Police State

..link from the above piece

(EBOOK) Po' People's Survival Guide thru COVID-19 and the Virus of Poverty

Oregon Officials Decry “Occupying Army” After Federal Agent Shoots Portland Protester in the Head

In Portland, Oregon, a federal agent deployed to protect a U.S. courthouse shot and seriously injured a 26-year-old protester on Saturday. Donavan La Bella was holding a stereo speaker above his head when he was hit in the head with a so-called less lethal round. La Bella remains hospitalized in serious condition with a fractured skull and broken bones in his face. City and state authorities have criticized the Trump administration for deploying federal officers in Portland. Democratic Senator Ron Wyden said on Twitter, “Trump & Homeland Security must now answer why [federal] officers are acting like an occupying army.” Oregon Governor Kate Brown said she wants the federal agents to leave Portland.

CSIS Used Information Collected via Illegal Activities To Get Counter-Terrorism Warrants, Court Rules

https://globalnews.ca/news/7183474/csis-information-collected-illegal-ac...

"...CSIS not only conducted the 'high legal risk' operations after being warned by government lawyers it did not enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution, it also did not inform the court, the ruling said. 'It is difficult to overstate how disturbing these circumstances are,' the court wrote. 'Operational activity was undertaken in the face of legal advice to the effect that the activity was not authorized in the CSIS Act. CSIS Director David Vigneaut said such activities were 'routine, bread and butter practices used by allied intelligence agencies around the world,' but acknowledged they could be considered crimes under the anti-terrorism provisions. For several years, CSIS relied on the legal doctrine of Crown immunity as a defence from criminal liability when engaging in these activities..."

Intelligence agencies like CSIS or CSE generally consider  themselves to be above the law and act accordingly.

Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum announced late Friday that her office would sue several federal law enforcement agencies over their response to Portland protests and launch a criminal investigation into an incident of force by federal officers.

https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2020/07/oregon-will-sue-federal-police-agencies-open-criminal-investigation-into-use-of-force.html

https://twitter.com/BMeiselas/status/1284644090055819264?s=20

Reporting From Portland (and vid)

https://twitter.com/kthalps/status/1284945880660029440

Reporters Sergio Olmos, Alex Zielinski and Tuck Woodstock who have been on the ground in Portland @ 14:30

Workers to Walk Off the Job in Nationwide “Strike for Black Lives”

In labor news, organizers for the “Strike for Black Lives” expect tens of thousands to walk out of work today in over 25 cities in support of the nationwide uprising against racism and police brutality. Oakland labor organizer and McDonald’s worker Angely Rodriguez Lambert said, “Companies like McDonald’s cannot on the one hand tweet that 'Black Lives Matter' and on the other pay us poverty wages and fail to provide sick days and adequate PPE.” Workers from nursing homes, airports, fast-food chains, farms and the gig economy are joining the nationwide day of action.

Re: 3 Arrests @ Weekend BLM Toronto Demos (see Twitter feed)

Sharon Gebresellassi - People's Lawyer

https://twitter.com/SaronGeb/status/1284924068140064768

"Yesterday, my office was appointed to represent a detained Canadian in the aftermath of a peaceful demonstration. I expected I would need no more than 30 minutes. 30 minutes turned into 15 hours..."

Lawfare is a critical component of our police state.

'It's Not Just About Police-Brutality - It's Economic Brutality As Well'

https://twitter.com/JohnOCAP/status/1285569790728441862

"In fact, the one is there to serve and protect the other..."

“Camouflaged Goon Squads”: Outrage, Legal Challenges in Portland as Federal Agents Snatch Protesters

quote:

AMY GOODMAN: Juan Chavez, you told Oregon Public Broadcasting, “It’s like stop-and-frisk meets Guantánamo Bay.” Explain.

JUAN CHAVEZ: Certainly. So, I mean, these tactics aren’t new in terms of American imperialism. This has been our foreign policy for some time. If foreign soldiers of our own were detaining people in Pakistan or Somalia or in South America, these would be the similar tactics they would have used. So that’s, hence, the reference to Guantánamo Bay. And then, of course, stop-and-frisk was a vast, racist policy used to thwart the constitutional standard by which officers can engage with people.

