[Zipperfish]

The protesters are protesting. The rioters are rioting. The looters are looting. The goon squads are not bothering to differentiate. Because the real enemy, to them, is cities that have elected officials from another political party. This is an attack on Portland.

[BartSimpson]

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

The protesters are protesting. The rioters are rioting. The looters are looting. The goon squads are not bothering to differentiate. Because the real enemy, to them, is cities that have elected officials from another political party. This is an attack on Portland.

And Portland will not receive Federal money when it comes time to pay for the mess. If they choose to let rioters run rampant they can pay for the mess themselves.

Fuck them.

[BeaverFever]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

The protesters are protesting. The rioters are rioting. The looters are looting. The goon squads are not bothering to differentiate. Because the real enemy, to them, is cities that have elected officials from another political party. This is an attack on Portland.

And Portland will not receive Federal money when it comes time to pay for the mess. If they choose to let rioters run rampant they can pay for the mess themselves.

Fuck them.

Republicans are choosing to let COVID run rampant. But I bey you want Federal money for them right?

[Scape]

[DrCaleb]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

I'm actually surprised at you Bart, that you don't see the obvious slight of hand sending in the goon squads to protect things not under threat as a means of stopping a constitutionally protected action that the White House disagrees with.

Look, even CBC is calling these fuckers out. They are NOT peaceful.

You need some remedial comprehension skills. The protests were "deemed" violent, but not by the CBC. Reports were that the protests were peaceful, until the federales showed up. Nothing was damaged, nothing was thrown, nothing was threatened until they showed up.

The officers Trump sent in were the catalyst for violence.

[DrCaleb]

Joseph McCarthy and the Force of Political Falsehoods

[BartSimpson]

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

The protesters are protesting. The rioters are rioting. The looters are looting. The goon squads are not bothering to differentiate. Because the real enemy, to them, is cities that have elected officials from another political party. This is an attack on Portland.

And Portland will not receive Federal money when it comes time to pay for the mess. If they choose to let rioters run rampant they can pay for the mess themselves.

Fuck them.

Republicans are choosing to let COVID run rampant. But I bey you want Federal money for them right?

And Justin Trudeau is a child molester.

[BartSimpson]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

Joseph McCarthy and the Force of Political Falsehoods

Still beating the lie that McCarthy was wrong, eh?

https://howtobeyourowndetective.com/201 ... ic-record/

[DrCaleb]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

Joseph McCarthy and the Force of Political Falsehoods

Still beating the lie that McCarthy was wrong, eh?

https://howtobeyourowndetective.com/201 ... ic-record/

The Extraordinary Injustice of McCarthy’s America

[Scape]

[Scape]

Surprise, surprise. Umbrella man was a white supremacist.

[BeaverFever]

$1:

Umbrella Man 'protester' who sparked George Floyd mayhem is Hells Angels-linked white supremacist, police say

His actions, Minneapolis police say, were the spark that led to a wave of violence and looting

In the days after George Floyd’s death, surveillance videos showed a man breaking windows at a Minneapolis auto store. Informally dubbed “Umbrella Man,” he was dressed in black, sporting a gas mask and carrying an opened umbrella.

The May 27 video showed him casually breaking the windows of an AutoZone with a hammer, as some protestors asked him to stop. Before that, police say, he had spray painted “free (expletive) for everyone zone” on the store. “Those cops will come for you if you’re pulling that crap,” a man can be heard saying on the clip.

Minneapolis police, the Star Tribune reports, say that the man sought to incite racial tension as he walked up the street causing mayhem. His actions, they said, led to violence and looting. The store itself was later burned down.
“This was the first fire that set off a string of fires and looting throughout the precinct and the rest of the city,” Sgt. Erika Christensen wrote in a search warrant affidavit, the Star Tribune reported.

“Until the actions of the person your affiant has been calling ‘Umbrella Man,’ the protests had been relatively peaceful. The actions of this person created an atmosphere of hostility and tension. Your affiant believes that this individual’s sole aim was to incite violence.”....

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/nationalpos ... 574dd/amp/





Provocateur false flag operation fail

[Thanos]

Well, Trump did say last year that he had "the bikers on our side":

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/umbrella-man- ... 42654.html

$1:

Who is Umbrella Man?

