240 replies to this topic

[PeaceFrog]

[Tim the Beek]

right to pepper spray or right to camp out in protest?

Right to camp out in a big box parking lot, waiting in line to save a few bucks off whichever shiny foreign-sourced gizmo they're buying.

[vic]

the best buy employees should be trained this week on the proper procedures to pepper spray the black friday maniacs who get out of hand when they open the doors at 1 AM and the stampede starts.

a statement like that turns my joke to a serious question: is it crowd control the police are there for or is it to repress protestors? if it's crowd control, should there not be cops in riot gear parked in front of the door to make sure people go into the stores in an orderly fashion? people have been killed as a result of black friday stampedes. there haven't been any stampedes at the protests, yet cops are using the tactics they're using. something wrong here, no?

shut out your thoughts on whether you support the movement or not when pondering an answer to this.

[Joker]

But...but..it's shiny AND on sale

[Tim the Beek]

[Java Time]

a statement like that turns my joke to a serious question: is it crowd control the police are there for or is it to repress protestors? if it's crowd control, should there not be cops in riot gear parked in front of the door to make sure people go into the stores in an orderly fashion? people have been killed as a result of black friday stampedes. there haven't been any stampedes at the protests, yet cops are using the tactics they're using. something wrong here, no?

shut out your thoughts on whether you support the movement or not when pondering an answer to this.

More harm comes from these pre sale gatherings...someone always dies:sad:

Cops should be there as crowd control...and many of those shoppers need a whoopin' or a peppering!!!

[Bone Daddy]

a statement like that turns my joke to a serious question: is it crowd control the police are there for or is it to repress protestors? if it's crowd control, should there not be cops in riot gear parked in front of the door to make sure people go into the stores in an orderly fashion? people have been killed as a result of black friday stampedes. there haven't been any stampedes at the protests, yet cops are using the tactics they're using. something wrong here, no?

shut out your thoughts on whether you support the movement or not when pondering an answer to this.

And why are they not at Picket lines protecting the people who want to work and cross the picket lines.


Scattered reports of violence are emerging: Verizon executives say a worker fired a BB gun at a co-worker who crossed the picket line in the Bronx, and the Daily News reports that strikers "pushed a nonstriking worker into scaffolding in Albany

[jg]

http://www.rollingst...up-top-20111122

As Glenn points out, when we militarized our society in response to the global terrorist threat, we created a new psychological atmosphere in which the use of force and military technology became a favored method for dealing with dissent of any kind. As Glenn writes:

The U.S. Government — in the name of Terrorism — has aggressively para-militarized the nation’s domestic police forces by lavishing them with countless military-style weapons and other war-like technologies, training them in war-zone military tactics, and generally imposing a war mentality on them. Arming domestic police forces with para-military weaponry will ensure their systematic use even in the absence of a Terrorist attack on U.S. soil… It’s a very small step to go from supporting the abuse of defenseless detainees (including one’s fellow citizens) to supporting the pepper-spraying and tasering of non-violent political protesters.

[vic]

http://petitionburea...lloreillyspray/

[Lazy Lightning]

Ganked from Tabby's FB page (with an "at least" highlighted in the text):

Fox on Pepper Spray: It's Just a Food Product.

You know that pepper spray that makes eyeballs feel like they're being fried in hot oil? Relax, it's just a "food product," or so says Fox analyst Megyn Kelly. "First of all, pepper spray, that just burns your eyes, right?" Bill O'Reilly asks Kelly yesterday. "Right. I mean it's, like, a derivative of actual pepper," she responds. "It's a food product, essentially." She wonders if the spray shot directly into the faces of students at a UC Davis sit-in last week was possibly diluted because they didn't seem to be writhing in agony quite like they should. OK, so some students ended up in the hospital, she acknowledges, admitting: "It was something abrasive and intrusive."

But sitting-in "is a crime," she adds. "Ten of them were charged with unlawful assembly and failure to disperse because they were posing a, you know, sit-in, a student protest. I mean, you can do that. It's very American, but it may also happen to break the law. Look, I know the tape looks bad, but I don't know if from a legal standpoint the cops did anything wrong." Someone who is finally admitting the cops maybe did something wrong is the UC Davis chancellor. She finally apologized for the situation yesterday. "I'm here to apologize. I really feel horrible for what happened," Linda Katehi told a gathering of students, faculty, and parents. The apology was met with catcalls and shouts that she resign, reports Reuters.

http://www.newser.co...od-product.html

Well, at least the chancellor finally admitted the situation was handled poorly.

[Joker]

She sounds more like the Mayor of Oakland, regretting her decision after it's too late to change it. Although I don't really see anything to suggest she's admitting the situation was handled poorly in this article.

[china cat]

http://petitionburea...lloreillyspray/

yeah, and ketchup is a vegetable

[Java Time]

Right to camp out in a big box parking lot, waiting in line to save a few bucks off whichever shiny foreign-sourced gizmo they're buying.

that should be illegal...until there's a shiny foreign sourced gizmo I need anyways:funny1:

[Joker]

yeah, and ketchup is a vegetable

Did you happen to catch this?


Washington

[china cat]

sickening.

jamie oliver exposed school lunches on his show. it is a CRIME what we are allowed to feed children. it makes me so ANGRY!!!

https://www.google.c...iw=1257&bih=625

[china cat]

OMG, JUST WATCH THIS EPISODE.

https://www.google.c...iw=1257&bih=625

[PeaceFrog]

Did you happen to catch this?


