The Church needs to separate from Trump.
August 9, 2020
Dozens Of NYPD Officers Swarmed The Home Of A BLM Protester But Didn’t Make An Arrest
New York Police officers in riot gear and backed up by helicopters and police vans surrounded the home of a prominent Black Lives Matter protester Friday morning, tried to get him to come out of his apartment, and finally left empty-handed after a crowd gathered because the protester began streaming the incident on Instagram Live.
A spokesperson for the NYPD, Jessica McRorie, later said the NYPD had been “attempting to make an apprehension for an assault on a police officer.” She declined to say more, saying the investigation was “active and ongoing.”
But the explanation left many unconvinced, especially because of the bizarre way the incident unfolded, with officers at first telling the protester, Derrick Ingram, that they had a warrant, and then, when he asked to see it, backtracking on that and saying they were working on a warrant, according to Kiara Williams, who, along with Ingram is a member of the protest group Warriors of the Garden. BuzzFeed News profiled the group in June.
“This is very clearly a political decision by the NYPD to harass peaceful protesters without a legal means to do so,” said Atusa Mozaffari, a lawyer for the Legal Aid Society who was present at the scene, though is not counsel for Ingram. “This is exactly what everyone in New York City should be worried about.”
“This was an attempt to silence our movement. This militarized police response endangers the safety of residents in Hell’s Kitchen and across NYC,” Ingram said in a statement on Friday evening. “Officers used threats and intimidation tactics on a young man with no criminal history,” the statement added.
NYPD officers arrived at Ingram’s apartment around 7 a.m.
“There’s no reason for us to come in there — open the door and come out,” an officer told Ingram.
“Derrick, you’re the one making this difficult, we’re just trying to get you to come outside. You’re the one being hostile.”
“I’m not being hostile, I’m calm,” Ingram answered, as hundreds of his followers watched.
The video echoed police encounters with Black men that have ended violently.
Ingram, who is Black, held his head in his hands, and paced back and forth in his apartment, visibly nervous.
Under New York law, police officers can only enter a person’s home under prescribed circumstances.
“The police can enter your home without your permission if they have a warrant or if it is an emergency. If the police say they have a warrant, ask to see it,” said Katie Chmielewski, a communications associate for the New York Civil Liberties Union.
But when Ingram asked to see a warrant, officers did not produce one. By late morning, he appeared increasingly shaken as he continued to film. At one point, he put on some music to try to keep calm. At another, he swung the camera around to show that there were officers in the building across from him, and that he could see their holsters. Other officers were trying to climb the fire escape, said an onlooker. Ingram fielded calls from lawyers trying to advise him, as the booming police knocks continued.
By noon — about five hours into the standoff — the street in Hell’s Kitchen where Ingram lives was blocked off at both ends. Several NYPD vehicles from the emergency services unit were parked outside the building, along with unmarked police cars. Officers from the Strategic Response Group and the Technical Assistance Response Unit were also present as a helicopter whirred overhead. Multiple observers told BuzzFeed News they had seen more than 30 police officers throughout the morning.
“We’re from emergency services,” one of the officers told Ingram from behind his apartment door, as they continued to knock over and over again.
“What emergency?” Ingram asked. “I don’t know what the emergency is.”
“We came immediately when we heard about it because we knew it could happen to one of us,” said Frantzy Luzincourt, the cofounder of Strategy for Black Lives, another protest group that’s worked with Warriors in the Garden. “This is next level and it’s scary for organizers. Are they going to show up at my house next? Or his?” he said, pointing to a friend.
Chi Ossé, another member of Warriors in the Garden who is also running for city council next year, chanted “Where’s the warrant?” over a megaphone. “This is nothing more than domestic terrorism,” he told a crowd of people who had gathered in a park that overlooked Ingram’s street.
Please notice how the police lied and made up shit, the police are openly dishonest so why do we trust their reports and court testimony. The police are too militarized and too powerful. They work to suppress not to protect. The US has become a police state with the police used by the upper class to keep the lower working class in line and laboring to make the upper class more money. In many places it is becoming clear that police unions and higher up members of police departments not only do not obey civilian elected leaders but openly challenge them and simply counteract their orders. I read of police threatening elected leaders. We now know this is going on so we must work hard on changing it. Hugs
August 8, 2020
Trump Wants U.S. to Get Cut of Any TikTok Deal. No One Knows How That’d Work.
