kcpd vs. kcfd political patronage parasites at odds over fatal firefighter niggerization by cop...,

kcfop |  Brothers and Sisters,

By now many of you have heard what happened this morning. A few members of the Kansas City Fire Department hung very large red ribbons with the name Bruno stenciled on them. Those ribbons were hung around the neighborhood belonging to the officer involved last year. Thankfully that officer and his family were out of town and did not have to witness the event. On duty members responded to the scene, but so did a large number of our own FOP brothers and sisters even though they were off.

What happened this morning is unforgivable and I understand how an event like this can bring up emotions that are difficult to deal with. I responded to the scene and met with a number of you. I have read each of your messages and understand the anger. I too am greatly upset about the events that happened today, along with the other events that have happened.

I met with the presidents of Local 42, 3808 and a representative of FOP Lodge 102 on Thursday morning to work out some sort of resolution. I have also been in constant contact with Mayor James, and Chief Darryl Forte'. Everyone involved understands our anger, but we need to try to be sensible about our reactions. I do NOT believe that either of the IAFF unions had anything to do with the recent issues, but their members have.

I am asking each of you to remember that there is a court process to deal with these issues, and we will be using that avenue. We believe that using city resources, shirts and symbols to harass anyone are violations of law and the appropriate measures will be taken. Lastly, I am not asking you to not be upset...you have that right. Just as you have the right to extend professional courtesy in your traffic stops and interactions. Should you choose not to, I understand, but please be polite when you contact any member of KCFD.

We choose this profession our families did not, bringing this fight to our homes is unforgivable. I stand by each of you and ask that you share this message.

political leadership not focused on that parasitic patronage army is no leadership at all!

Governing

NYTimes |  Night after night the streets have attracted disparate groups, some from within Ferguson, and some from hundreds of miles away. As demonstrators gather each evening, it is not unusual to see some people carrying handguns while only a block away parents push their toddlers in strollers. Neither the peaceful protesters nor the hotheaded elements appear to have any direction or a unified leadership.

Many of those on the street say they have shrugged off guidance from elders in the African-American establishment, and even from the Brown family, which has repeatedly pleaded for calm.

One protester, DeVone Cruesoe, of the St. Louis area, standing on Canfield Drive last week said, “Do we have a leader? No.” Pointing to the spot where Mr. Brown was killed, he said, “You want to know who our leader is? Mike Brown.” 

The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson arrived at the protest on Friday night. “People were so warm,” he said. “It was that kind of celebration.”

But he said on Saturday morning that the violent tone of the protest reflected anger over police tactics. Ferguson, he said, is “a metaphor for urban America,” where many minorities and poor whites lack access to jobs, transportation and health care. 

Many African-American civic leaders in St. Louis said they were frustrated by their inability to guide the protesters. 

At an emotional meeting at a church on Thursday, clergy members despaired over the seemingly uncontrollable nature of the protest movement and the flare-ups of violence that older people in the group abhorred. 

“We had the so-called power brokers here on Tuesday,” said the Rev. Robert C. Scott, pastor of Central Baptist Church in St. Louis, referring to a meeting earlier in the week. “Nothing has changed. It has exacerbated. We should not be on the news looking like Iraq or Beirut.” 

Derrick Robbins, another pastor in attendance, said there had been no negotiations between the police and protesters. 

“Everybody’s trying to be a leader, but it’s not working,” he said. “I wish we could come together and have a unified front. That is not happening.”

Some people have suggested that there is a generational divide. George Richardson, who works for the building department in East St. Louis, said the younger protesters were acting independently, ignoring advice from their parents.

chief struggley's occupation army is a patronage make-work project for what would otherwise be unemployed l00z3rs...,

buzzfeed | Over at the Prime Time Beauty & Barber Shop, a social hub in the black part of town, folks see it differently. “They treat us like criminals,” said barber Branden Turner, who’s worked at the shop for a few years. They described officers routinely waiting for customers to leave so they could give them traffic tickets, search for drugs, or ask them for identification so they could run a background check.