And so, the combination of those two things, I don’t think we’ve seen in the United States, or at least I don’t know what the analog would be. The closest, I suppose, would be actually what our immigrant communities have gone through for — you know, even before Trump, in dealing with ICE. The ICE officers are known for showing up having faulty warrants and trying to convince people they think are immigrants to come into their detention. We’ve seen that in Oregon, in fact.

AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, when you talk about internationally what happens, so often it’s U.S.-trained. I mean, you look at Central America, for example, Latin American soldiers, in the past, who have been moving into people’s home and arresting them. The shock for Americans in the United States is to see it on U.S. soil, in some cases. I mean, many communities actually do experience this feeling of occupation. And now what’s interesting is the establishment, the governors, the senators, the mayors, the state attorneys general are saying this can’t happen on U.S. soil, when it’s hitting the mainstream population.

JUAN CHAVEZ: Absolutely. And, you know, I’d say that a lot of these local officials, state, federal, local, have been complicit with some form of occupation for a long time. Policing is just another form of counterinsurgency for so many communities. So, these tactics have been built up for a very long time. And so long as we continue to fuel policing, fuel prisons as a solution for public safety, we’re going to continue to see this downward slope of our rights being infringed.

Trump to Send Federal Troops to Protests in Chicago & Seattle Amid Violent Crackdown by Local Police

quote:

We are going to talk about Trump’s push for schools to reopen at all costs in a minute. But first, Jitu Brown, you are a longtime civil rights, human rights leader in Chicago. As you hear Lori Lightfoot says we’re not allowing tyranny to come to this city, your response to what President Trump is saying he will do?

JITU BROWN: Well, first of all, thank you for having me on, Amy. And saying I’m a longtime organizer is just saying I’m old. So, that’s OK. I can deal with that.

But I would just say that Mayor Lightfoot’s statements are the right statements, but it’s too late, you know, when you look at Chicago during the COVID — when the COVID outbreak first exploded, and we saw in cities where the Black death toll was way above that of our white counterparts. For example, in Chicago, we’re only 30% of the population, but we were 70% of the deaths. We saw checkpoints in places like Newark, New Jersey, where people had to show identification to get into different neighborhoods. We saw, as rebellion — after the murder of George Floyd and rebellions began to ensue around the country, I know in my neighborhood it was martial law. And, you know, my humble opinion is that it still is.

So, we’re looking at — regardless of the disaster or the moment, we are looking at the infringement on our rights that is just escalating, and they’re going further and further. So, you know, Donald Trump having federal agents come into Chicago is something that we should definitely be worried about, but we should not act as if our rights have not been infringed upon already, that, I mean, if you really want to talk about it, you can go back to the crime bill. And I remember when, as a young organizer, I saw Chicago police remove two busloads full of young people from the Ida B. Wells housing projects and take them to jail. And that opened the door for the mass incarceration of young Black and Brown men and women. And so, I think it’s really important that we keep this in context.

The last thing I’ll say is, along with the federal agents, the risk of federal agents in unmarked vehicles coming into our city, and what that means for people that are protesting, what that means for organizations, I think it’s also important to note that police have taken the gloves off. Just this past week in Chicago, a young organizer who I worked with, Miracle Boyd, who — when I met her, she was fighting to stop the closure of all the high schools in her neighborhood. She was protesting at an event where they were trying to protest a Christopher Columbus statue, and a Chicago police officer, as she was vigorously protesting, ran up on this 18-year-old girl and smashed her in the mouth with his baton and knocked her teeth out. We just had a press conference supporting Miracle yesterday. So, the brutality is not new. The infringement on our rights is not new. Whether the agent is Donald Trump or the agent of change or the agent of this type of infringement on our rights are Democrats, our rights are already being infringed upon.

CSIS again caught flouting the rule of law

The spy service’s unofficial motto: Lie, deny, then act surprised

Late last week, the director of Canada’s spy agency made me laugh, long and hard.

