Scott Olsen get's hit on the head and hospitalised last month, Kayvan Sabeghi was put into hospital having been beaten up by police when h was trying to go home from an Occupy protest.
Now we see this footage which is said to have taken place n 3 November. Regardless of what the cameraman may have said before the film tarted it is clear that he posed no threat whatsoever at the time he was shot, probably with a bean bag round.
I would not tar all police with the same feather but it looks as if Oakland PD has far more than its fair share of thugs and morons. I wonder if the conditions of entry for the force include dragging knuckles and singing the Horst Wessel Lied
4 comments:
I actually watched this guy's live stream for a while that evening, and he was laying it on the cops big-time -- but verbally only. Which, as you point out, is no reason to shoot him, under both U.S. law and Oakland PD policy there has to be some threat in order to justify shooting him even with a beanbag round.
- Badtux the Watchful Penguin
Troglodytes.
Even if he was shouting at the cops at the top of his voice then there was no reason to shoot Scott Campbell.
I just wonder what sort of cops they employ in Oakland, Badtux.
Susan, Troglodytes seems to describe them!
From watching the live stream earlier, there actually wasn't any Oakland PD in that crowd of cops, it was all Alameda County Sheriffs or various (mostly-white) surrounding police departments, like he pointed and laughed at the Concord Police Department and said something along the lines of "so they send an all-white police department to deal with a racially diverse protest? Where's your black cops? Your Hispanic cops? Talk about sad!"
There was a number of interesting things that happened that night. Unlike most I'm not among those who condemn them for breaking into the foreclosed (bank-owned) Traveller's Aid building, they are protesting the banks, after all, and that's certainly a better target for their ire (all the empty foreclosed buildings in Oakland) than the mayor of Oakland, who from what I can tell is a bit of a twit whose control of her police department is iffy at best. But the way it was handled was completely wrong, it needed to be handled with a concerted PR campaign starting beforehand about the tragedy of the bankers foreclosing on all these buildings then keeping them off the market to drive up property values while people were sleeping on the streets for lack of housing, and then without the black bloc kiddies setting up the barricades and pissing off the neighbors. Just goes to show the primary weakness of the Occupy movement: an inability to create a narrative due to lack of a coherent structure capable of creating such a narrative and enforcing message discipline to push the narrative.
In any event, what that cop did was illegal and against every police department's use of force policy, which allows use of force only as required to protect public safety. And another cop is going to get away with breaking the law. So it goes. Our police forces here in the United States are no longer law enforcement agencies, they're just high-tech gangs, just the Bloods and Crips with fancier gang colors.
-- Badtux the Law-abiding Penguin
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