“Everyone knows the statistics,” said Turner, referring to the now well-known figures showing a disproportionate amount of traffic stops and arrests for blacks. “Ask anybody from the city,” he said, meaning St. Louis. “Don’t nobody come in from the city because they know this is one of the most racist places there is.”

In this city of about 21,000 people, the national spotlight has forced residents to grapple with dueling narratives of their relationship to each other and to their government. It’s a tale of two cities that happen to exist in one town: Ferguson. More largely, it’s a tale of two Americas, black and white, that seem to exist in totally different realities and have sharply divergent views on race.

Many black locals welcome the unflattering attention, hoping it might lead to change in a city where whites are only 29% of the population but five of the six city council members, six of the seven school board members, and — as repeated ad nauseam this week — 50 of the 53 police officers.

“We’re tired of being bullied,” said Jayson Ross, a 25-year-old native who has been a regular presence at the nightly protests.

Those demonstrations weren’t just a reaction to the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. They were also a fiery response to years of grievances that were routinely ignored by most of Ferguson’s white residents and by its predominantly white government. It’s the same pent-up fury that sparked protests in small towns made infamous by previous race-related controversies that went national: Sanford, Fla.; Jena, La.; and Jasper, Texas, notable among them.

Regardless of the geographic region, the community response follows a predictable script: White residents almost always find themselves surprised by the simmering discontent of their black neighbors. And why wouldn’t they be? They usually live in a different part of town, no longer segregated by law but by history, custom, and sometimes policy. What’s more, the police and other arms of government treat them with respect. Many white residents don’t think there’s much racial discontent because they just don’t see it.

red ribbon protest: cops were busy cutting these down last night...,

I had to come down to the data center last night, and to my surprise there were thousands of Bruno ribbons tied around lamp posts, parking meters, street lights etc..., downtown in Kansas City. As I sat at a bus stop waiting to catch my ride home, a pair of cops came sauntering up the street arms fully loaded with the red ribbons where they'd been busily walking along and cutting them down.

Adhering to the "don't start none, won't be none" principle, I simply nodded my head in greeting to them as they passed by, because my highest priority was to get home without incident. I did manage to take a few pictures of some of the ribbons. Somebody with deep pockets paid for this substantial act of graphic speaking truth to power. 

judge struggley backpeddling quicker than chief struggley...,

pitch |  Jackson County Circuit Judge Bryan Round will not preside over a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by the family of Anthony Bruno, who was shot to death by an off-duty Kansas City police officer last December.

Round, who had been a Kansas City police board attorney for about eight years, was assigned last week to preside over the controversial Bruno lawsuit.

But Round recused himself Wednesday after The Pitch published a story in which legal experts criticized him for comments made during a trial that appeared to be protecting the Kansas City Police Department. Round filed the case transfer order but did not say why he was recusing himself. He also did not provide a statement.

The Pitch reported Wednesday that Round had found Nicholas Rose not guilty of resisting arrest in June but guilty of disturbing the peace and careless driving. Rose and about 50 friends were riding motorcycles and doing stunts on Interstate 70 and U.S. Highway 40 last year and causing a traffic hazard.

Between the June trial and the July 30 sentencing hearing, Round had learned that Rose was considering an excessive-force lawsuit against the police department and officer Donald Hubbard, who arrested him. (Videos show Rose doing a wheelie and bumping the back of Hubbard’s patrol car. Videos also show Hubbard jumping out of his patrol car, grabbing Rose and throwing him to the ground. Hubbard later told officers that Rose was trying to flee the scene and trying to hit him with his helmet.)

