Just When I Thought I Could Change the Subject

Here They Come Again With This Mess!!

I'm not saying that I thought police were not still 'killing/beating up/lying about their actions with' black people; I'm not that naive! I did think I was through writing about it though. It was getting so regular, and the stories were all the same, especially the ending when there is no punishment (or even reprimand) for the officers involved. This case though.... what they did to this young man was so blatant and vicious, and what happened to them was so surprising, that I just had to write this down! 

This should also open the eyes of some of the more intelligent of the 'Trumpettes' ; the 'good ole boy' types who believe that whatever the police say is right, that they are 'only doing their jobs', and that black men 'always fight the officer, resist being arrested, run from the police', and if they didn't the police wouldn't have to use force to 'subdue' them. These videos, and the outcome of this case, should show some of you at least that there are times when the 'victim' (because that's what this young man was, a victim of police brutality) is not lying. Two separate people, from two different directions (cars) saw injustice happening and did what they could to show the world.  Despite what the victim told the police, if it had not been for those videos surfacing which backed up his version, the world would have seen him as just another 'black criminal trying to lie on the white man.' 

Not this time.

Two police officers fired after video shows handcuffed man being kicked in the head

By Peter Holley and Lindsey Bever April 14


Two Georgia police officers have been fired after videos surfaced on social media showing them punching and then kicking a man in the head, authorities said.

Gwinnett County police said late Thursday that Sgt. Michael Bongiovanni was fired after authorities discovered a video showing Bongiovanni punching the man in the face as the man stepped from a vehicle with his hands up. Earlier, authorities had fired Officer Robert McDonald, who was captured in a different video kicking the man in the head as he lay handcuffed on the ground.

                    
“The revelations uncovered in this entire investigation are shocking,” police said in a statement after Bongiovanni’s termination. “ … We acknowledge that the actions of these two officers have implications that will be felt for some time. However, we also believe that our decisive action in terminating both officers speaks volumes about what is expected of each officer that wears a Gwinnett County Police badge.”

Former Gwinnett County police sergeant Michael Bongiovanni, left, and former police officer Robert McDonald. 

(Courtesy of Gwinnett County Police Department)

The incident, which quickly went viral on social media, occurred about 4 p.m. Wednesday. One video, which was shot from across the street, shows a man getting out of a vehicle with his hands raised before the arresting officer punches him in the face.

The other video, shot from a different angle, begins as that officer is struggling with the man as he gets out of the vehicle and raises his hands. Shortly after the man is subdued by the officer and handcuffed, a second officer arrives on the scene and kicks the man in the head.

A struggle ensues before the officers search the man’s pockets. Both officers are white; the man, who is black, was identified as 21-year-old Demetrius Bryan Hollins of Lawrenceville, Ga., according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

 The nonprofit community group Black Lives Matter of Greater Atlanta condemned the officers Thursday evening in a Facebook post.

                   

Hollins told NBC News that he was trying to get to the camera app on his own cellphone Wednesday to record the encounter. He said one officer started “shoving me in my car and telling me that I was never going to have a video, that I was never going to make the phone call to my mom. When I had my hands up, that’s when he punched me in the face.”

Hollins told the news station that when he was handcuffed and lying on the ground, “another cop came out of nowhere and stomped me in the face.”

He was charged with multiple traffic citations, obstruction of a police officer and possession of less than an ounce of marijuana.

Hollins’s {sic} attorney, Justin Miller, told NBC News that had the moment not been captured on video, it may have been overlooked.

“The fact that these guys felt so brazen as to … assault him in public in broad daylight in front of hundreds of onlookers and hundreds of cars is indicative of what they think is okay,” Miller told the news station. Without the videos, he added, “they would have painted him as the bad guy, arrested him, brushed it under the rug and probably did it to them again the next time they saw him.”

Gwinnett County Police Chief Butch Ayers said at a news conference Thursday that McDonald, a three-year veteran on the force, was responding to assist Bongiovanni during a traffic stop when he “got tunnel vision.”

Police said Hollins was pulled over for having a broken taillight and then resisted Bongiovanni. But by the time McDonald arrived, Hollis was on the ground and no longer resisting, Ayers said, noting that no use of force was necessary.

