domestic violence... we ain't seen nothing yet... 7/23/2016 0 Comments   by E.L. Christianson Jr. And, that's the truth, we ain't seen nothing yet.   The stage is set.  The rules are in place for the action to begin.  So far, what we have had is a warm-up. We see it all around the world and we see it all through history.  There is no reason to believe, as some want to, that it will be different in our case.  Oppression and injustice can only be piled up so high and then the pile starts to slide sideways and those on the bottom get a glimmer of light shining down to where they are... hope stirs and suddenly, they decide that they aren't going to take it anymore. The build-up in this country has had a few centuries of accumulation.  Native peoples felt it first.  Then Africans were imported and shared in the misery.  We have evolved in many ways and the domestic landscape appears peaceful and even progressive from a certain perspective.  We no longer slaughter the Native populations on a large scale.  We no longer own Africans as slaves.  But the oppression and injustice continues under a new set of clothes, a disguise.  The rules have changed but those to be held in check are still the same groups.  Today, the Native populations are held on 'reservations' in the poorest areas of what was once 'their' country.  The Africans are held in urban reservations, 'ghettoes', the poorest areas of the cities.  Both groups are under the absolute control of the police who have the authority to brutalize them and to kill them with the slightest of excuse and without the threat of repercussions. The prison system, used primarily as a control device for the 'chosen' is the largest such system in the world.  The laws are created to fill the prisons with the targeted populations.  Drug laws, for only one example, distinguish between drugs used by one group (targeted populations) or use those drugs used by the dominate group (whites of European backgrounds).   And we can see the results by looking at who is in prison and for how long and for what crime... and we can see the truth. Here are 2 examples of why it will get worse... in the first example a cop goes after a suspected drunk driver, opens fire through the rear window and repeatedly struck the driver in the back, killing him.  Prosecutors charged the cop with felony manslaughter.  The cop enters a plea to a lesser charge is left with no criminal record.  Now, he serves as the police chief in a small community 20 miles from the scene of the murder. Here is a second example: According to prosecutors, the deputy gunned down the unarmed suspect in the back.  “There was no threat because there was no one around who could get hurt. There was a trail of shell casings that showed the deputy chased him and shot at him as he ran away,” said J.R. Joyner, the lead prosecutor in the case. “One shot was point-blank — an execution shot.” Joyner said the forensics evidence was “the strongest of any case in my career.”  Prosecutors successfully indicted the deputy on a murder charge, citing the law that bars an officer from shooting a fleeing suspect in the back. But at trial, jurors would acquit the deputy.  The deputy would keep his job at the sheriff’s department and be put in charge of training deputies in firearms and use of force. The point of these two examples is that when confronted over committing a murder, the police are promoted rather than punished.  For a murderer to graduate to police chief is an affront to justice.  For a murderer to be placed in charge of training in firearms and the use of force boggles the mind.  The population sees these things as they happen continuously and all around.  There will be 'blow-back' as we like to call it. The battle lines are being draw and people are choosing sides.. the enemy is in uniform.  It is not only 'mad-men' (men who are mad) with automatic weapons who will be out there shooting cops.   The assault will come from many angles as those who have been brutalized and oppressed with massive injustice start to 'correct' their situation. The New York Daily News reports...The encounter followed a series of incidents shortly after the Dallas police ambush involving police officers who felt restaurant customers and staff treated them less than respectfully. A Northern Virginia police officer was denied service at a Noodles & Co. in the latest episode of anti-cop animosity at restaurants across the country. Wash. restaurant owner blames language barrier after banning cops ​ A Columbus, Ohio officer was hospitalized last week after biting into a sandwich laced with glass at a cafe, though investigators don’t believe the glass was placed there on purpose. Earlier this month, staff at a North Carolina Zaxby’s fried chicken heckled two Cleveland County sheriff’s deputies and covered their food with extra spicy hot sauce. A man at a diner outside Pittsburgh refused to sit next to a group of four police officers eating at the restaurant. One of the officers later paid for the man’s dinner because the officer said he wanted to show the man that "we're not here to hurt you." by E.L. Christianson Jr. We are a nation at war.  