In this post we cite two reports that highlight the problem of police impunity that shows up in the everyday lives of American citizens.
Our first amendment rights to speech, protest, and assembly and our 4th amendment right to be free from unwarranted search and seizure of our person and property are under attack.
Green Liberty highlights key state crimes as a critique of the power structure and as a call to organize a liberation coalition. But we would be remiss to not make note of the daily state crimes handed down by police officers, agents of the state, who the author Joanna Schwartz, a professor of Law at UCLA exposes in her new book: Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable.
Here is opening excerpt: “the terror of police power is a recurring fact of American life, particularly in this country’s poorest communities and in communities of color. The power of officers comes not only from the strength of arms, but also from a legal system that is swift to protect its enforcers, yet slow to hold them to account. Where did this virtual immunity from prosecution come from? Has it always been this way? And if not, how has police power and impunity changed through the ages? Historian Joanna Schwartz joins The Chris Hedges report to discuss her new book, Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable.”
Read the full report at Chris Hedges news feed: https://therealnews.com/american-police-are-basically-untouchable-how-did-it-get-this-bad
In another report, see the link to the MSNBC news feed that reviews the tactic by city and state officials to criminalize dissent of protesters resisting construction of a “Cop City” project; criminalizing dissent is a violation of first amendment constitutional right to seek a redress of grievance though formal notice to the authorities and by way of assembly and protest. The plan to construct “cop cities” in major urban areas belies a plan in place to use police force to silence critics and possibly plan for a form of class warfare.
Here is an excerpt from MSNBC : “Arresting bail fund organizers is just the latest strategy that city and state officials have used to criminalize dissent and to attack those of us working to stop Cop City. In January 2023, Georgia state troopers who were part of a larger joint police task force killed Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, one of many activists who had been living in the forest to defend it from devastation. Georgia state troopers opened fire on Terán, who went by Tortuguita, while Terán was in a tent, leaving 57 bullet wounds in the activist’s body despite an autopsy that suggests Tortuguita was killed with both hands raised in the air while sitting cross-legged.”
Read full news here: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/stop-cop-city-bail-fund-arrests-rcna87357
Thanks for sending this, Chuck. I so enjoyed speaking with you last week and look forward to looking over your greenlibertycaucus.org site as soon as I can. I have been trying to write in a way that influences people to wake up lately and it is hard to live up to the standards we need to really bring down the invisible tyrants we know are behind the political monopoly’s repression of our ability reach the public’s with the knowledge about vaccine’s adverse effects and the truth about police brutality that is never brought account. They when the gap between the people and the state is this wide, it is a sure sign we are living in a Fascist state.