Round, who was appointed to the bench this year, called Rose a “vulture” and sentenced him to two weeks of shock incarceration. He also told Rose that he would not have found him not guilty of resisting arrest if he had known that Rose was planning to file a lawsuit against the police department.

you are not nearly scared enough about ebola?

foreign policy |  Attention World: You just don't get it. You think there are magic bullets in some rich country's freezers that will instantly stop the relentless spread of the Ebola virus in West Africa? You think airport security guards in Los Angeles can look a traveler in the eyes and see infection, blocking that jet passenger's entry into La-la-land? You believe novelist Dan Brown's utterly aburd description of a World Health Organization that has a private C5-A military transport jet and disease SWAT team that can swoop into outbreaks, saving the world from contagion?

Wake up, fools. What's going on in West Africa now isn't Brown's silly Inferno scenario -- it's Steven Soderberg's movie Contagion, though without a modicum of its high-tech capacity.

Last week, my brilliant Council on Foreign Relations colleague John Campbell, former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria, warned that spread of the virus inside Lagos -- which has a population of 22 million -- would instantly transform this situation into a worldwide crisis, thanks to the chaos, size, density, and mobility of not only that city but dozens of others in the enormous, oil-rich nation. Add to the Nigerian scenario civil war, national elections, Boko Haram terrorists, and a country-wide doctors' strike -- all of which are real and current -- and you have a scenario so overwrought and frightening that I could not have concocted it even when I advised screenwriter Scott Burns on his Contagion script.

Inside the United States, politicians, gadflies, and much of the media are focused on wildly experimental drugs and vaccines, and equally wild notions of "keeping the virus out" by barring travelers and "screening at airports."Let's be clear: Absolutely no drug or vaccine has been proven effective against the Ebola virus in human beings. To date, only one person -- Dr. Kent Brantly -- has apparently recovered after receiving one of the three prominent putative drugs, and there is no proof that the drug was key to his improvement. None of the potential vaccines has even undergone Phase One safety trials in humans, though at least two are scheduled to enter that stage before December of this year. And Phase One is the swiftest, easiest part of new vaccine trials -- the two stages of clinical trials aimed at proving that vaccines actually work will be difficult, if not impossible, to ethically and safely execute. If one of the vaccines is ready to be used in Africa sometime in 2015, the measure will be executed without prior evidence that it can work, which in turn will require massive public education to ensure that people who receive the vaccination do not change their behaviors in ways that might put them in contract with Ebola -- because they mistakenly believe they are immune to the virus.

We are in for a very long haul with this extremely deadly disease -- it has killed more than 50 percent of those laboratory-confirmed infections, and possibly more than 70 percent of the infected populations of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. Nigeria is struggling to ensure that no secondary spread of Ebola comes from one of the people already infected by Liberian traveler Patrick Sawyer -- two of whom have died so far. That effort expanded on Wednesday, when Nigerian health authorities announced that a nurse who had treated Sawyer escaped her quarantine confinement in Lagos and traveled to Enugu a city that, as of 2006, has a population of about three million. Though the nurse has not shown symptoms of the disease, the incubation time for infection, which is up to 21 days, hasn't elapsed.

with aid doctors gone, ebola fight grows harder

NYTimes |  On Saturday afternoon, several hundred people in an area of Monrovia known as the West Point slum broke through the gates of a former school that had been converted days earlier into a holding center for people with suspected Ebola. 

Samuel Tarplah, 48, a nurse running the center, said Saturday evening that the protesters wanted to shut it down. “They told us that we don’t want an Ebola holding center in our community.” He said the intruders stole mattresses, personal protective equipment, even buckets of chlorine that had just been delivered. “They took everything.”

Fear is complicating the huge increase in aid that is needed: food for people in areas that have been cordoned off; laboratory supplies to test for the disease; gloves, face masks and gowns to protect health workers; body bags for the dead; bedsheets to replace those that must be burned. Airlines have canceled flights that could have carried in such supplies, despite assurances from the W.H.O. that properly screened passengers pose little risk. Positions on aid teams remain unfilled. 

Hundreds of workers for Doctors Without Borders have fought the outbreak since March. The group’s president, Dr. Joanne Liu, said there was an acute need for materials as well as for more human resources — and not just experts and bureaucrats, but also the kind of person who is ready to “roll up his sleeves.”