David Vigneault said something that every other Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) director (save one) has said after it’s been revealed — inside or outside a courtroom — the spies who ultimately report to the country’s chief spy have a corrosive habit of treating the rule of law like a disposable dishrag.

Vigneault was obliged to dish out the service’s standard PR gruel after Federal Court Justice Patrick Gleeson found that CSIS has “a cavalier institutional approach” to the rule of law.

“Having approved operations that were on their face illegal, the service then collected information which in turn was put before this court in support of warrant applications, without notifying the court of the likely illegality,” Justice Glesson wrote.

Vigneault’s pat reply: He takes Justice Gleeson’s blunt, scathing indictment of CSIS’s illegal modus operandi “very seriously” and, cross his heart, he’s going to give all naughty CSIS officers a stern lecture so that everyone belatedly and “fully understands our obligations to the court.”

That’s when I chortled.

I wrote a 368-page exposé in 2002 that detailed how top CSIS officials not only permitted their spies to treat the rule of law like a disposable dishrag for a long time, but condoned it and protected all those anonymous, rule-of-law-skirting spies for a long time, too.

Alarmed CSIS officers helped me tell the truth about CSIS.

Translation: CSIS broke the law and didn’t tell outsiders, including a federal court judge it’s required, by law, to tell when it’s apparently breaking the law....

Philadelphia’s district attorney on Wednesday decried President Donald Trump’s threats to send federal agents into his city, saying that Trump’s “fluffy” rhetoric about occupying cities “comes out of the fascist playbook.”

. . . .

“What’s unusual is the politicization of a normal relationship between federal law enforcement and local law enforcement. And what is really unusual is the apparently illegal Stormtrooper tactics that have been used by federal law enforcement in Portland.”

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/philly-da-threatens-to-charge-fed-law-enforcement-if-trump-deploys-fascist-playbook

Paramilitary-Style Tactics in Portland Mirror Decades of U.S. Violence on the Border & Abroad

quote:

TODD MILLER: Yes. So, the BORTAC unit is — they’re essentially U.S. Border Patrol agents. And U.S. Border Patrol agents, as you just mentioned, Amy, they work in what are known the 100-mile zones, or, as the ACLU put, Constitution-free zones. So, if one can imagine, you know, the contours of the United States — right? — along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, the 5,000-mile U.S.-Canada border, along the coasts, and if you imagine a band, like an orange band or something like that, along the contours, that is covering a huge chunk of the U.S. population. Two hundred million people are covered in what is known as the Constitution-free zone, where the U.S. Border Patrol works with extraconstitutional powers. And in that sense, on the southern border, the idea of the U.S. Border Patrol agents snatching people off the streets or snatching people in the desert or snatching people in the various checkpoints that they can put up in these 100-mile zones happens every day, happens all the time. In a sense, it’s like the extension of that border into places like Portland or Chicago, but, as you mentioned, fit within the Constitution-free zone or the border jurisdiction. And Portland, close to the Canadian border and also along the coast — so, along the coastlines, that’s also in those sorts of jurisdictions.

And then, when you look at BORTAC, which is, you know, the special forces unit of the U.S. Border Patrol, the ones that are doing the paramilitary-style tactics, they are the Border Patrol on top of the Border Patrol — right? — in terms of being militarized, weaponized. They were formed in 1984 to quell uprisings in detention centers for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. And then they had a presence in 1992 in Los Angeles, when there was unrest after the Rodney King incident. And it goes on and on. There’s a long history of BORTAC being involved in unrest, and it seems to be part of their purpose.

And so, as Border Patrol has expanded in astronomical fashion over the last 25 years particularly — 4,000 to 21,000 agents — the expansion of BORTAC then happens, as well. And so, in a way, it’s a surprise — in a way, it’s quite a surprise, like the clip from Brian Williams. And then, in a way, it’s not a surprise at all to see that BORTAC is being a part of being put in places where they’re — where, you know, from — Washington might view as unrest — right? — but it’s really people protesting, that they’re going to be showing up in Chicago, that they’re going to be showing up in New York, in places that are in the 100-mile zones.

