VIDEO: PROFILING IS STILL ALIVE AND ACTIVELY USED BY POLICE AS WELL AS ICE, HSI AND CBP IN AMERICA

 

( VIDEOS ) WONDER WHY PEOPLE DON'T TRUST THE POLICE????

 THESE videos show why so many people do not trust the police and are thankful when someone is filming police actions because they know that is protecting them from harm. IT must also be noted the vast majority of police officers are nothing like the police documented in these videos, it is unfortunate too many police and police departments defend police like these because of the "blue line".  Years after my own interactions with rogue cops I still have a hard time trusting a police officer is going to do the right thing.....

Exclusive Video: Inside Police Lines at the Occupy Wall Street Eviction 15NOV11

EYEWITNESS report and video from Mother Jones reporter Josh Harkinson of the raid and eviction of the Occupy Wall Street protesters at Zuccotti Park in NYC. What a sad comment on this nation's political leaders that the raids and evictions of the Occupy Wall Street protesters had to take place in the dead of night and involved the banning and even the arrest of reporters to hide the governments actions. This would be expected in a country not claiming to be a democracy, but any more we shouldn't be surprised it is happening here too......the protesters showed what democracy looks like, the government and the police showed what fascism looks like....

—By Josh Harkinson

Read Josh's liveblog from the raid of Zuccotti and check out all the rest of our #OWS coverage.

By about 4 a.m. today, New York City police had pushed the media out of Zuccotti Park and were preparing to evict the few dozen protesters who remained. Yet there I was, standing in the park amid a gaggle of high-ranking officers, quietly watching the whole thing unfold.
"You gonna occupy awhile?" one officer cracked to another.
"Yeah," the other guy smiled.
I stood next to them against a short granite wall, trying to avoid notice.
Like the other reporters who'd swarmed to Lower Manhattan to cover the eviction, I'd quickly discovered that the media was not allowed here. The police had created a one-block buffer zone around the park—in some areas two or three blocks—and were refusing to admit even the most credentialed members of the press. A New York Times reporter had already been arrested, a member of the National Lawyers Guild told me. I feared that Occupy Wall Street's big day was being censored.

As occupiers streamed out of the park, harried by baton-wielding cops, I resolved to get inside. Shielded from view by a car, I slipped under a barricade and came to another blockade across the street from the park's southeast corner, where I cut through a hole and was quickly approached by a police officer. "I'm not an occupier," I told him, holding out my business card.
"That's great, he said, pointing away from the park. "But you are going to have to wait on the other side of the street."
I waited, and when nobody was looking, I crossed back over as confidently as I could and entered a scrum of suit-wearing police brass and cleanup workers scrubbing the park's sidewalk. Nobody bothered to stop me as I strode up to the park's northern entrance and stopped against a wall, a few yards from where police in helmets surrounded the the remaining occupiers.
Next to me, an officer was telling an important-looking guy named Eddie about "the intel we've had over the past couple of months" about "the severely mentally retarded, the ones that are real fucked up in the head, and have been violent in the past." He went on: "They are a little off kilter. They're off their meds. They haven't had meds in 30 days."
"I'm only 24 hours off mine," Eddie joked.
"It's good for you, Eddie," the cop said. "You've got to come clean every once in a while."
As the two men talked, a sweaty-faced man wearing a neon vest over a business suit walked up and started tearing protest signs off the wall."I couldn't wait," he said. "Destroying things never felt so good."
"Really," someone said, almost inflecting the word as a question.
"They're fucking assholes," the guy in the suit shot back.
Another guy came up to Eddie. "How are we about hooking up the fire hydrants?" he asked. "We talkin' to somebody?"
"Do it. Do it," Eddie said over the roar of a garbage truck.
A few yards away, the last occupiers took turns waving a large American flag. Huddled inside the park's makeshift kitchen, they seemed as diverse as Occupy Wall Street: There was a shaggy punk in a spiky leather jacket. A young girl in a red sweatshirt that read "Unity." Clean-shaven guys wearing glasses. A shirtless occupier named Ted Hall, who has led an effort to hone the movement's "visions and goals." All of them surrounded a smaller group of occupiers who'd chained their necks to a pole.
A white-shirted officer moved in with a bullhorn. "If you don't leave the park you are subject to arrest. Now is your opportunity to leave the park."
Nobody budged. As a lone drum pounded, I climbed up on the wall to get a better view.
"Can I help you?" an burly officer asked me, his helpfulness belied by his scowl.
"I'm a reporter," I told him.
"This is a frozen zone, all right?" he said, using a term I'd never heard before. "Just like them, you have to leave the area. If you do not, you will be subject to arrest."
By then, riot police were moving in, indiscriminately dousing the peaceful protesters with what looked like pepper spray or some sort of gas. As people yelled and screamed and cried, I tried to stay calm.
"I promise to leave once the arrests are done," I replied.