“This incident — this type of force and this action — was uncalled for,” the police chief said Thursday. “It shouldn’t have happened. There is no excuse for it. We have taken appropriate and swift action to deal with this. This officer and his actions do not represent the men and women of this police department who put their lives on the line every single day to protect this county.”


 The chief said that the officer apologized for his actions but that the footage still made him angry. “I was upset and it felt like I had been gut-punched,” Ayers said.

During an internal investigation, authorities discovered a second video Thursday, filmed by a witness and posted online, that was “contrary to what was reported by Michael Bongiovanni,” police said in the statement. That video showed Bongiovanni strike the man in the face before the other officer had arrived, police said.

Black Lives Matter of Greater Atlanta also referred to the second video on its Facebook page. (This video is from ABC News.)

Bongiovanni was hired in 1998 and graduated from the police academy in 1999, according to the police department.

The police chief said during the news conference that a plan is in place to outfit uniformed officers with body cameras by the end of the year.

Asked what message the incident sends, Ayers told reporters: “We have standards, we have policies, and we’re going to hold ourselves to those standards and to those policies. And if you violate those, there will be a swift investigation. And if those complaints are found to be sustained, action will be taken.”

This story has been updated.

Is A Time Coming When Racism Won't Mean Black vs White?

Have you ever noticed the bumper sticker that HRC puts out, the blue square with yellow bars running through it? It looks like this:

HRC Equality Sticker

 A couple of years ago I started seeing this:

'Thin Blue Line' Sticker

It's called "the thin blue line", and supposedly it means support for the police department from those related to it or friends of it. Actually, based on what I've seen and heard (and this is totally my opinion!) it is also being used as a means of identifying themselves to each other, in order to curry a favor, or to receive 'professional courtesy' ...

They took a symbol that for YEARS has meant Equal Rights for Everyone, and turned it into a symbol for their systematic disregard for the law, (getting other officers to turn a blind eye when they're speeding, driving drunk, or worse) as well as a symbol of the "blue wall" that investigators run into when they try to get the truth about one officer from another. Cops don't tell on other cops, regardless of the cop's crime...

So, what does this bumper sticker have to do with the color of racism you may ask? Only this:  the cheerful colors of the HRC emblem have been turned into something dark and menacing, just as the meaning of the bright blue of a policeman's uniform has undergone a transition from "the policeman is your friend' to "the cop will shoot you dead".

 In recent times we've begun to see that racism has undergone a similar change. Instead of the centuries-old picture of black against white, we're now seeing a pattern of officers against citizens, and it's mainly against black citizens. In my opinion it's been going on for quite a while, it's just that we are only now seeing how brutal and widespread it really is, thanks to cell phone cameras and social media. There have always been cases of young black men dying suspiciously in police custody, or even before they were in custody, but people were afraid to speak out before. Now they can back up what they say with video proof, and they can even do it anonymously, so now we hear about all the cases that had previously been hidden behind that blue wall. 

We're heading for a time when racial prejudice will be a lot lower on the list of society's issues; IMO it will never be eradicated completely, because there will always be one group that hates another. If something isn't done soon though, IMO homelessness, AIDS, cancer and a lot of other 'hot button topics' of today will be eclipsed by the terror squad the police department is becoming. They will have more power than the old Mafia families, and will be just as ruthless (if not more, since they are supposed to be the law!). 

The world, it is a-changin....

Is That REALLY What They Discovered, Or Is This An Attempt To Placate the Public?

 From The Root:

DOJ Findings Accuse Ferguson Police of Pattern of Racial Bias

Finally the Department of Justice has completed its investigation, and are going to release their findings; do they honestly see what so many of us have known for years? Or is this an attempt to smooth things over with the angry Ferguson residents after the Grand Jury came back with the decision not to indict Darren Wilson?

During an extensive review that included hundreds of interviews and more than 35,000 pages of police records, Justice officials find a huge discrepancy in treatment toward Ferguson, Mo.’s black population.   

Police advance through a cloud of tear gas toward demonstrators protesting the killing of teenager Michael Brown Aug. 17, 2014, in Ferguson, Mo.  Scott Olson/Getty Images

The Department of Justice is preparing to release findings this week alleging that the Ferguson, Mo., Police Department practiced routine racial bias and violated the constitutional rights of residents, the Washington Post reports.

According to the report, department officials discovered that although 67 percent of Ferguson’s population is black, black people made up 93 percent of all arrests 2012-2014.

