigning “neoliberal racism” in the Age of Obama. Still, for someone with some basic working knowledge on contemporary U.S. racial oppression, watching such racially blind discussions feels almost as surreal as watching a Major League Baseball game broadcast from a big city ballpark without a fan in the stands.

Paul Street is an author in Iowa City, IA. His publications include Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman&Littlefield, 2007) and The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, and Jobs in Chicago, Illinois, and the United States (Chicago Urban League, October 2002).
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http://blackagendareport.com/paul-street-on-gwen-ifill

Lawyers detail horrific and illegal conditions of Baltimore arrest victims
By Ed Hightower
15 May 2015
In a massive and daunting attack on democratic rights, authorities in Baltimore detained some 250 people, without charge and in deplorable conditions, following protests on April 27 against the police killing of Freddie Gray. This unconstitutional round up and vindictive treatment received scant attention in the corporate media, with most coverage appearing only after a Facebook post by a public defender in Baltimore went viral, with almost 21,000 shares in fewer than two days.

The Facebook post highlighted the illegal and inhumane conditions for those arrested in the vicinity of Baltimore’s Mondawmin Mall, which is in the neighborhood of Frederick Douglass High School, Coppin Academy High School, Coppin State University, as well as a major public transit center.

In what bears the markings of a state provocation, hundreds of riot police swarmed the area just before the end of the school day at Frederick Douglass, on the basis of a supposed threat of violence on social media by students. Police closed the nearby transit hub, making it nearly impossible for students and other area residents to leave, and proceeded to sweep the neighborhood, calling on those present to leave, having effectively sealed the exits.

As a result of this “kettling” operation, there were some minor acts of vandalism, mostly against police vehicles. This so-called rioting then served as Maryland Governor Lawrence Hogan’s pretext for declaring a state of emergency and deploying 5,000 previously alerted National Guard troops into Baltimore.

Hogan also issued an executive order suspending Maryland’s judicial rule 4-212(f), which requires that arrested persons be brought before a judicial officer within 24 hours of arrest for a determination of probable cause and bail eligibility. This rule, known as the “prompt presentment” requirement, was enacted by the highest court in the state and thus its modification by gubernatorial fiat was a flagrant violation of the separation of powers principle of American law.

In addition, Baltimore’s three circuit courts were all closed on the following day, Tuesday, April 28, pursuant to the Governor’s state of emergency decree. This made many routine judicial hearings, such as a simple review of bond, impossible. At the same time, the number of judicial officers—called commissioners—who conduct the 4-212(f) hearings was reduced to a mere one or two that Tuesday, making it impossible for most of the detainees to even see a commissioner within the 24-hour period required by Maryland court procedure.

Those detainees who did see commissioners fared little better. In many cases, they had not been charged with a crime at all. In other cases, basic information was absent from standard arrest forms such as the name of the arresting officer or sworn statements that probable cause for arrest existed. Regardless of these procedural defects, the detainees were forced to remain in lock up, in a legal purgatory.

This reporter interviewed two attorneys representing detainees at Baltimore Central Booking and Intake Facility. Criminal defense lawyer Ginger Robinson told the WSWS that she began receiving calls on Tuesday, April 28 from concerned parents of friends and schoolmates of her client, 18-year-old Geremy Faulkner, who police targeted on the day before because he was filming their operations in the area of Mondawmin Mall. By the morning of Wednesday, April 29, Robinson had received many more calls about Faulkner’s situation, including one from a professor at Towson University, from a federal public defender, a state attorney, a prominent Baltimore corporate lawyer and others in the legal profession.

When Robinson went to central booking on that Wednesday, she was told by staff that Faulkner, a high school graduate with a job and no criminal record whatsoever, was not being charged with any crime and thus he was not technically “in custody” even though he was locked up. Since he was not in custody, Faulkner was not entitled to meet with an attorney, a classic Catch-22 that echoes the pseudo-legal “enemy combatant” status of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

In describing his arrest, Faulkner told the Nation that as he filmed police chasing down one youth, he “just moved to the side and put my hands in air and expected them to run past me.” He added, “but one of the guys in riot gear kicks me in legs. ‘You wanna kill cops?,’ he says and he hits me. Then he hits me again. I said, ‘What’s your name?’ He says, ‘Shut the f… up.’”

Ultimately, central booking employees allowed Robinson to meet with Faulkner in an attorney-client interview booth. The young man described living in a holding cell, roughly ten-feet long and as wide, with 11 people, packed so densely there was not enough space for all of them to lie down at the same time. Detainees had to sleep in shifts, or sleep sitting up.

Faulkner and 100 or so other detainees were released within an hour of habeas corpus petitions being filed by Robinson and other attorneys.

Attorneys at the Baltimore Public Defender’s Office worked through the night of Tuesday, April 28 to draft these habeas corpus petitions and research the legal issues involved in the unprecedented situation facing the central booking detainees.

One of these attorneys was Marci Tarrant Johnson who also spoke with the WSWS. Johnson authored the Facebook post on detainee conditions that went viral that week.