"This is a frozen zone," one cop insisted. "You could be injured." His meaning was clear.

"No, you are going to leave now."
He grabbed my arm and began dragging me off. My shoes skidded across the park's slimy granite floor. All around me, zip-cuffed occupiers writhed on the ground beneath a fog of chemicals.
"I just want to witness what is going on here," I yelped.
"You can witness it with the rest of the press," he said. Which, of course, meant not witnessing it.
"Why are you excluding the press from observing this?" I asked.
"Because this is a frozen zone. It's a police action going on. You could be injured."
His meaning was clear. I let myself be hustled across the street to the press pen.
"What's your name?"
His reply came as fast as he could turn away: "Watch your back."

Josh Harkinson is a staff reporter at Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. Email him with tips at jharkinson (at) motherjones (dot) com. To follow him on Twitter, click here. Get Josh Harkinson's RSS feed.

Do you appreciate fair and factual reporting on Occupy Wall Street? Please donate a few bucks to help us expand our coverage.

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Scott Campbell Films Police Shooting At Occupy Oakland: Video Sparks National Outrage (VIDEO) 9NOV11

THIS is outrageous and proof something is very, very wrong in the Oakland police department. No doubt the Dept of Justice will be investigating these examples of police brutality, and high officials in the department and city administration must be held accountable. Watch these videos......
A police attack against Oakland man Scott Campbell has drawn national attention and outrage after Campbell released a video of the incident on YouTube.
Early Thursday morning after Occupy Oakland's general strike, Campbell filmed police officers as they surrounded the remaining protesters. According to Campbell, an officer asked him to step back as he approached the police line with a video camera. Campbell obliged, and then began filming about ten feet from the officers. On the video, Campbell can be heard asking "is this OK?" twice. Several seconds later, an officer shoots him with what appears to be a rubber bullet.
After Campbell released the video, national voices including the New York Daily News and Keith Olbermann expressed outrage at the apparent randomness of the attack. According to the New York Daily News, Campbell was shot "for apparently no reason."
"[Was there] any warning?" asked Olbermann on his show Countdown with Keith Olbermann during an interview with Campbell. "Any indication that they were about to move?"
"No, there was absolutely no warning whatsoever," answered Campbell. "There was no order to disperse; there was no warning that weapons might be used."
"It reminds me of some of those black humor comedy sketches where the cop shoots and then says, 'stop or I'll shoot' after shooting," said Olbermann.
In an interview with San Jose Mercury News, University of South Carolina criminal justice professor Geoffrey Alpert said the video left him "astonished, amazed and embarrassed."
"Unless there's something we don't know, that's one of the most outrageous uses of a firearm that I've ever seen," he said.
Campbell also released a graphic photo of his injury, showing extreme bruising and swelling. He is currently investigating options regarding a lawsuit against the Department. The Oakland Police Department did not immediately respond to comment.
At the same protest, police also allegedly attacked Kayvan Sabeghi, an Iraq war veteran and the co-owner of Elevation 66 Brewing Company in El Cerrito, as he was walking home. Sabeghi had been out to dinner and was returning to his apartment near the protest when police would not let him through. Allegedly, while explaining to police that he was only trying to go home, officers beat Sabeghi with billy clubs and arrested him. Sabeghi suffered a lacerated spleen during the attack and was reportedly denied medical treatment for several hours.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article stated that Elevation 66 Brewing Company is in Berkeley. The article was updated to reflect the brewery's accurate location in El Cerrito.
Watch Campbell's video of the attack below, then watch his interview on Countdown with Keith Olbermann:

Mall Counterterrorism Files ID Mostly Minorities from NPR 8SEP11

THERE is no way I will ever consent to an "interview" with some rent-a-cops at a mall or anywhere else if I haven't done anything wrong. I will probably be escorted off the premises, or maybe real cops will be called...and a lawsuit will be filed. Check out this series of stories on the neo-nazi tactics of some private security firms and the collaboration of local, state and federal law enforcement with them. From NPR.....

