Paradise Falls
Rookie
- Feb 15, 2015
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Groups of protesters violently clashed with police in Baltimore before looting businesses
and setting fire to cars and structures. At least 15 officers were injured in these confrontations, according to police.It was the first time the National Guard was called in to quell unrest in Baltimore since 1968, when some of the same neighborhoods were convulsed
by violence after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.By the end of the night, almost 200 people had been arrested. Protesters gathered hours after a funeral was held for Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old black man who suffered a fatal injury while in police custody under circumstances that still have not been revealed.
Last night some 71 people were arrested in Cleveland overnight during riot protests that flared after a police officer was found not guilty in the shooting deaths of an unarmed man and a woman following a high-speed car chase in 2012, police said on Sunday.
This comes the same time as New Jersey sets up martial law like curfew as unrest persists.
Similar protest and acts of violence against Police and Government has been occurring in almost every major city across the US in the past few weeks and months getting more violent as they go along like a forest fire with little to no coverage by the mainstream.
"An Upraise in the making." as one bystander from the protest in Cleveland commented.
In a new study
to the recent spate of protests against police & Government brutality have changed the way the left thinks about rioting. The old liberal idea, which distinguished between peaceful protests (good) and rioting (bad), has given way to a more radical analysis. “Riots work,” insists George Ciccariello-Maher in Salon.“But despite the obviousness of the point, an entire chorus of media, police, and self-appointed community leaders continue
to try to convince us otherwise, hammering into our heads a narrative of a nonviolence that has never worked on its own, based on a mythical understanding of the Civil Rights Movement.” Vox’s German Lopez, while acknowledging the downside of random violence, argues, “Riots can lead to real, substantial change.”In Rolling Stone, Jesse Myerson asserts, “the historical pedigree of property destruction as a tactic of resistance is long and frequently effective.” Darlena Cunha, writing in Time, asks, “Is rioting so wrong?” and proceeds
to answer her own question in the negative.
Recently in San Francisco, San Francisco v. Sheehane, a police-brutality case, made it all the way to the Supreme Court. The case revolved around two San Francisco police officers whom entered a disabled woman's apartment on a report that the woman was suicidal. With a key and with guns drawn the two officers proceed to enter
her bedroom and gun her down with two clips of fully loaded ammo as she sat on the bed. The case matters because it’s the first police-shooting incident the court has confronted since Ferguson put policing and excessive use of force on the map. And, as the Supreme Court do in these cases, it handed the cops a win.Never mind her disability: To the responding officers, that was a “secondary issue.” What truly mattered, one of them testified, was that they were “faced with a violent woman who had already threatened to kill herself.” Sheehan survived her injuries, and later sued the city of San Francisco and the shooting officers for violating her civil rights. She also faulted the city for disregarding her disability under the Americans With Disabilities
Act.You might hope that, in writing the opinion, Justice Samuel Alito would use language that would place the decision in the context of Ferguson. Or at least recognize one of the many instances, caught on video, where police shot and killed a mentally ill person — Jason Harrison, Anthony Hill, and Lavall Hall all come to mind. Or perhaps acknowledge that, according to one estimate, more than half of those killed by police are suffering from mental illness.
Instead, Alito and five other justices ruled that the officers were entitled to a blanket shield from liability, under a doctrine known as qualified immunity. The doctrine is nowhere in the Constitution, yet officers and municipalities invoke it all the time when sued for constitutional violations. And more often than not, courts agree that immunity is proper, so long as the officers’ blunders were “reasonable” under the circumstances. What counts as reasonable? A lot of things, some real, others largely exaggerated. Split-second decision-making. Fear for one’s life. How “dangerous,” “recalcitrant,” and “law-breaking” the victim was. Alito actually used those words to describe Sheehan and found no fault with anything the two officers did in their interactions with her. She was basically asking for it.