War abroad and war at home.  We are pushing  hard to expand our overseas wars... massing troops and military equipment on the borders of Russia, buzzing Chinese development with our military jets... empire building all over the world against the wishes of multiple victims.  At home we are creating the perfect 'security state' with the militarization of the domestic police... always a war; war on crime, cultural war, war on cancer, war on drugs, war on poverty, war on terror and the supposed war on cops. American foreign policy and domestic policy views everything as war. When fighting a war, tactics and strategy are limited. There can be no debate or discussion because fighting a war dictates striving for victory.  There is no need to ask questions because all of the answers are obvious.  War requires the use of the military overseas or militarized police and jails at home with torture used in all venues as means of coercion.  Violence becomes the standard and victory the only goal. War fails when used to address complicated issues at home (hasn't worked very well overseas either). Culture, ideas, crime, poverty, drugs, religious beliefs can't be defeated by a war (if defeat is really the purpose). But, since war is what we live and die by, we should get adjusted to the reality of our future domestic situation.  It will be war and more war.  This is guaranteed because we have made no provisions for anything else. On one side will be the cops.  They have been engineering the idea of a war on cops for a long time and present day circumstances will make that more and more a reality.  It is not the case now, but it soon will be.  That a few police officers are targeted and killed is not something that should surprise anyone who has been paying attention.  That someone would regard a 'cop killer' as a hero should not come as a surprise either.  To be arrested for making that type of declaration will not solve the problem but will increase the tensions and will result in more deaths of police officers.  That we all lose all rights as civilians and as citizens to the security state is a surprise even as we have been moving in this direction for a long time.  To take away basic rights of citizens under the pretext of protecting police officers will not make anyone safer. We should recognize that we have been training lots of people in the use of dangerous weapons for a very long time.  Some of those we have trained drift into the ranks of police officers.  Some of those we have trained, upon returning home to the frustration of social problems we refuse to address realistically, will drift into the ranks of those who will be shooting at the police. Our leaders do not have the courage to admit that our policies have been wrong.  To admit to failure is not something a politician will do.  There are no reasons to believe that any of this is going to change in the near future... domestic violence is a solid part of our American culture, always has been.  With increased militarization gripping both sides of the conflict the violence will escalate dramatically.  As was said, 'you ain't seen nothing yet'... and that's the truth !!! There are three articles below that express different aspects of our problems with war.  Reading these articles will assist in understanding the carnage that is upcoming in 'the homeland'.    Brief History of the "War on Cops": The False Allegation That Enables Police Violence ​By Dan Berger, Truthout | Op-Ed ​ Numerous sources confirm that there is no such war. Last year was one of the safest on record for police officers, and even with the targeted killings in Dallas and Baton Rouge, being a police officer does not rate as one of the 10 most dangerous jobs in the country. It is far less dangerous than logging, fishing, or roofing. Yet, conservative commentators routinely sound the alarm against a "war on cops." This claim surfaces not only in those rare instances when an officer is killed but also anytime people challenge police violence or authority. People are not at war with police. But police are at war with people. For more than 50 years, the "war on cops" story has provided both public support and material resources for the war that metropolitan police departments have waged on mostly poor Black, Brown and Indigenous communities. The "war on cops" may be an old story, but it is a useful one. In fact, the "war on cops" narrative helps explain how the United States ended up with a police force that functions like a series of military battalions. The idea behind the "war on cops" treats police like soldiers: going into battle every day, serving as symbols of their country with the overriding objective of winning the war (on crime, drugs, or terrorism) at all costs. The idea of a "war on cops" owes to the savvy responses police officials offered to the insurgencies of the 1960s. Police seized upon the political upheaval of that time to advocate for greater authority and resources.  