This is the shit that happens in dictatorships and banana republics. What happened to the US law and order with due process? Hugs
If he were still running casinos in rough-and-tumble Atlantic City, N.J., President Trump’s demand about Microsoft’s possible purchase of TikTok might be translated this way: I want a piece of the action.
In exchange for blessing Microsoft’s acquisition of the Chinese-owned social media platform, Mr. Trump has said the United States Treasury should receive a “very big proportion” of the sale price. If he follows through, it would signal an effort to carve out an entirely new role for the federal government in exerting its powers to approve or thwart business deals with national security considerations.
In essence, the president is promising to orchestrate the kind of pay-to-play bounty that the United States prohibits companies from making to governments of other countries under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
And he is playing a role that is common among the autocratic leaders on whom he has often heaped praise: using the sheer power of his office to influence the private marketplace without clear legal or regulatory authority.
“It’s protection money. It’s not what the government of the United States should do,” said Avery Gardiner, the general counsel for the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonprofit advocacy organization focused on digital rights, privacy and an open internet.
“It’s scary to think that it might apply in some parts of business and not in others,” she added. “It becomes a special tax if your business is involved in social media. but you can only do the deal if you pay the protection money. That’s even worse.”
“Very simple,” he explained to reporters this week about his approach to a TikTok deal. “I mean we have all the cards because, without us, you can’t come into the United States. It’s like if you’re a landlord, and you have a tenant. The tenant’s business needs a rent; it needs a lease. And so what I said to them is, ‘Whatever the price is, a very big proportion of that price would have to go to the Treasury of the United States.’”
Mr. Trump added: “And they understood that. And actually, they agreed with me. I mean, I think they agreed with me very much.”
Legal experts said there is also no law that explicitly prohibits companies from voluntarily offering a gift to the government, as long as it is not made under duress and the gift does not benefit any particular individual government officials.
But they also warn that extracting a large cash payment as a condition of a TikTok sale would undermine the integrity of a legal process that operates with specific, objective standards. That could set a precedent that deters similar deals in the future by injecting uncertainty into the prospect of any big business deal.
That appears to be exactly what Mr. Trump wants.
There is more at the link above. It is clear that tRump has reverted to his mob boss roots. He has been involved with the different organized crime mobs from the beginning. Now he wants to use the US government as he has known ever action all his mobbed up life. I do not know what it will take to wake up the 36% of the US are in the cult of tRump, but I do know that if we do not vote overwhelmingly blue this election the experience of democracy is over. Putin is overjoyed that he and his mob may be able to move fully into the US than just the fringes that they are now. Hugs
August 7, 2020
August 6, 2020
New York City Police Unions Sue to Block City’s Chokehold Ban
I believe in unions but in these cases the police unions have become the enemy of the people, and so need to have their power reduced. They have become criminal enterprises using their ability to threaten to enable thugs to harm people. Hugs
New York City Police Unions Sue to Block City’s Chokehold Ban
Led by the city’s Police Benevolent Association, the lawsuit comes six years after Staten Island resident Eric Garner’s death in a police chokehold. Garner’s dying gasps of “I can’t breathe,” captured on a viral video, drove thousands onto the streets in 2014.
It took George Floyd uttering the same words under a Minneapolis officer’s knee this year to spur New York State and city legislators to pass a ban on the practice among a suite of reforms designed to promote transparency, accountability and restraints upon police.
Since Governor Andrew Cuomo signed those bills in June, police unions have fought systematically to dismantle the new laws. A different lawsuit filed in federal court last month aimed to block the release of thousands of NYPD disciplinary records, many of which were recently posted publicly by ProPublica.
“An ordinary police officer will be unable to discern whether many ordinary activities taken in the course of the apprehension and arrest of a suspect violate the statute,” attorney Anthony Cole, from the firm DLA Piper, writes in the complaint.
The statute criminalizes using any restraint that restricts the flow of air or blood “by compressing the windpipe or the carotid arteries on each side of the neck, or sitting, kneeling, or standing on the chest or back in a manner that compresses the diaphragm, in the course of effecting or attempting to effect an arrest.”