And I want to — as people are quite aware of, there was an announcement in March that BORTAC, or this Border Patrol unit, was going to join forces with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in ICE, to do a show of force in the sanctuary cities — right? — the sanctuary cities, to then go after undocumented people in cities, the same cities that we’re seeing them being deployed right now. So, in a way, it’s going hand in hand now with what was announced in March, with what’s been going on actually for years now.

quote:

CECILIA MENJÍVAR: Right, yes. My research has focused not at the border — excuse me — away from the border. But I was doing — I was doing quite a bit of research in Arizona, in Maricopa County, during the time when the sheriff of Maricopa County used many similar techniques to terrorize the Latino population specifically. And at that time, I was interviewing Central American immigrants in the area who pointed me in this direction. They brought up to my attention the similarities between what they had lived during the civil wars in Guatemala and El Salvador and what they were living in Phoenix during the reign of terror that the sheriff created in Phoenix, for instance. And so, it was their experiences that brought to my attention the similarities between technologies of state violence and state terror used during the civil wars in Latin America and what immigrant — Latino immigrants, specifically, were living in cities in the United States, specifically, for instance, Phoenix, where that concentrated.

And in relation to detention centers and disappearances in detention centers, what happens to immigrants who are sent to detention facilities is that they are sent to very remote places. They often lose contact with their families. Their families don’t know where they are. I have had immigrants calling me, asking me to help them locate their family members, because they don’t know where they are held, being held. And so, this again brings back memories to when, in their home countries, they would go search for families who had been taken from their homes at night or from their places of work to be disappeared. And so, the same thing was happening here in — is happening here in the United States, with 638 detention facilities throughout the country. Each state has at least two detention facilities dedicated to hold immigrants in detention. And so, the parallels are so strong and so vivid that immigrants who have lived through both can very quickly point that out to one’s attention.

Police Officers in Deadly Encounters Should Be Required To Talk, Former SIU Director Says

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto-siu-ontario-1.5661885

"A former director of Ontario's police watchdog is pushing back after a string of cases where officers involved in the deaths of civilians have chosen not to speak with investigators, saying the province has the power to make it mandatory for them to explain what went on in those fatal encounters..."

Stop defending - start defunding!

Former Nashville cop recounts his experience of being a victim of police brutality

What provoked the encounter? Expired tags. It's also disturbing because as an officer, he would have known the steps to take (hands on the wheel, don't move until the officers ask, stay in your car, co-operate fully and make your complaints later) and he says he was still mistreated.

Then we have do-gooder's who think RCMP in uniform should be used to hand out food. Talk about using people with no privilege to try and boast a tarnished image. I agree with all the people on the ground who say that their mere presence will mean many people will not go or will not come back.

I helped one year at a Rock the Vote event in the Downtown Eastside when a couple of lawyers set up a booth to notarize voting documents for peple withour proper ID and then other volunteers would take them to the voting booth around the corner from the park. Not a single person took them up on the offer until one of the local people recognized one of the lawyers and then went around and told people it was alright. Almost 100 homeless people got to vote that day but none of them would have voted if it was a cop in uniform "helping" them.

The Greater Vancouver Food Bank’s photo shows three police officers in full uniform — including armoured vests — bent over boxes of food in a parking lot.

“Burnaby RCMP officers rocking the distribution line this morning at our Winston Street location,” the food bank said on Twitter. “We love it when our community comes together!”

But not everyone felt as upbeat about the idea of armed police handing out food to society’s most vulnerable.

“I’m absolutely stunned,” said Paul Taylor, who’s worked in the food justice world in Vancouver and is executive director at Food Share in Toronto. The presence of police officers at a food bank could be traumatizing for users, many of whom may be people of colour.

https://thetyee.ca/News/2020/08/14/Food-Bank-Photo-Ops-Police/?utm_sourc...