Daniel Zwerdling, G.W. Schulz, Andrew Becker and Margot Williams

Listen to the Story

Morning Edition

[7 min 47 sec]

The following is a continuation of an investigation by NPR News and the Center for Investigative Reporting on private counterterrorism programs, like the one at the Mall of America.
Programs aimed at keeping a lookout for potential terrorists are not about profiling, government officials stress. But an analysis of suspicious activity reports of incidents at the Mall of America near Minneapolis, by NPR News Investigations and the Center for Investigative Reporting, suggests that the Mall of America may be questioning people based partly on their appearance.
From the more than 1,000 pages of suspicious activity reports examined, the documents suggest almost two-thirds of the "suspicious" people whom the Mall reported to local police were minorities. Compare that with the U.S. population, which is more than 70 percent white. And whites account for 85 percent of the population in Minnesota.

More From This Investigation

DATABASE: Mall Of America Suspicious Activity Reports

Analyze and review 125 reports on shoppers and incidents at Mall of America.

Under Suspicion At The Mall Of America

A program aimed at finding terrorism threats is entangling ordinary citizens with police and FBI.

Shoppers Entangled In War On Terror

Documents detail how the Mall of America shares intelligence about possible threats.

Finding Meaning In Suspicious Activity Reports

Discerning real tips from paranoid reports is sometimes more of an art than a science.

One evening last summer, Nauman Tariq had just pulled out of the Mall of America parking lot with his father sitting beside him in the car. Suddenly a police car started tailgating them with its lights flashing. Two more cruisers moved in.

"I mean this kind of stuff you see in the movies, like cops coming up, and pulling over and surrounding you," Tariq, a brain specialist at three hospitals in Minneapolis, says. "We can't even imagine it's going to happen to us for no reason."
The police ordered Tariq out of the car, frisked him and put him in the back seat of a patrol car. While he was sitting there, he craned his neck to read the policeman's computer on the front seat.
"My name was there on the laptop with my address and there was this highlighted sentence saying that [he was a] 'possible terrorist threat,' " Tariq says. "So that was something which at that time I realized that there was something seriously wrong here."
The report on the incident, which NPR and the Center for Investigative Reporting obtained from police files in Bloomington, Minn., says that the Mall of America's private security unit flagged Tariq as a "possible terrorist."
One of the police officers told him why:
"He said that the Mall of America contacted the police because I was doing some suspicious activity," Tariq says. "And I asked him what did I do, and all he could tell me was I used the bathroom, it looked like I was walking fast with my father and I was using my cellphone a lot."
The police report confirms that explanation. The police let Tariq go after 45 minutes. But he says there's another reason why the mall's security unit might have suspected he was a terrorist.
"I look like a Muslim from a mile away," he says, laughing. "Meaning that I have a beard, I don't have a mustache, and my color, it's Middle Eastern, my skin color."
Identifying 'Suspicious' People
The nation's leaders have insisted since Sept. 11 that you shouldn't report people based on appearance, and instead look at behavior.
A training video posted on a government website makes clear that "profiling of individuals based on their race, color, national origin or religion is not acceptable in reporting terrorism related suspicious activity."
NPR and the Center for Investigative Reporting asked 29 law enforcement agencies across the country to provide suspicious activity reports from attractions such as amusement parks or baseball stadiums. Only officials in Minnesota sent us reports — more than 100 "suspicious" people that the Mall of America sent on to local police. Documents show that in almost half the cases, the reports were forwarded to state and federal law enforcement.
A Mall of America spokesman says they stop and question more than 1,000 people each year, so it's not clear whether the reports obtained by NPR and CIR are a representative sample. The mall's executives wouldn't tell us if the ethnic and racial breakdown of their visitors is different from the U.S. population.
"I think the program is one of the most effective programs in the security world. I really do," says Maureen Bausch, a vice president at Mall of America.

Follow The Surveillance

In May 2009, two black men visiting the Mall of America drew the suspicions of a mall security employee as they strolled through the attractions with a video camera. The security guard followed them, noting their locations and alleged actions and calling in two more security guards before stopping the men for questioning. This animation displays the observations of the security guard as written in the mall's "Suspicious Activity Events Log" and noted with a map of the mall in the incident report. The report was forwarded to the Bloomington Police Department and obtained by NPR and the Center for Investigative Reporting in response to a public records request. Documents show that the incident was also reported to the Minnesota state fusion center and the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force. (Click the header to go to the story for this graphic.)