The claim police won’t be able to determine the correct course of action here seems stupid to me just don’t keep people from breathing or having blood flow to the brain. Seems easy to figure out to me. Don’t choke people. When I was taking Kempo and in law enforcement we stayed away from the neck and throat because of how easy it was to crush the windpipe. Remember the police are not in a war zone under active fire as they want you to believe. Most of their job is boring and administrative. This is the problem with militarizing the police, the job of serving and protecting get hyped to a constant taking on of terrorists and fighting an enemy that doesn’t exist. Hugs
August 5, 2020
German ambassador pick disparaged immigrants and refugees, called for martial law at US-Mexico border
This was a very interesting read. This is the type of religious bigot that populate the tRump government at all levels. This is a retired Army officer of 30 years who holds these views thinking not only a religious bigot, a racist, but that the US should use its might to push for Christians world wide and shoot non-whites at the US southern border while forcing other countries to keeping themselves more white pure. If you want to understand the problems we have here in the US then read this, it shows the mind set of the cult of tRump. Hugs
https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/04/politics/kfile-douglas-macgregor-german-ambassador-pick/index.html
Two Black moms say Secret Service handcuffed them, separated them from kids with no cause
The women told the paper an officer said the car had been reported stolen. Johnson, who owns the vehicle, said she provided proof to officers it was hers and told them she hadn’t reported it stolen.
The women said they were handcuffed for roughly 45 minutes before they were able to be with their babies again.
A bystander told them the officers searched their car during that time without Johnson’s permission, the women said. They also said they weren’t read their Miranda rights.
“These were two young African American mothers with their babies sitting lawfully in a car with D.C. tags. Can the Secret Service honestly say it would have treated white out-of-town tourists and their babies, sitting there without District tags, the same way?” he also asked in the letter.
While Maloney told the paper that he hasn’t yet received word from the Secret Service about his letter, the agency told the Post that it has gotten a “query requesting the agency investigate an alleged interaction between Uniformed Division Officers and two members of the public.”
Also there was this:
‘I Was Asked If I Stole My Car’: Black Diplomats Describe Harassment At U.S. Borders
Spears’ first posting, in October that same year, was at the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. Everything started off well, she says, and she quickly settled into her new life and job. Spears would often cross back into the U.S. to shop or meet friends for coffee.
But she quickly noticed a trend: When she made those border crossings, she was regularly pulled over by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers for secondary inspection.
Spears is Black. She is one of a growing number of current and former minority foreign service officers to speak out recently about the special challenges they face as diplomats.
Spears says while crossing the border, she showed the CBP agents her diplomatic passport and other official forms of identification — and was startled at the line of questioning she then underwent.
“I was asked if I stole my car,” she says. “One time, I was even accused of having counterfeit documents, as in my diplomatic passport … I was regularly questioned on if I truly worked at the consulate in Ciudad Juarez.”
In the six months that she worked in the consulate, Spears says she was pulled aside more than 20 times. Each time, she says, the harassment escalated.
“One time, I was told not to look at the officer in the eyes when I spoke to him,” she says. “I was told I needed to look down at the ground.”
Spears says she was left feeling that they “wanted to make me feel small.”
Spears still maintains that she was harassed and intimidated by CBP officers because she is Black. She says several times she complained to CBP supervisors at the border. One supervisor handed her a pamphlet with a hotline number to call, she says, and told her that the officers would not be disciplined.
Spears also took her concerns to her superiors at the U.S. Consulate.
There, she says, “I was just met with pure denial and gaslighting about how this wasn’t racism, this wasn’t discrimination. Essentially, you know, it was downplayed and brushed under the rug.”
Ray, who is also Black, says he too experienced harassment at U.S. borders during his 30-year career, which ended in 2012. He says he learned to just put up with it because no one particularly cared — back then or now.
“No one’s going to stick their head above their desk and make an issue of it if they value their job, if they feel that the senior leadership doesn’t care,” he says. “And frankly, my personal opinion is that the senior leadership really does not care.”
More at the link above. Hugs
![[Andy Marlette -- Pensacola News Journal]](https://cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/tbt/DOUZFZTQXNEP3HYU2WV6BXWU4E.jpg)