Powerful groups like the police enlist people to support them or risk annihilation. Around the country, police officers used these tumultuous events to argue for more: more money, more weapons, more officers and more authority. During the urban unrest of the mid-1960s, which were often sparked by incidents of police violence against Black or Latino men, police routinely claimed to be at war in American cities. After the Watts neighborhood erupted in 1965, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) created the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) Team, an elite and highly militarized police unit. Its first assignment came in an assault on the Los Angeles Black Panther office four years later. As police departments around the country developed their own SWAT teams, they became routine components of the war on drugs in the 1980s and 1990s. Often in these urban conflicts, police said snipers fired upon them. Unable to determine the source of some gunfire during the 1967 uprising in Detroit, police and National Guard claimed to be under attack by snipers. Such reports led a handful of police officers, state troopers, and National Guardsmen to seize the Algiers Motel. They found no snipers but killed three Black men and beat nine other people -- seven Black men, two white women -- in the process. (Similar unsubstantiated reports of sniper fire during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 led police to scale back on rescue efforts in favor of greater policing.) Some city police departments seized upon the deepening economic crises of the 1970s to develop undercover paramilitary forces. As historian Elizabeth Hinton describes in her new book, From the War on Poverty to War on Crime, the Detroit and Los Angeles police departments created secretive police units that waged brutal undercover operations against low-income Black communities. Designed as elite shock troops in the war on crime, the LAPD's Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) and Detroit's Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets (STRESS) functioned as urban mercenaries. "In just two years, STRESS made more than 6,000 arrests and killed eighteen civilians and suspects," Hinton writes. "Of those killed, all but one were Black." Police unions have been the central institution promoting the idea of a war on police. The first to defend cops who kill civilians, police unions have for decades declared that they are under attack. Cynical and racist as such declarations may be, they have worked. Take a look at New York City, the country's largest police department with a storied history of abuse. Describing police beating up children in 1964, author James Baldwin wrote that "Harlem is policed like an occupied territory." The Patrolmen's Benevolent Association (PBA), the labor union representing members of the New York City Police Department (NYPD), has defended police violence and argued for greater weaponry to carry it out. The PBA's influence increased throughout the 1970s as it advocated for wartime policing. After four officers were killed in two days in May 1971, the PBA called for officers to carry shotguns as well as pistols. While the claim was derided for being shrill, the proliferation of SWAT-style policing meant that new hardware flowed to major police departments at an unprecedented scale. Two years later, the PBA told The New York Times that police "should have sufficient retaliatory means at our disposal" against anyone who would attack the police. The PBA claimed to be in a guerrilla war with the Black Liberation Army (BLA), a military splinter group of the Black Panther Party. But in fact, police tactics more resembled the American military than a guerrilla force: Police sought to overwhelm their opponents with superior hardware and sheer force. The NYPD and FBI dedicated 150 officers to kill suspected BLA member Twymon Meyers on a New York City street in 1973 and then stationed snipers on rooftops at his funeral in Harlem. Shotguns and legal immunity became more common among the NYPD, as in the rest of the nation. In 1984, an officer used a shotgun to kill 66-year-old Eleanor Bumpurs during an eviction. As is by now expected news, the officer who killed Bumpers -- like the officers who killed Michael Stewart, Anthony Baez, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Eric Garner and so many other New Yorkers -- was either acquitted or never indicted. As part of its war, the PBA has provided legal, financial or public support for officers who have shot, choked or otherwise killed people in the line of duty. At the same time, the PBA claims that an ongoing "war on cops" necessitates denying parole to anyone who was convicted of violence against police officers, regardless of their conduct in prison or risk to society. A button on the PBA's website enables visitors to send letters to the New York Parole Board opposing release of parole-eligible people who were convicted of attacking police officers. According to the Release Aging People in Prison