He has not been named by local media as he has not been formally charged with a crime.

Minnesota police extensively searched through video footage of the violence to try to identify the man but had no luck.

According to the Star Tribune, the man was identified following an email tip-off. The email claimed the man was a member of the Hells Angels biker gang.

An investigation found that the man was also connected to the Aryan Cowboys, a prison biker / street gang. The Anti-Defamation League identifies them as a white supremacist group based primarily in Kentucky and Minnesota.

A search warrant by Minneapolis Police claims that the man has previous convictions for domestic violence and assault.

It was these previous arrests that officers claim helped them identify the man. They compared images taken from the incident in Minneapolis to previous booking photos.

The warrant claims that the man's size and eye, nose and brow area match that of Umbrella Man.

It is also alleged that the man was involved in an incident last month in which a Muslim woman was confronted by a motorcycle group wearing Aryan Cowboy leather vests.

After footage from the Minnesota protests was released online, there were many theories as to who Umbrella Man might be.

The St Paul Police Department was forced to issue a statement and a video denying that he was one of their officers.

Police Chief Todd Axtell said: "We knew right away that our officer was not involved in instigating the unrest in Minneapolis because we knew exactly where he was at the time - and he was in St Paul.

"This type of disinformation can jeopardise the officer's reputation and safety, and chip away at the trust this police department has worked so hard to build with its community," he added.

[BeaverFever]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

Republicans are choosing to let COVID run rampant. But I bey you want Federal money for them right?

And Justin Trudeau is a child molester.

Childish. Because you know you don’t have any other response to the disastrous Republican handling of the virus Which is still unchecked

[BeaverFever]

$1:

Think federal cops in Portland are scary? Cops use 'jump-out boys' all the time

Baynard Woods 2h ago

Plainclothes police ‘jump-out boys’ terrorize American cities. Sometimes they become all-out criminal gangs

Wed 29 Jul 2020 11.16 BST

People in Portland, Oregon, have protested against racism and policing for more than 50 consecutive nights, following the police killing of George Floyd on 25 May. The violence of the police response has further stoked the anger of protesters, as it has around the country.

In response, President Trump has empowered federal agents under the Department of Homeland Security to detain and arrest protesters. Many around the world were shocked when Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that federal agents wearing camouflage were driving around in unmarked vehicles, snatching up protesters and speeding away.

That description sounded all too familiar. We’ve spent much of the last five years reporting on the Baltimore police department. In reporting our new book, I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad, we found that police units in unmarked cars have long used terror and confusion to destabilize communities.

During the uprising following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in 2015, the national guard snatched up one protester and police attacked another on live television. Away from the cameras, we witnessed other agencies with unmarked uniforms rounding citizens onto school buses, for mass detention, often without ever formally charging them.

Even before the uprising, Baltimore, like most American cities, has heavily relied on aggressive police squads to maintain order. Plainclothes police squads – “jump-out boys” – ride around in unmarked vehicles looking for citizens to tackle or throw against a wall, then search for guns or drugs.

Police departments officially call it “proactive policing”.

Chad Wolf, the acting head of the Department of Homeland Security, recently used similar language on Fox News to describe what is happening in Portland.

“Because we don’t have … local law enforcement support, we are having to go out and proactively arrest individuals,” Wolf said. “And we need to do that because we need to hold them accountable.”

Yet the police themselves are rarely held accountable. “Proactive policing” is, at its core, unconstitutional. These practices presume people guilty and ignore constitutional protections. We, in turn, are all too ready to ignore these violations, especially if the victim has a criminal record and the cops actually find drugs or guns during the search.

The US Department of Justice’s 2017 report on policing in Chicago noted that residents reported that plainclothes units acted like an “occupying army” and made the neighborhood feel like “an open-air prison”. Police in Baltimore, where nearly 80% of the officers do not live in the city, have also been described as an “occupying army”.

Many cities have made a troubling, quasi-fascist trade-off: use terrorizing tactics to heavily police certain parts of the city, in the name of comforting the parts of the city and the suburbs which rarely see plainclothes police.

In June, the New York police department abolished a plainclothes anti-crime unit and reassigned 600 plainclothes officers because of their involvement in a disproportionate number of shootings and their use of “stop-and-frisk” tactics widely considered racist and unconstitutional.