Never Surrender in Portland Oregon

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/17/never-surrender-in-portland-oregon/

"There is a whole new generation of Americans who have decided that non-stop resistance is the only way to confront the lethal power structure that is bound and determined to tattoo obedience on their very souls. That relentless longevity of energy is being acted out in Portland Oregon like no other city across this nation. This has really become a profound awakening of historical precedence...."

Yes. It continues...

WATCH: "They fire at least 7 times on James Blake at point blank range in the back, while his children watch from the car-seats..."

https://twitter.com/inthenow/status/1297919240188637185

Defund the Police!

UNCOVER: Dead Wrong: Season 7 (podcast)

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/uncover/season-7-dead-wrong-1.5612940

"In its latest season, UNCOVER seeks accountability within Canada's most powerful institutions."
A shocking story of Canada's criminal injustice system at work. MUST HEAR.

Harsha Walia

Police conducting wellness checks are not an aberration of an otherwise 'just' policing system.

Wellness checks are SYMPTOM of the inherent violence of policing & all carceral institutions, (including involuntary detention under mental health acts). Abolish the RCMP.

What would Malcolm X have to say about police brutality and justice today?

Link

Artists defend anti-police slogan on mural funded by City of Victoria grant

Artists painted individual letters that together said “More justice, more peace.”

After nearly a fortnight after its inception, staff at the city’s arts and culture program noticed that one of the letters in the mural contained the acronym ACAB, for All Cops Are Bastards.

“It came as a surprise to us,” said Bill Eisenhauer, head of engagement at the city. “That wasn’t in the original concept and when we became aware of the acronym, we reached out to the artists to discuss.”

Before any conversations took place, a city crew was dispatched — “prematurely,” said Eisenhauer. “As more information came to light, it became clear that the acronym was placed on the work by the artists.”

Organizers say that they received an email at 9 a.m. Thursday demanding that they paint over one of the letters by noon, or the city would take on the task.

The artists quickly got the word out to supporters, and when a City of Victoria crew showed up to do the work, they were met by a group of 30 to 40 people intent on stopping them.

“The issue is more about racial justice than protecting artistic expression,” said Pam Buisa, one of the community organizers behind the mural. “Whether or not you agree with the artists’ message is not the point. It’s about the greater ‘More justice, more peace’ message we are trying to get out.”

The project was funded by a grant from the City of Victoria, with local businesses sponsoring the work.

quote:

The artists stress that they do not wish to speak on behalf of the Black community, but from their experiences as Black and Indigenous-identifying individuals.

“It was our impression that the City of Victoria allowed us this space as an acknowledgement of the oppressions we face. We understood this as a gesture of peace and care which makes it particularly disappointing to see that our opinions are now being censored by the City of Victoria and the Victoria Police Department,” they said.

Charity Williams, lead organizer of the mural, said supporters have indicated that they are willing to camp at the site overnight, if necessary, to protect the mural.

Eisenhauer said that the issue is all a misunderstanding and that the City of Victoria is both supportive of public art and pleased to have contributed to the creation of this mural.

“We look forward to conversations with the artists to seek a way forward. It is not our intent to paint over the piece and no action will be taken while conversations take place.”

Victoria Police Chief Del Manak said that the inclusion of ACAB is disrespectful to the department.

“I fully support the spirit behind the mural as I understand it to have been originally presented to the City of Victoria. The Victoria Police Department, and I personally, stand behind the call for “More Justice, More Peace,” said Manak in a statement. “Justice is not justice if it does not include all members of society. Excluding one group through harmful words seems counter to the very spirit of the mural itself.”

Protesters in Montreal topple John A. Macdonald statue, demand police defunding

Protesters in Montreal toppled and defaced a statue of John A. Macdonald on Sunday as rallies were held in several cities to demand that police services be defunded and reformed.

A spokesman for the Montreal police confirmed the statue of Canada’s first prime minister was unbolted, pulled down and sprayed with graffiti at around 2:45 p.m. The statue’s head was disconnected from its body during the incident.

Jean-Pierre Brabant said police were on hand but did not intervene other than to ask the crowd to disperse on a loudspeaker.

He said no arrests were made.....