Undercover Cop Pulls Gun and Threatens Oakland Police Brutality Protesters | Alternet

Hysterical!

LOL, these assholes, sorry my bad language, but if they are trying to have an American Spring, they are really doing it all wrong. That stuff worked in the Middle East. 

People here have seen them do it over there, so now they are very suspicious and are ready with easy social media access to tell all. 

What part of retarded do they not understand? Even switching sides is retarded. LOL, now they can go from breaking the law to keeping the law, when they were just seen tearing up shit??? I'm sorry, but sometimes 4 letter words says it all!!


Undercover Cop Pulls Gun and Threatens Oakland Police Brutality Protesters | Alternet

December 11, 2014  |  

(Editor's Note: This report has been updated with new developments at 8.30 PM PST on Thursday).

A white undercover California Highway Patrol (CHP) detective pulled a gun and threatened protesters at Wednesday night’s march to end racist policing and police brutality in Oakland, California.

He was seen losing his cool and pointing the gun at protesters and a photographer before other uniformed police arrived to arrest a black protester, as can be seen on numerous videos of the incident on the Twitter feeds, #berkeleyprotest and #oaklandprotest.

The incident was photographed and posted to storify.com and #oaklandprotest, where it quickly went viral. These Twitter feeds have been documenting the ongoing East Bay protests following the two grand jury decisions in Ferguson, Missouri and New York City, in which white officers who killed unarmed black men escaped facing charges.

Late Thursday, the Los Angeles Times extensively quoted California Highway Patrol Chief Avery Browne discussing the incident, where Browne concluded that "no one has provided any evidence that the officers were inappropriate in what they did."

Browne recounted his chronology of the event. He said the gun-pointing detective was one of several undercover cops posing as demonstrators at Wednesday's march in Oakland. He the detective said a fellow undercover officer had been "attacked" by protesters. He said the detective who pulled the gun told him, "Chief, I didn't know if I was going to make it out of this thing alive."

That line of defense--that a police officer is entitled to use deadly force while doing his job if he fears for his life--is the standard in law that absolves police officers from facing charges for harm caused by excessive force. That was seen as the legal linchpin that allowed two grand juries to exonerate the white officers who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in Staten Island.

The protests across the country demand, among other things, that this standard protecting police who lose control and use excessive force must be changed. They say, as the LA Times' report indicates, that police who too quickly rely on deadly weapons know that they can say those magic words--they feared for their lives--and escape accountability.

The CHP Browne made another telling admission to the LA TImes, saying that many undercover officers were spooked by protesters who recognized that they were cops and called them out in front of other protesters. The Times wrote:

"The CHP and other law enforcement agencies have been using plainclothes officers to observe and gather information about the protests, and Browne said tensions have risen among officers as several protesters have posted pictures of themselves on social media claiming to be armed with handguns, rocks and explosive devices.

"Despite Wednesday's incident, Browne said he will continue to deploy plainclothes officers to gather intelligence from protesters. Officers have also been creating Twitter accounts, on which they don't identify themselves as police, in order to monitor planned demonstrations."

This video, posted by WeCopWatch on YouTube on Thursday, identified two other undercover Oakland police officers who posed as protesters and were unmasked by marchers. However, there is nothing in that exchange that can be described as threatening.

The Oakland incident comes after police in nearby Berkeley rioted this past Saturday night, lunging into the crowd and using smoke bombs, nightsticks and tear gas to disperse a crowd of several hundred protesters. That confrontation led the Berkeley police to reconsider their tactics during protests on the following nights.

But as the protest marchers crossed into other police jurisdictions, closing several interstate highways, other police agencies, such as the California Highway Patrol, said they would respond forcefully.

This latest development shows that police are not changing their use of excessive force as the protesters have been demanding. It is a sobering reminder of how entrenched police policies and practices are, which is one reason that the protests are continuing.

 Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America's retirement crisis, democracy and voting rights, and campaigns and elections. He is the author of "Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet Books, 2008).

Activist Post: We Are the Enemy: Is This the Lesson of Ferguson?

We Are the Enemy: Is This the Lesson of Ferguson?

John W. Whitehead
Activist Post






If you dress police officers up as soldiers and you put them in military vehicles and you give them military weapons, they adopt a warrior mentality. We fight wars against enemies, and the enemies are the people who live in our cities — particularly in communities of color. -- Thomas Nolan, criminology professor and former police officer.

Ferguson matters because it provides us with a foretaste of what is to come. It is the shot across the bow, so to speak, a warning that this is how we will all be treated if we do not tread cautiously in challenging the police state, and it won’t matter whether we’re black or white, rich or poor, Republican or Democrat. In the eyes of the corporate state, we are all the enemy.

This is the lesson of Ferguson.

Remember that in the wake of the shooting, Ferguson police officers clad in body armor, their faces covered with masks, equipped with assault rifles and snipers and riding armored vehicles, showed up in force to deal with protesters. Describing that show of force by police in Ferguson, Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, stated, “This was a military force, and they were facing down an enemy.”

Yes, we are the enemy. As I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, since those first towers fell on 9/11, the American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, and denied due process.