In the New York Daily News, civil rights attorney Joel Berger said he was encouraged by the disbanding of New York’s plainclothes units, which follow an approach “designed as a form of social control to show people in minority neighborhoods who is in charge, just like stop and frisk”.

Even those who support these tactics do not shy from this philosophy. In her 2016 book The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, the conservative writer Heather MacDonald argued that proactive policing is a form of “urban reclamation”.

In Baltimore, this kind of policing has been exceptionally egregious. A special plainclothes squad called the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) was the subject of a sweeping 2017 federal indictment charging eight detectives with robbery and racketeering charges. All either pleaded guilty or were convicted and are currently serving sentences for widespread violations of constitutional rights. Before they became federal prisoners, however, these were decorated and celebrated police officers who acted precisely as we see Trump’s federal agents acting in Portland.

According to the testimony of squadmate Maurice Ward, Wayne Jenkins, a 14-year veteran who ran the GTTF at the time it was taken down, would make as many as 50 unconstitutional stops a night. Jenkins used a technique he called a “door pop”. When he saw a group of Black men standing at, say, a bus stop, he would speed up in his unmarked car and slam the brakes. Another cop would pop open the door and they would chase and tackle anyone who ran. If the person had a gun, they arrested them. If the person had drugs, they stole and sold them. The police considered these people, a federal prosecutor later said, “beneath the law”.

Wiretaps and trial testimony revealed that because Jenkins wasn’t wearing a uniform or displaying any police identification beyond a tactical vest, he often lied to victims and said he worked for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) or the US Department of Justice. In one case in 2016, Jenkins and his squad stopped a man and his wife as they left a home repairs store. They took them to an unofficial interrogation site called “The Barn”, where Jenkins claimed to be a federal prosecutor.

Then members of the GTTF took the couple to their home, in another jurisdiction, and detained them for hours. They found nothing illegal, so they didn’t arrest the couple for any crimes. They did, however, steal $20,000 from them.

Because the man had a criminal record, no one believed him when he said police kidnapped and robbed him. The man’s wife later explained that she didn’t know if the people stopping her were even cops. This is common in Baltimore, where police in cargo pants and sneakers prowl around looking for trouble. Sometimes, members of the GTTF even wore masks so residents they ambushed would think they were criminals. In his guilty plea, Jenkins admitted that when he did this to a driver in 2010, the man panicked and crashed into another car killing its driver. Jenkins and a sergeant planted heroin to justify the chase.

These aren’t isolated examples of “bad apples”. The US Department of Justice report on Chicago cites a case where two plainclothes officers wearing all black approached a couple, who thought they were being robbed and fled. One of the officers shot and killed the man.

Whenever there is a perceived crime spike, calls for proactive policing are renewed. When the NYPD disbanded its plainclothes unit, the police union president, Patrick J Lynch, said that “shooting and murders are both climbing steadily upward, but city leaders have clearly decided that proactive policing isn’t a priority” and they “will have to reckon with the consequences”.

After Freddie Gray’s death, a rise in crime in Baltimore quickly turned the narrative from police reform to tough-on-crime solutions that further empower police. Every time members of the GTFF stole drugs or money, it created a ripple effect of violence. Those who were robbed had to answer to people they owed money or drugs. In one case, GTTF officers stole $10,000 from a man who was later murdered over a debt as he returned home from an appearance in court for the gun they charged him with. Of course, his murder, like those of the more than 300 other Baltimoreans killed that year, further justified increasing police powers – and expanding the police budget.

In Portland, we are seeing the federal version of “proactive policing” sow confusion and chaos – and Trump is betting on the turmoil. Unaccountable police, whether in plainclothes or uniforms, create chaos, which allows authoritarian leaders to argue that we need more police power, the very thing that people in Portland – and across the country – are protesting against.

Trump’s federal police simply expand the definition of who is “beneath the law” so that it encompasses white, middle-class protesters as well as Black and brown people. Now, he’s threatening to send the same shock troops to more cities. But our cities do not need more jump-out boys. They’re teeming with them already, and they’ve already contributed enough chaos and violence.

Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg are the co-authors of I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad

© 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

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