Source: Documents from Bloomington Police Department, Minnesota Joint Analysis Center and Mall of America
Credit: Stephanie d'Otreppe / NPR

Mall executives wouldn't discuss the findings, but government hearings and press reports cite the mall's program as a model for fighting terrorism.
"When you're projected to draw 40 million visits a year — 40 million people walking through your doors — your No. 1 priority has to be safety and security," Bausch says. "The world has changed so we've had to adapt and change with it to make sure our guests are safe and having a great time."
But Minnesota's Department of Human Rights has been concerned about the mall's security program. Four years ago, the mall's guards reported a man to the police because he was "observing others while writing things down on a note pad as though he was conducting surveillance." It turned out he was a musician waiting for a friend. He filed a complaint with the state of Minnesota, charging that the mall targeted him because he's black. The Human Rights Department investigated, and it concluded the evidence does suggest that the Mall of America "subjects racial minorities to heightened scrutiny," which the department said would be "illegal."
Bausch wouldn't discuss the case.
"No I cannot respond to that, I cannot," she says. "Even though it's a matter of public record."
But Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, says she is troubled by those suspicious activity reports from the mall. "I can't sort of say this is de facto profiling," Kayyem, who is now a professor at Harvard says. "I would be concerned about it."
Recent history shows there's reason to think about terrorism in Minneapolis. Government officials say that Somali-Americans there have gone overseas for terrorist training. But Kayyem says she is troubled that two-thirds of the "suspicious persons" in the Mall of America's reports are from places like the Middle East, Africa, Asia. Or they're African-American.
"The fact that they're doing it this way is something they should clearly change. This is not, not helpful from anyone's perspective," Kayyem says.
A Mixed Reaction
The documents show that when the mall reports suspicious people, roughly half of those reports go to state and federal law enforcement.
Ask the Khalil brothers from Southern California how the mall treated them and you'll get a mixed reaction.
When the brothers were visiting a friend in Minneapolis two years ago, they ate dinner at the mall and took photographs. The mall's private security force confronted them. The Khalil brothers say the next thing they knew, an FBI agent followed them to the airport as they were about to fly home.
"He asked me where I was born and where my wife worked and where my daughters worked and what they're doing and what my wife does," Emil Khalil says.
The Khalil brothers are both in their 70s. They were born in Egypt, but they've been American citizens for decades.
"For all the 30 years that I lived in the United States this was the first time I was treated as a suspect and I didn't do anything wrong so it bothers me," he says.
His brother, Sameer, however, appreciates that the Mall of America reported them.
"It didn't bother me at all," Sameer Khalil says. "That's their job. They should do that to make it safer for everybody."

More From This Series

Under Suspicion

Mall Counterterrorism Files ID Mostly Minorities

Two-thirds of the people stopped at the Mall of America were minorities, activity reports show.

Under Suspicion

Under Suspicion At The Mall Of America

A program aimed at finding terrorism threats is entangling ordinary citizens with police and FBI.

Under Suspicion

Shoppers Entangled In War On Terrorism

Documents detail how the Mall of America shares intelligence about possible threats.

 

POLICE ID FROM PRO MUBARAK THUG & Horses, Camels, Rocks, Molotovs: Egypt’s Thug Tech from WIRED.COM 2FEB11

PRO mubarak thugs attacked the pro democracy protesters in Tahrir Square in Cairo on horseback and on camels with rocks, whips, clubs, molotov cocktails. Here is video of the violent attack the Egyptian Army permitted to happen and some proof of what most people believe, these people attacking the pro democracy protesters are government thugs.....police and govt employees and poor people so desperate for money they can be hired to attack the very people struggling to improve the lives of all Egyptians.....
UPDATE 127, Wednesday, Feb. 2, 5:13 p.m. EST/ Thursday, Feb. 3, 12:13 a.m. Cairo (Siddhartha Mahanta): @Uncucumbered tweets what she thinks could be a police ID taken from a captured Pro-Mubarak thug, perhaps confirming that the supposedly spontaneous pro-government demonstrators were anything but:

Horses, Camels, Rocks, Molotovs: Egypt’s Thug Tech

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/02/horses-camels-rocks-molotovs-egypts-thug-tech/

