Police Brutality

[Y Chwyldro Comiwnyddol Cymraeg]

From listening to Dead Prez, and reading a bit of research on the Uhuru movement, I've noticed that they see Police brutality as a huge problem for the black community.Obviously any sort of aggresion from the police is bad, butr how bad is the situation? Is violence from the police a daily occurance? Do many inoccents get killed and framed by the police (as in Track 3 of D>P's RBG album)?

[Catbus]

Under the right circumstances (especially if leftist politics are involved) people being framed by the police can happen fairly easily. Three of my friends got arrested from a Food Not Bombs feeding a little while ago while they were dishing out soup. They were released after a few days but were held on some type of conspiriacy charges. The major problem is if you have no concrete evidence (photos, videos, sound recordings even witnesses, but they won't always hold up) as to prove your innocent it's your word verses theirs, and generally they win.

As for people being killed by the police, I've never heard any cases of that but I'm sure it's happened.

Edit: I forgot to mention, out of the three arrested two were Black and the other was Indian. I've also noticed a lot of racial profiling during any activity we partake in. Whenever the crowd of us is prodominately white, usually theres little interference, but whenever we're even or more racially mixed, you can always spot a couple of officers just watching us.

My thinkings always been since the police academy is (so I've heard) very easy to get through, it would give any bigot the chance to discriminate legally.

[Yehuda Stern]

The heyday, so to speak, of police brutality was in the 1990s - Rodney King is the most famous case. Many shootings of black youth for no real reason took place back then. The phenomenon is hardly over, but it cooled down a bit, mostly because back then Black people were much more politically active and this led to officers being more aggressive. I don't think you'd be hard pressed to find incidents of police brutality towards black people today either, or even against white youth who look too 'unruly' in the eyes of conservatives.

[Y Chwyldro Comiwnyddol Cymraeg]

More politically active in the 1990's? If that was a gauge for Police Brutality then I'd have thought the late ^)'s and 70's would have been worse.

[#FF0000]

More politically active in the 1990's? If that was a gauge for Police Brutality then I'd have thought the late ^)'s and 70's would have been worse.

That'd make sense, since, if I remember, the 70's is about the time the police started training like goddamn paramilitaries (end result: SWAT teams). It also happens to coincide with the beginning of the War On Drugs (1971) Still, I think the police departments practiced some kind of... restraint, since there wasn't much in the way of "non-lethal" weapons back then.

In any case, from what I can remember, and from what I'm finding from the bit of snooping around I did, people generally seem to agree that the 90's was the "age of Police Brutality". One article I found in some mailing list archive talks about it and has a list of (mostly black/hispanic) victims of police brutality. Some of it is pretty heinous, such as a young woman who was shot 27 times in her car. The police were called to help herbecause she was suffering from a seizure. I can send you the article, if you want it.

I also remember a report on a number of forced strip-searches carried out on women in California (16,000 a year?), and, I think, Utah.

I would say it's pretty bad. Also, let me also add, at the risk of sounding childish, Fuck the police.

[Os Cangaceiros]

It's still pretty bad. If the police want to mess with you/arrest you, most likely they will find a reason.

I've only had two encounters with the police, and both of them were pretty bad.