“What we have to keep in mind is we are facing today the most devastating and biggest Ebola epidemic of the modern times,” Dr. Liu said. “There is fear, there is a front line, the epidemic is advancing, and there is a collapse of infrastructure.”

A more muscular effort to fight the outbreak began lumbering to life over the past week.

The newly appointed United Nations coordinator for Ebola, Dr. David Nabarro, wrote in an email that he had his “head right down working through some extremely challenging stuff under tight time pressure.” 

“All of us are going to have to perform in an outstanding way over some months,” Dr. Nabarro added in a phone interview. “For many, the image is fearful to a degree that it makes it very hard indeed for them to do anything other than think about their safety and the safety of those they love.”

nigeria sacks 16,000 doctors in midst of rising ebola concerns

aljazeera |  Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan reportedly (link is external) fired 16,000 resident doctors this week, causing concern as the country fights a number of Ebola cases. The government also reportedly (link is external) suspended the residency training programme in federal hospitals, citing the need to better address challenges currently facing the health sector. 

The move comes as thousands of doctors are on strike (link is external) throughout the country, calling for better working conditions and increased pay. The Nigeria Medical Association (NMA) Friday demanded (link is external) the immediate reversal of Johnathan's decision, and encouraged those affected not to pick up their termination letters. 

Online, many in Nigeria expressed concern over what the sacking meant for the country as it battles Ebola, with 11 cases confirmed (link is external) so far. 

ebola outbreak moving too fast to handle

msn |  The Ebola outbreak that has claimed more than 1,000 lives in west Africa is moving faster than aid organisations can handle, the medical charity MSF said Friday.

The warning came a day after the World Health Organization said the scale of the epidemic had been vastly underestimated and that "extraordinary measures" were needed to contain the killer disease.

Related: WHO: Ebola toll may 'vastly underestimate' crisis

The UN health agency said the death toll from the worst outbreak of the disease in four decades had now climbed to 1,069 in the four afflicted countries, Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

"It is deteriorating faster, and moving faster, than we can respond to," MSF (Doctors Without Borders) chief Joanne Liu told reporters in Geneva, saying it could take six months to get the upper hand.

 "It is like wartime," she said a day after returning from the region where she met political leaders and visited clinics.

WHO said Thursday it was coordinating "a massive scaling up of the international response" to the epidemic.

"Staff at the outbreak sites see evidence that the numbers of reported cases and deaths vastly underestimate the magnitude of the outbreak," it said.

The latest epidemic erupted in the forested zone straddling the borders of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, and later spread to Nigeria.

WHO declared a global health emergency last week -- far too late, according to MSF, which months ago warned that the outbreak was out of control.

Liu said while Guinea was the initial epicentre of the disease, the pace there has slowed, with concerns now focused on the other countries.

"If we don't stabilise Liberia, we'll never stabilise the region," Liu said.

Concerns have also centred on the Nigerian cases, which are in Lagos, sub-Saharan Africa's largest city.

"Right now we have no past experience with in urban setting," said Liu.

ebola crisis in monrovia...,

bbc |  There are conflicting reports over the fate of 17 Ebola patients who vanished after a quarantine centre in the Liberian capital Monrovia was looted.

An angry mob attacked the centre in the city's densely populated West Point township on Saturday evening.

A senior health official said all of the patients were being moved to another medical facility.

But a reporter told the BBC that 17 had escaped while 10 others were taken away by their families.

More than 400 people are known to have died from the virus in Liberia, out of a total of 1,145 deaths recorded by the World Health Organization.

Assistant Health Minister Tolbert Nyenswah said protesters had been unhappy that patients were being brought in from other parts of the capital.

Other reports suggested the protesters had believed Ebola was a hoax and wanted to force the quarantine centre to close.

The attack at the Monrovia centre is seen as a major setback in the struggle to halt the outbreak, says the BBC's Will Ross, reporting from Lagos.