campaign, the PBA's hardline stance turns the parole board into a "re-sentencing body" to give people a life sentence not imposed by a judge or jury. This goes against the logic of parole, which is supposed to judge whether someone poses a risk of harm in the present rather than on the basis of the offense for which a person was originally convicted. This is the world the "war on cops" has made; one in which police kill unarmed people regularly yet claim to be under attack themselves. Even as some high-profile commentators have proclaimed that Black Lives Matter, they still act as if police lives matter more. Pundits who lament the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile protest the "horrific murders" and "cold-blooded killings" of police in Dallas and Baton Rouge. Were Sterling and Castile's deaths not horrific? Why is there no attention to the blood temperature of the officers who killed a 37-year-old man for selling CDs on a sidewalk or who pulled over a 32-year-old man for a broken taillight and a "wide-set nose" and ended up shooting him to death in front of his girlfriend and her four-year-old child? "I do not believe in the war between races," Lorna dee Cervantes declared in her classic 1981 poem. "But in this country/ there is war." The "war on cops" functions similarly: its truthfulness may be easily dispelled but its power is much harder to dislodge. The task, embraced with such clarity in the recent #FreedomNow protests, is to end the war by police. There is no war on cops. But in this country, there is war. After Those Wars the U.S. Has Been Involved in, Violence Has Come Home to Roost in America Welcome to the “home front,” folks. By Tom Engelhardt /  TomDispatch Strangely, amid the spike in racial tensions after the killing of two black men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota, and of five white police officers by a black sharpshooter in Dallas, [AlterNet Ed. Note: and since then the tragic killings of three police officers in Baton Rouge,] one American reality has gone unmentioned. The U.S. has been fighting wars—declared, half-declared, and undeclared—for almost 15 years and, distant as they are, they’ve been coming home in all sorts of barely noted ways. In the years in which the U.S. has up-armored globally, the country has also seen an arms race developing on the domestic front. As vets have returned from their Iraq and Afghan tours of duty, striking numbers of them have gone into police work at a time when American weaponry, vehicles, and military equipment—including, for instance, MRAPs (mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles)—have poured off America’s distant battlefields and, via the Pentagon, into police departments nationwide. And while the police were militarizing, gun companies have been marketing battlefield-style assault rifles to Americans by the millions, at the very moment when it has become ever more possible for citizens to carry weapons of every sort in a concealed or open fashion in public. The result in Dallas: Micah Johnson, a disturbed Army Reserves veteran, who spent a tour of duty in Afghanistan and practiced military tactics in his backyard, armed with an SKS semi-automatic assault rifle, wearing full body armor, and angry over police killings of black civilians, took out those five white officers. One of them was a Navy vet who had served three tours of duty in Iraq and another a former Marine who had trained local police for DynCorp, a private contractor, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, civilian protesters, also armed with assault rifles (quite legal in the streets of Dallas), scattered as the first shots rang out and were, in some cases, taken in by the police as suspects. And at least two unarmed protesters were wounded by Johnson. (Think of that, in his terms, as “collateral damage.”) In the end, he would be killed by a Remotec Andros F5 robot, built by weapons-maker Northrop Grumman, carrying a pound of C4 plastic explosive, and typical of robots that police departments now possess. In other words, this incident was capped by the first use of deadly force by a drone in the United States. Consider that a war-comes-home upping of the ante. Already, reports the Defense One website, makers of military-grade robots—a burgeoning field for the Pentagon—are imagining other ways to employ such armed bots not only on our distant battlefields but at home in a future in which they will be “useful, cheap, and ubiquitous,” and capable of Tasing as well as killing. Of course, among the many things that have also come home from the country’s wars, Predator and Reaper drones are now flying over “the homeland” on missions for the Pentagon, not to mention the FBI, the Border Patrol, and other domestic agencies. So the future stage is set. Once you’ve used any kind of drone in the U.S. to kill by remote control, it’s only logical—given some future extreme situation—to extend that use to the skies and so consider firing a missile at some U.S. target, as the CIA and the Air Force have been