Currently, Justice officials are trying to reach an agreement with the Police Department to prompt a change in practices, which the DOJ says includes use of excessive force and unjustified arrests and traffic stops. If no settlement can be reached, the Justice Department could file a lawsuit against the department.

The Post notes that the findings indicate that black residents made up about 85 percent of all individuals stopped by police officers in Ferguson and 90 percent of all citations issued.

Police were also more prone to use excessive force against black citizens, who were involved in 88 percent of all cases in which force was used. All 14 canine-bite incidents for which race was available involved a black person, the Post notes.

Full evidence is set to be released this week as early as Wednesday, according to the Post. Part of the evidence showing racial bias included an email written by Ferguson police and municipal court officials, one of which, dated November 2008, claimed that President Barack Obama would not be president for long, since “what black man holds a steady job for four years.”

According to the Post, the review concludes that racial bias and prioritizing revenue above public safety have heavily affected Ferguson’s police and court practices, putting them in violation of the Constitution and federal law. 

Read more at the Washington Post.

Perhaps This is Why They Don't Want Cameras?

   

A lot of people (myself included) wonder why on earth the police departments of this country would NOT want to use lapel cams or other means of filming each encounter they have with an alleged criminal. It seems like it would put a halt to all of this debate about whether or not people, especially black males, are being 'profiled' or 'targeted', and we would no longer have these major protests and demonstrations going on all over the country. Perhaps this is one reason:

Caught on Camera: Cop's Accidental Shooting
NBC News Channel Albuquerque police officer's lapel camera captures an accidental firearm discharge and its aftermath. KOB's Caleb James reports. Published December 18th 2014, 12:20 pm

     A New Mexico police officer was wearing a lapel camera which was filming as the officer entered a vacant apartment on an upper floor of the building. As he entered he appears to stumble, and as he explains "I fell down, and I guess my trigger finger went down at the same time."  (NBC News Channel Video, 0:26 seconds in)

     Back to my statement that perhaps this is one reason why police departments are loathe to adopt personal cameras on their uniforms, let's indulge in a moment of supposition. Two officers, partners, go into an empty apartment ostensibly looking for someone they are chasing. One officer stumbles, falls, gun goes off, shooting and killing someone in the apartment downstairs who, coincidentally(?) happens to be a drug dealer in the neighborhood that was suspected of killing a police officer, but has not been charged because of the usual stuff, witnesses against him who either recant or disappear, evidence in police custody which is somehow damaged or stolen, etc. (If you've watched any of the crime shows on television in the last 10 years you know exactly what I'm talking about! lol) Now, although to some that would seem a wild and completely farfetched, out of the realm of possibility theory, actually it isn't; after all, I came up with it, right? So these two cops (or perhaps only one of them) go into the vacant apartment; through some means (perhaps the second one is outside watching the windows) and he lets the first one know where the occupant is in the apartment. The officer inside then shoots down through the floor into the apartment below, hopefully hitting the occupant. Even if he doesn't kill him though, it could be made to  seem a warning by the police to the dealer. It could be explained away as the accidental discharge of a firearm, case closed. With a lapel cam however, it would be a little more difficult to successfully pull it off, since the lapel cam could not only show the movements of the officer, it could tell what was said at the time. In this video you've got him talking on his radio to other officers, asking about the outcome of the shot; I'm sure the conversation would have gone quite differently if the situation was as I've theorized! This is perhaps  one of the things that police departments are considering when they debate the issue of lapel cams.

     Now I'm not saying that all police departments are harboring 'bad' cops in their midst who might be subject to go off in a fit of rage and beat someone to death while wearing the cam; what I am saying is that cops stick together. They stick up for one another, they 'cover each other's backs', they protect their 'brothers'. If there is any possibility of an officer losing his temper and perhaps bringing a subject 'down' a little too forcefully, they do not want to take any chances that an incident will be recorded, not by one of their own. So we get all these excuses and justifications and rationales for why police departments should not be required to use them, and we get more and more people brutally punched, kicked, beaten, and killed, and more and more officers being acquitted by grand juries. It just seems to me that it would be an easy way for officers to prove their own innocence and their victim's guilt, IF that is the case.  

As always, this post is strictly the opinion of the author, and does not in any way represent Blogger.