Health experts say that the key to ending the Ebola outbreak is to stop it spreading in Liberia, where ignorance about the virus is high and many people are reluctant to cooperate with medical staff.

black face chronicles: captain ron johnson not in charge in ferguson...,

Start video at the 2:00 minute mark.

he spotted the cigars: chief struggley set the stage for darren "barney fife" wilson to walk...,

vox |  In the 1980s, a pair of Supreme Court decisions set up a framework for determining when deadly force by cops is reasonable. Those decisions have governed how state laws are applied. Furthermore, many agencies simply use identical standards to the Supreme Court's for their own use-of-force policies — though some departments don't let officers use deadly force even when the Court decisions say they'd be allowed to.

Constitutionally, "police officers are allowed to shoot under two circumstances," says Klinger. The first circumstance is "to protect their life or the life of another innocent party" — what departments call the "defense-of-life" standard. The second circumstance is to prevent a suspect from escaping, but only if the officer has probable cause to think the suspect's committed a serious violent felony.

cops can't shoot every felon who tries to escape

The logic behind the second circumstance, says Klinger, comes from a Supreme Court decision called Tennessee vs. Garner. That case involved a pair of police officers who shot a 15-year-old boy as he fled from a burglary. (He'd stolen $10 and a purse from a house.) The Court ruled that cops couldn't shoot every felon who tried to escape. But, as Klinger says, "they basically say that the job of a cop is to protect people from violence, and if you've got a violent person who's fleeing, you can shoot them to stop their flight."

Some police departments' policies only allow deadly force in the first circumstance: defense of life. Others have policies that also allow deadly force to prevent escape in certain cases, within the limits of the Supreme Court decision.

Does the convenience store robbery matter?

Shortly after releasing the documents that identified Brown as the primary suspect in a convenience-store robbery, the Ferguson Police Department clarified that Wilson had not known that Brown was a robbery suspect when he made "initial contact" with Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson. (Instead, the department says, Wilson stopped the teenagers because they were walking in the middle of the street.)

That phrasing doesn't make it clear whether or not Wilson believed Brown to be a robbery suspect when he started to shoot at him. If he did, it might then be up to the investigators and county prosecutor McCulloch to decide whether a "strong-arm robbery," as the Ferguson Police Department described the incident, counts as a violent felony. If they decide it does, that will go some way toward a legal justification for Wilson's action. On the other hand, Wilson would only be able to claim that he was justified if Brown was fleeing — which eyewitnesses say he wasn't.

It's most likely, however, that the whole question is moot. From the Ferguson Police Department's statements on the afternoon of August 15th, it doesn't sound like Wilson even knew about the robbery at all. In that case, there's no way for him to claim that he was justified in keeping a violent felon from fleeing, because he didn't even know Brown was a suspect in a crime at all.

Wilson could instead, however, claim "defense of life" — that he feared for his life when Brown (according to his story) assaulted him in his car. In that case, the next question will be whether it was reasonable for him to be afraid of Brown.

failed black political leadership: st. louis missouri is and always has been hypersegregated....,

Skip to 6:40 and listen to Dorrien Warren

time |  St. Louis is a region of division: The depopulated, deindustrialized city (mostly African American) is legally divided from the far more prosperous (mostly white) county, with the city ardently seeking a reunion that the county vehemently spurns. North St. Louis city (largely African American) is estranged from south St. Louis city (mostly white) in a city that is now 48% African American. The maze of suburbs that make up north St. Louis county, where Ferguson is, is mostly African American and estranged from the maze of suburbs that make up south and west St. Louis counties, which are mostly white.

These interlocking networks of fragmentation that characterize the St. Louis, frequently deplored but diligently maintained, have managed to keep African Americans here contrarily concentrated and diffuse, politically empowered (there have been African American mayors, police chiefs, etc.) but also politically contained, and, in many respects, isolated from the cultural and political currents of the region. There remains in St. Louis a sense that African Americans are strangers in a strange land. The region is what sociologists call “hyper-segregated.”