There was a moment of hope after Ferguson that perhaps things might change. Perhaps the balance would be restored between the citizenry and their supposed guardians, the police. Perhaps our elected officials would take our side for a change and oppose the militarization of the police. Perhaps warfare would take a backseat to more pressing national concerns.

That hope was short-lived.

It wasn’t long before the media moved on to other, more titillating stories. The disappearance of a University of Virginia college student and the search for her alleged abductor, the weeks-long man-hunt for an accused cop killer, the Republican electoral upset, a Rolling Stone expose on gang rapes at fraternity parties, Obama’s immigration amnesty plan, and the rape charges against Bill Cosby are just a few of the stories that have dominated the news cycle since the Ferguson standoff between police and protesters.

It wasn’t long before the American public, easily acclimated to news of government wrongdoing (case in point: the national yawn over the NSA’s ongoing domestic surveillance), ceased to be shocked, outraged or alarmed by reports of police shootings. In fact, the issue was nowhere to be found in this year’s run-up to Election Day, which was largely devoid of any pressing matters of national concern.

And with nary a hiccup, the police state marched steadily forth. In fact, aided and abetted by the citizenry’s short attention span, its easily distracted nature, and its desensitization to anything that occupies the news cycle for too long, it has been business as usual in terms of police shootings, the amassing of military weapons, and the government’s sanctioning of police misconduct. Most recently, Ohio police shot and killed a 12-year-old boy who was seen waving a toy gun at a playground.

Rubbing salt in our wounds, in the wake of Ferguson, police agencies not only continued to ramp up their military arsenals but have used them whenever possible. In fact, in anticipation of the grand jury’s ruling, St. Louis police actually purchased more equipment for its officers, including “civil disobedience equipment.”

Just a few weeks after the Ferguson showdown, law enforcement agencies took part in an $11 million manhunt in Pennsylvania for alleged cop killer Eric Frein. Without batting an eye, the news media switched from outraged “shock” over the military arsenal employed by police in Ferguson to respectful “awe” of the 48-day operation that cost taxpayers $1.4 million per week in order to carry out a round-the-clock dragnet search of an area with a 5-mile-radius.

The Frein operation brought together 1,000 officers from local, state and federal law enforcement, as well as SWAT teams and cutting edge military equipment (high-powered rifles, body armor, infrared sensors, armored trucks, helicopters and unmanned, silent surveillance blimps) — some of the very same weapons and tactics employed in Ferguson and, a year earlier, in Boston in the wake of the marathon bombing.

The manhunt was a well-timed, perfectly choreographed exercise in why Americans should welcome the police state: for our safety, of course, and to save the lives of police officers.

Opposed to any attempt to demilitarize America’s police forces, the Dept. of Homeland Security has been chanting this safety mantra in testimony before Congress: Remember 9/11. Remember Boston. Remember how unsafe the world was before police were equipped with automatic weapons, heavily armored trucks, night-vision goggles, and aircraft donated by the DHS.

Contrary to DHS rhetoric, however, militarized police — twitchy over perceived dangers, hyped up on their authority, and protected by their agencies, the legislatures and the courts — have actually made communities less safe at a time when violent crime is at an all-time low and lumberjacks, fishermen, airline pilots, roofers, construction workers, trash collectors, electricians and truck drivers all have a higher risk of on-the-job fatalities than police officers.

Moreover, as Senator Tom Coburn points out, the militarization of America’s police forces has actually “created some problems that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.” Among those problems: a rise in the use of SWAT team raids for routine law enforcement activities (averaging 80,000 a year), a rise in the use and abuse of asset forfeiture laws by police agencies, a profit-driven incentive to criminalize lawful activities and treat Americans as suspects, and a transformation of the nation’s citizenry into suspects.

Ferguson provided us with an opportunity to engage in a much-needed national dialogue over how police are trained, what authority they are given, what weaponry they are provided, and how they treat those whom they are entrusted with protecting.

Caught up in our personal politics, prejudices and class warfare, we have failed to answer that call. In so doing, we have played right into the hands of all those corporations who profit from turning America into a battlefield by selling the government mine-resistant vehicles, assault rifles, grenade launchers, and drones.

As long as we remain steeped in ignorance, there will be no reform.

As long as we remain divided by our irrational fear of each other, there will be no overhaul in the nation’s law enforcement system or institution of an oversight process whereby communities can ensure that local police departments are acting in accordance with their wishes and values.

And as long as we remain distracted by misguided loyalties to military operatives who are paid to play the part of the government’s henchmen, there will be no saving us when the events of Ferguson unfold in our own backyards.

When all is said and done, it doesn’t matter whose “side” you’re on as far as what transpired in Ferguson, whether you believe that Michael Brown was a victim or that Darren Wilson was justified in shooting first and asking questions later.

What matters is that we not allow politics and deep-rooted prejudices of any sort to divert our efforts to restore some level of safety, sanity and constitutional balance to the role that police officers play in our communities. If we fail to do so, we will have done a disservice to ourselves and every man, woman and child in this country who have become casualties of the American police state.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute where this article first appeared. He is the author of A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State and The Change Manifesto.