doing regularly for years in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. And of course, in our domestic arms race, with small drones commercially available to anyone and the first of them armed (no matter the rudimentary nature of that armament), it’s not hard to imagine a future Micah Johnson, white or black, using one of them sooner or later. After all, Johnson was already talking about planting “IEDs” (the term for insurgent roadside bombs in our war zones) and a flying IED is a relatively modest step from there. ​ So, welcome to the “home front,” folks. And speaking of drones, it’s worth giving a little thought to what might, in fact, still come home, to the sort of example that two administrations have set by turning the president into an assassin-in-chief and regularly creating law for themselves when it comes to the targeting of distant peoples. In that light, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon considers America’s Trojan Horse technology of death and just what it may someday smuggle into “the homeland.” Reasons Why Police in America Keep Killing Civilians and Getting Away With It The system protects cops at the expense of civilians. ​By Steven Rosenfeld /  AlterNet The question of why police can kill civilians and get away with it isn’t new and isn’t going away. ... the officers involved claimed they felt threatened. In all these cases, a complex and volatile mix of factors involving race, police fear, state-sanctioned power and weaponry, questionable training and unaccountable systems interacted. In 2014, there were 444 “justifiable” homicides by law enforcement, according to FBI statistics. In 2013, there were 461 justifiable homicides, the FBI said. Academic criminologists say that number is closer to 1,000 annually, because not all local department report to the FBI. Between 2005 and 2015, 47 officers have been charged with murder or manslaughter, and 13 have been convicted of murder or manslaughter from fatal on-duty shootings. ​ There are many factors surrounding police killings and what’s almost always exoneration under America’s criminal justice system. Some are well-known and others less so, but all point to a police culture and criminal justice system that enables cops to target perceived threats, encourages the use of force and is reluctant to second-guess law enforcement when tragedy ensues. Here are eight features of that system, compiled from testimonials by defense lawyers, reporters and academics. 1. Too many police departments and uneven training. There are 18,000 police departments across America, from local sheriffs and transit cops to state police and federal officers. Most western nations nationalize their policing, which means more uniform training and dealing with broader constituencies so that, one public defender said, it’s less likely local biases and prejudices can take hold. 2. Cops are overmilitarized and trained to be fearful. Police are more heavily armed today than they were 40 years ago. Departments are dumping grounds for surplus military gear from the Defense Department and also buy it from contractors. 3. Cops have too much power, compared to judges. Police are allowed to detain civilians based on their suspicions, which can launch a downward spiral. That’s not the same standard as a judge uses to issue search warrants, where probable cause must be shown. 4. Cops are disciplined and policed by their allies. 5. The law puts cops' rights above those of civilians. 6. Juries typically give cops the benefit of the doubt. Part of that is police are trained to protect each other, one factor in what’s called the blue code of silence. 7. Mainstream media and politicians tend to side with police. 8. Police officers almost never pay court costs or fines.  It’s usually police unions that end up covering the court costs, not the officers facing charges, and it is similiarly municipal governments that pay the settlements, academic researchers have found. Those factors work against changing police culture, because police and governmental systems end up insulating the involved officers from financial consequences. ​ Another Rigged System It is not a new conclusion to say that policing in America and the criminal justice system are structured to protect cops who use deadly force. Police say they have to be armed because there are so many guns in America. They say the vast majority of police never use their weapons on civilians. But in Europe, in contrast, police don't kill hundreds of civilians year after year, with most getting away with it. Cops are not trained to fear the public and use their firearms when they feel threatened. They're not protected by a police culture and a system of legal precedents that exonerates officers who routinely claim their lives are in danger. ​ Police killings in America continue. Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America's retirement crisis, democracy and voting rights, and campaigns and elections. He is the author of "Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet Books, 2008).