Enter this iron triangle of control, neglect and racial alienation, and one uncovers several recent racial narratives that should have warned St. Louisans about what was coming—narratives about crossing the racial divide here. Metrolink, St. Louis’s light rail system, completed its second line in 2006. It provided African Americans of East St. Louis, one of the poorest cities in the country, and of north St. Louis county much easier access to the St. Louis Galleria Mall and the central cultural corridor of the city, including the hip Delmar Loop district. Concurrently, the Galleria has since seen an astronomical increase in shoplifting, and there has also been an increase in general crime and hooliganism in the Delmar Loop. This has led many to think that the Metrolink, as it has crossed racial boundaries, has enabled African American teenaged crime. This vicious cycle of young African Americans’ antisocial hostility and acting out, hardly unique to African Americans or even to Americans, and ever increasing white fear and barricade building, have intensified racial tensions, as people find the problem intractable and increasingly impossible to discuss honestly. The current riot in Ferguson is largely a war between police and the young African Americans who think cops exist mostly to prevent African American from harming whites.

hormones, adolescent stupidity and sheer boredom...,

NYTimes |  The Highway Patrol officer named to take over security in Ferguson, Capt. Ronald S. Johnson, also expressed his displeasure with how the information had been released. Captain Johnson, who grew up in the area, had been brought in by Gov. Jay Nixon on Thursday to restore peace after days of confrontations between demonstrators and the police in riot gear and military-style vehicles. The captain said he had not been told that the authorities planned to release the video of the robbery along with the name of the officer. But he sought to calm people down, saying, “In our anger, we have to make sure that we don’t burn down our own house.”

Protests on the streets Friday night started peacefully. Cars clogged streets as horns blared and music played. Hundreds of demonstrators clutched signs and chanted slogans, but many others danced to music. On one street, six people danced atop a delivery truck.

Although the police presence was limited, Captain Johnson walked through the community, taking photographs with children and offering hugs and handshakes. “I’m pleased with how it’s going,” he said early in the night.

But tensions rose around midnight when the police released a small amount of tear gas as they backed away from the crowd. Some protesters threw rocks and other objects, according to media reports. Some demonstrators fired weapons into the air.

Captain Johnson told The Associated Press that the police backed off to try to ease the tension. “We had to evaluate the security of the officers there and also the rioters,” he told The A.P. “We just felt it was better to move back.”

Using people and vehicles, protesters quickly blocked a major thoroughfare here, prompting the police to return and form a barricade of their own. For a time, the protesters and the police faced off in the road. The police urged protesters to go home, and demonstrators, many of them chanting slogans like “We ready for y’all,” approached the officers. Some tossed glass bottles toward the police.

ferguson is mostly black, so why it its government so white?

slate |  Ferguson, Missouri, is a majority-black city governed mostly by whites. The mayor is white. The police chief is white. The police force is 94 percent white. Only one of its six city council members is black. These facts, as much as anything, have shaped the protests over the police shooting of Michael Brown. Ferguson, with a 67 percent black population, is a place where the largest community has little political voice.

Why is that? David Kimball, a political science professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, has studied the dynamics of race and elections in St. Louis proper. He says that the pattern in Ferguson is common throughout the city’s inner-ring suburbs, where blacks have gradually replaced whites in recent decades.

The issue boils down to who votes. Ferguson is roughly two-thirds black, but compared with the city’s whites, the community is younger, poorer (the city has a 22 percent poverty rate overall), and, as the New York Times recently wrote, somewhat transient, prone to moving “from apartment to apartment.” All of these factors make black residents less likely to go to the polls, especially in low-turnout municipal elections. And so whites dominate politically. “The entire mobilization side of it is what accounts for the difference,” Kimball said.

chief struggley blames "outside agitators" for his tactical failures and throws chief delmar under the bus....,

slate | Indeed, the whole interview is a chance for Jackson to reiterate that the cops are doing the right thing. Here's how it ends:

HANNITY: You are certain that an altercation occurred and a shot was fired within the car, meaning Mr. Brown was in the car at some point?