Johnson witnessed the conditions facing female detainees first hand. She described meeting women who had not been able to take their usual prescription medicines, who were denied medical attention, and who were not being properly fed. They were told not to drink the tap water in their holding cells. They received slices of bread every few hours, but the floors were so filthy that many women used the bread as a bit of padding or buffer, so that their heads would not touch the filth when they lay down to sleep. As with the men, such as Faulkner, women were packed in so tightly they could not all lie down at the same time.

Johnson noted that because most of the detainees were not charged with any crime and thus were not registered in the usual manner in a publicly available inmate database, their family members had difficulty locating them.

The picture that emerges from the detainees’ conditions, their denial of access to attorneys and their families, and, in most cases, their total innocence of any crime, testify to the provocative character of the entire affair. The mafia-like police actions, the governor’s assertion of supra-judicial authority, and the lack of commissioners to hold 4-212(f) hearings reek of a consciously planned collective punishment and a warning to Baltimore workers, youth and students lest they exercise their democratic right of free expression, association and publication.

The unlawful detention of over 200 people in Baltimore is of a piece with the lockdown of Boston following the marathon bombings and the deployment of the National Guard in Ferguson last summer. Staring at a restive, impoverished working class, the financial elite is tearing through the final boundaries of constitutional forms of rule.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/05/15/balt-m15.html

Maryland grand jury announces charges against six cops in killing of Freddie Gray
By Nick Barrickman
22 May 2015
On Thursday a grand jury indicted six Baltimore cops involved in the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray. Gray’s death last month from spinal injuries he incurred while in police custody set off an eruption of social anger and the police-military occupation of the city.

The indictment came three weeks after Baltimore State Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced charges against the six police officers involved in Gray’s arrest. Mosby’s action, taken in close coordination with the Obama administration, was aimed at dissipating social tensions in Baltimore after the deployment of 5,000 National Guard to stop mass protests, which also spread to other cities.

The grand jury largely upheld Mosby’s initial charges with significant exceptions. Caesar R. Goodson Jr., who gave Gray a “rough ride” in the police van after his arrest, received the stiffest charge, including a second-degree “depraved heart” murder that carries a potential 30-year sentence. All the cops were charged with second-degree assault, which carries a potential ten-year sentence, as well as with reckless endangerment, which carries a five-year penalty.

Significantly, the false imprisonment charge given to the officers involved in Gray’s arrest has been dropped from the indictment. Mosby was originally adamant that Gray’s arrest was illegal and the cops had no reason to arrest him. The small knife police say Gray had in his pocket, Mosby declared, was legal under Maryland law.

Attorneys for the police will no doubt point to the dropping of the false imprisonment charges to malign Gray and legitimize the actions of the cops. Mosby sought to justify the grand jury’s decision in a brief press conference, saying, “As our investigation has continued, additional information has been discovered and is often the case, during an ongoing investigation, charges can and should be revised based upon the evidence.”

Attorneys for the police have already attacked Mosby’s indictment as an example of “overzealous prosecution,” and have accused her of conflicts of interests because her husband is a City Council member in the district where Gray was killed and she has political and personal ties to lawyers representing the Gray family. There are also efforts by supporters of the cops to move the venue of any future trial out of Baltimore in hopes of getting a more police-friendly jury.

Under mounting social anger due to a spate of exonerations of killer cops by rigged grand juries, including in Ferguson, Missouri and Staten Island, New York late last year, the grand jury indictment in Baltimore is designed to boost illusions in the so-called justice system and the Democratic Party in particular. Indictments, however, are by no means convictions and there will be many efforts to reduce charges or reach plea bargains with wrist-slap punishments before any eventual trial.

Regardless of the outcome of any trial, none of the essential causes behind the death of Freddie Gray and the wave of police killings across the country will be resolved. The almost daily police murder of unarmed citizens and the militarization of the police in response to mass protests have its roots in the explosive social polarization in America and the efforts of the incredibly wealthy corporate and financial elite to contain an ever-more impoverished and restive working class.

An investigation last month by the Washington Post found that of the thousands of killings in which a police officer was involved, only several dozen cops were ever charged in court, with even fewer resulting in a conviction.


http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/05/22/gray-m22.html

An investigation last month by the Washington Post found that of the thousands of killings in which a police officer was involved, only several dozen cops were ever charged in court, with even fewer resulting in a conviction.

This is key and let's see how this unfolds. Any bets?

CNN wants you to call the Feds if you recognize any looters from pictures and videos. Just to make sure there is no confusion, the number is 1-800-7LOCKUP. Do your part to fuel the modern day Auschwitz.

CNN wants you to call the Feds if you recognize any looters from pictures and videos. Just to make sure there is no confusion, the number is 1-800-7LOCKUP. Do your part to fuel the modern day Auschwitz.

In the same breath they will rail against the STASI for it's security measures defending a front line state in an intense Cold War which could go hot in any given time. But this is different don't ya see, we're talking bout Property.

we're talking bout Property.

Property uber alles!