• By Spencer Ackerman
• February 2, 2011  | 
• 11:32 am  | 

Egypt runs an ultramodern security state, with extensive experience wielding the latest tools of repression. That was on display when the government shut down the internet for six days in order to break up massive protests against President Hosni Mubarak. But as Mubarak’s thugs went into suppression mode against protesters in Cairo, they used low-tech weapons to injure an estimated 500 people at Tahrir Square.
The intensifying crackdown is decidedly old-school. There was a cavalry charge into Tahrir Square: As the army hung back in its armored personnel carriers, plainclothes police forces — some of their ID cards were captured by protesters and shown on TV — rode camels and horses, attempting to break demonstrator phalanxes with wooden sticks.
The equine assault was a stark contrast to the Egyptian army’s armored personnel carriers in the square. After calling on the demonstrators to go home earlier Wednesday, the army has stayed out of the assault, although some of its carriers became roadblocks to separate the warring factions. Journo-blogger Issandr El Amrani explains that presence of the horses and camels indicates that the regime “recruited from the stables near the Pyramids” to make up its hit squad.
There was some sporadic gunfire — apparently warning shots from the army — but the signature projectile of the day is a rock. Al Jazeera reported that the pro-regime forces were using “sticks with nails,” knives, “homemade swords,” chairs and bits of masonry to attack the demonstrators. Its reporter Dan Nolan watched “guys in front of me poundin on pavement to break it into sizes they can throw.”

Aluminum siding became makeshift shields and checkpoints. On the terraces above the square, presumed pro-Mubarak forces rained metal appliances — I thought I saw a space heater thrown — down onto the crowds.
One journalist spotted people throwing “fire bombs at protesters.” Molotov cocktails are being thrown with “increased frequency” as night has fallen, Al Jazeera reports. That’s as high-tech as the violence has gotten.
And that’s probably a necessity: The government is denying that there were any security forces on the streets, preferring to portray the clashes as the organic response of pro-Mubarak Egyptians to “outlaws” (as Mubarak called them) amidst the protesters. To use guns or other weapons would give the lie to that line — although it’s worth noting there were some tear-gas assaults.
But just because the weapons in Tahrir Square weren’t sophisticated doesn’t mean they were ineffective. Al Jazeera reports that an estimated 500 people have been injured in the square. It’s not clear how many are dead. And there are still lots of people at the square right now.
There’s a lot of bitterness among the protesters toward the army right now. What looked for the last couple days like a restraint bordering on a vote of no confidence in Mubarak now looks like uniformed acquiescence to the crackdown.
One protester tweets: “This is the world’s tenth largest army, not a fire brigade!! Do something u animals!! There are women and children there!!”

BP's Media Clampdown Continues: Activist Hassled By Louisiana Police (VIDEO) 22JUN10

The video is extremely disturbing...a cop, being paid by the public with tax dollars....behaving like a lap dog of BP, doing their bidding and not at all interested in protecting the civil rights of a citizen
Mother Jones's Mac McClelland has been soldiering on down in Louisiana, even as her attempts to report on the oil spill response have largely evolved into covering the way BP has clamped down on media access in the region, through a network of private security contractors and an apparent iron grip on local authorities. Still going on!

Everyone knows by now that BP is still blocking press access to oil-spill sites even though they're not supposed to anymore. I've been blathering about it for weeks, and it's been all of three days since four contractors wouldn't let me through the Pointe Aux Chenes marina outside Montegut, Louisiana. And though as of June 16 the federal government was saying helicopters could fly reporters as low as 1,500 feet around spill sites, on June 17 I was on a helicopter that was prohibited from flying below 3,000 feet (and whose pilot flipped silent birds at the "military guys" coming over the radio and hassling him about being in the area at all).

Insert standard reminder that National Incident Commander Thad Allen issued a written directive weeks ago ordering these media blockades to be lifted. Smash cut to the Associated Press's senior managing editor Michael Oreskes, seeking redress from White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs to no avail.
McClelland also provides a video of an encounter between Drew Wheelan of the American Birding Association, getting hassled by a local police officer for shooting a segment across the street from BP's facility in Houma, Louisiana. Wheelan was not on BP's property at the time, but still caught a share of Kafkaesque static:

Wheelan: "Am I violating any laws or anything like that?"
Officer: "Um...not particularly. BP doesn't want people filming."
Wheelan: "Well, I'm not on their property so BP doesn't have anything to say about what I do right now."
Officer: "Let me explain: BP doesn't want any filming. So all I can really do is strongly suggest that you not film anything right now. If that makes any sense."

Making even less sense is the fact that Wheelan was subsequently pulled over by the same police officer some time later, and then tailed by "two unmarked security cars" for 20 miles! As McClelland remarks, this "is a whole other level of alarming."