JACKSON: He was, he was -- yes.

HANNITY: In other words, he wasn't handcuffed in the car. He went in the car of his own volition.

JACKSON: Yes.

HANNITY: And do you believe there was a struggle for that gun?

JACKSON: That's what the county police chief said in his opening statement. He's the one that took the -- his officers are the ones that took the statement from both the officer and the witnesses.

HANNITY: What about the unrest that has taken place now in your city? Do you believe a lot of the looting and a lot of what has happened is a result of outside agitators, as some have suggested, or do you think this is just a community angry at what happened?

JACKSON: No, it's a lot of outside agitators that are causing the violence. We've had some -- several very peaceful protests. I mean, they're angry. They want -- they have questions they want answers to. And I understand that. I get that.

Outside agitators! That's a whip-smart line to use on Fox News, which ran so much footage of the New Black Panther Party's bumbling 2008 "protection" of a Philadelphia polling place, and the subsequent legal cases against the NPP, that the Panthers practically qualified for the Screen Actors Guild.

Hannity's warm-milk interview gets at a division in conservative America. I mentioned that the reporter who's been on the "militarized police" beat the longest is Radley Balko. (While at the Cato Institute, in 2006, he published a paper on paramilitary police raids.) And in a popular column for National Review, Charles C. Cooke argued that the conservatives trying to change the subject in Ferguson to black-on-black crime are making themselves and their peers sound callous. "The question of who guards the guardians pertains now as keenly as it ever has," he wrote. "The Right’s answer should be 'we do' — and we’re happy to hang them high if we know that they have transgressed."

chief struggley has permanently sharted okeydoke overseer britches...,

Chief Struggly and the department that couldn't shoot straight is the gift that keeps on giving for solving the escalating crisis of over-militarized police departments acting like incompetent occupation forces in occupied enemy territories.

Chief Jon "boo-boo in his britches" Delmar reading and believing the reports handed up to him through Ferguson Chief Struggly.

Sistah Tiffany Mitchell putting the lie to all of this gas via her eyewitness account to Lawrence O'Donnell.  Fist tap Ken.

not rocket science: the thing that I am first, is a man....,

reuters |  Missouri's governor Jay Nixon hours earlier put Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson in charge of security in the town of Ferguson after almost a week of clashes between protesters and police firing tear gas and stun grenades. Dozens of people have been arrested amid looting, shooting and vandalism.

In a tactical U-turn, Johnson and a handful of black officers without body armor walked among thousands of protesters filling the streets of the mostly black St. Louis suburb, demanding justice for the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

"We just want to be able to come and demonstrate together without the fear of being shot. It's that simple," said 53-year-old protester Cat Daniels, an Iraq veteran. "What you see tonight is people coming together. When that kid was killed the hurt and the pain was real."

Mark Hall, a 21-year-old student, said: "I'm so happy they left us alone so we could prove that all we wanted was the opportunity to exercise our rights peacefully ... a chance to be heard."

how this struggly little bleener ever get to play at "protecting and serving"?

cbsnews |  Washington lawmakers let out a collective gasp on Thursday after seeing startling images of police officers decked out with combat gear and tanks to respond to largely peaceful protesters in Ferguson, Missouri. 

While there may have been some looters and violent individuals among the demonstrators who gathered to protest the killing of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown, the police looked more equipped to enter a war zone than a protest, liberal Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and conservative Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., agreed. Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement, "At a time when we must seek to rebuild trust between law enforcement and the local community, I am deeply concerned that the deployment of military equipment and vehicles sends a conflicting message."

"So much of the militarization of policing is fueled by federal programs, I think it's important for the federal government to take the lead here," ACLU criminal justice expert Kara Dansky told CBS News.

Already, Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., has produced legislation that would put some constraints on the federal program that allows the Pentagon to give police forces equipment for free. Johnson's bill represents just one step Washington could take to address an issue that he's been warning about for months.

"Something potentially sinister is happening across America, and we should stop and take notice before it changes the character of our country forever," Johnson co-wrote in a USA Today op-ed in March. "County, city and small-town police departments across the country are now acquiring free military-grade weapons that could possibly be used against the very citizens and taxpayers that not only fund their departments but who the police are charged with protecting."

The congressman made note of the several towns, and even at least one college (Ohio State University), that have acquired Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected vehicles (or MRAPs) in just the last few months thanks to the Pentagon's 1033 program. The program was approved by Congress in the 1990s and has since given police forces more than $4.3 billion worth of property such as MRAPs, pistols, automatic rifles, and flashbang grenades. 

"Why is there surplus, especially when the Defense Department is threatening to cut jobs anytime Congress talks about defense cuts as part of sequestration or the Budget Control Act?" Johnson asked in his op-ed. "The primary reason is that we're drawing down from two major equipment-laden wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and while some of this equipment is being destroyed in the war zone, at a loss of billions in American taxpayer dollars, much of it is now being returned to the U.S."

On top of receiving equipment directly from the 1033 program, police forces can buy equipment like drones and MRAPs with terrorism grants from the Department of Homeland Security. The department has doled out $34 billion in grants since the program started after 9/11. 

In addition to limiting transfers in the 1033 program, Johnson's bill would call for some accountability in the program. 

"One of the big issues that inspired this legislation is some of the smaller equipment, the assault weapons, were unaccounted for, they were given away to friends," Michael Shank of the Friends Committee on National Legislation told CBS News. "Just the accountability of these free weapons going to police chiefs and police forces was really problematic."

At one point, the office that oversees the 1033 program suspended the transfer of firearms to police forces because there were so many problems, the Associated Press reported last year, such as former military firearms being sold on eBay. In New York last year, lawmakers thought the job of tracking equipment from the 1033 program could be handled by an unpaid intern.

Johnson's bill would prohibit the Defense Department from giving any more equipment to an agency that couldn't certify the whereabouts of prior equipment it received. 

While Congress considers actions to reform the program, the administration could act on its own, Danksy said.

it's all about enhancing overseer safety in the occupied territories...,

firstlook |  Police militarization is increasingly aimed at stifling journalism as well. Like the arrests of Lowery and Reilly last night, Democracy Now‘s Amy Goodman and two of her colleagues were arrested while covering the 2008 St. Paul protests. As Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation (on whose board I sit) explained yesterday, militarization tactics “don’t just affect protesters, but also affect those who cover the protest. It creates an environment where police think they can disregard the law and tell reporters to stop filming, despite their legal right to do so, or fire tear gas directly at them to prevent them from doing their job. And if the rights of journalists are being trampled on, you can almost guarantee it’s even worse for those who don’t have such a platform to protect themselves.”

Ultimately, police militarization is part of a broader and truly dangerous trend: the importation of War on Terror tactics from foreign war zones onto American soil. American surveillance drones went from Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia into American cities, and it’s impossible to imagine that they won’t be followed by weaponized ones. The inhumane and oppressive conditions that prevailed at Guantanamo are matched, or exceeded, by the super-max hellholes and “Communications Management Units” now in the American prison system. And the “collect-it-all” mentality that drives NSA domestic surveillance was pioneered by Gen. Keith Alexander in Baghdad and by other generals in Afghanistan, aimed at enemy war populations. 

Indeed, much of the war-like weaponry now seen in Ferguson comes from American laws, such as the so-called “Program 1033,” specifically designed to re-direct excessive Pentagon property – no longer needed as foreign wars wind down – into American cities. As the Missouri Department of Public Safety proudly explains on its website, “the 1033 Program provides surplus DoD military equipment to state and local civilian law enforcement agencies for use in counter-narcotics and counter-terrorism operations, and to enhance officer safety.”