Washington — Congress agreed this week to continue counting the tomato sauce on a slice of pizza as a serving of vegetables for federally-sponsored school lunches.

In doing so, it sided with one of biggest makers of frozen pizza for school lunches the Schwan Food Co. of Marshall, Minn., a frozen pizza giant with more than $3 billion a year in annual sales. The privately held company was at the heart of the lobbying battle in Washington over pizza and convinced several members of Minnesota's congressional delegation to follow its lead.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison and Republican U.S. Rep. Erik Paulsen were the only Minnesota members of Congress to vote against the bills.

Schwan Food pizza brands include Red Baron, Freschetta and Tony's Pizza. Besides the products it sells to consumers, Schwan's does a big business selling frozen pizza to the federally-subsidized school lunch program.

A recent press release from the company boasts that it has a 70 percent market share in the pizza category of the $9.5 billion school food service industry.

So when the U.S. Department of Agriculture proposed new, stricter nutritional standards for school lunches earlier this year, it set off a massive lobbying campaign by Schwan and companies such as food giant ConAgra.

In particular, they honed in on a rule that would give tomato paste — a key pizza ingredient — less nutritional credit than under the old rules.

Federal lobbying records show that Schwan and the American Frozen Food Institute, the industry's trade association, spent about $450,000 on lobbying this year, although the information available to the public doesn't say how much was spent on this issue alone.

The bill that passed Congress Thursday orders the U.S.D.A to scrap the proposed tomato paste rule in the school lunch program.

Schwan officials did not respond to several requests for an interview. But officials at the American Frozen Food Institute made a variety of arguments for continuing to give tomato sauce preferential treatment when calculating vegetable servings. The arguments centered on the possible increase in cost to school districts and the lack of a scientific basis for U.S.D.A decision.

Institute officials also said that, because the new rules would have required pizza makers to use more sauce to meet nutritional content guidelines, the taste of newly reformulated dishes might be less popular with children.

More
http://minnesota.pub...ota-delegation/

What does this have to do with ketchup? And more importantly, what does this have to do with OWS?

[china cat]

it's a couple of random posts. really, things will be okay.

[PeaceFrog]

thanks for the reassurance

[Jabadoodle]

[PeaceFrog]

http://www.repopul8...._cop/index.html

[Joker]

Some of you might be interested in this, others probably not so much , it shows a lot of what happened before the pepper spraying.




Elli Pearson, one of the Occupy protesters who was pepper-sprayed by police at UC-Davis, admitted to "Democracy Now!" that the protesters locked arms and sat down to surround the police, who were actually trying to leave the campus. The protesters then told the police that if they wanted to leave, they'd have to clear a path through the protesters:

[Joker]

Pepper-spray report can be released without names


The University of California can release a report on the pepper-spraying of student demonstrators by UC Davis police but must first remove the names of most officers, a judge ruled Wednesday.

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Evelio Grillo said the task force report does not contain confidential personnel records of police officers who were interviewed during an investigation into the Nov. 18 crackdown on Occupy Wall Street protesters.

Still, Grillo said he wants the university to redact the names of officers to protect them from harassment. The exceptions are Police Chief Annette Spicuzza and Lt. John Pike, whose names became public during media coverage of the confrontation.

The judge said the document cannot be released for at least 21 days to give the officers a chance to appeal the ruling.


Read more: http://www.stltoday....l#ixzz1qX1aHGhu

[Joker]

Looks like the Chief and the administrators had a lot to do with this thing getting out of hand right from the start.

http://reynosoreport...noso-report.pdf

[PeaceFrog]

no shit, sherlock.

[vic]

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<a class="subj-link" href="http://bradhicks.liv...html">Sometimes, When &quot;All the Facts are In,&quot; It&#39;s Worse: The UC-Davis Pepper-Spray Report</a></h2>
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<li class="item"><span><abbr class="datetime">Apr. 15th, 2012 at 8:24 PM</abbr></span></li>
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<div class="user-icon"><img alt="Brad @ Burning Man" class="ContextualPopup" height="100" src="http://l-userpic.liv...1181189/479214" up_url="http://l-userpic.liv...1181189/479214" width="82" /></div>
<p><a href="http://knowyourmeme....everything-cop" target="_blank"><img alt="" height="141" src="http://i0.kym-cdn.co...jpg?1321852699" style="border-right: 0px solid; border-top: 0px solid; float: right; border-left: 0px solid; border-bottom: 0px solid" width="211" /></a>You know how every time somebody in law enforcement does something that looks bad, we&#39;re told that we should &quot;wait until the facts are in&quot; before passing judgment? Well, after Lieutenant Pike of the UC Davis Police Department became an internet <a href="http://knowyourmeme....everything-cop" target="_blank">meme</a> by using high-pressure pepper-spray on peaceful resisters, the campus hired an independent consulting firm to interview everybody they could find, review all the videos and other evidence, review the relevant policies and laws, and issue a final fact-finding report to the university. <a href="http://reynosoreport...oso-report.pdf" target="_blank">The university just released that report, along with their summary</a> (PDF link), and the final report is even worse than the news accounts made it seem.<br />
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You probably weren&#39;t aware that the protesters warned the university that they were going to be protesting <i>two weeks</i> in advance, were you? The campus, and campus police, had two weeks&#39; notice to plan for this, and yes, on day one, one question they addressed was, &quot;What if the protesters set up an Occupy encampment?&quot; Two weeks in advance they planned, well, if they do that, then we&#39;ll send in police to remove the tents, and to arrest anybody who tries to stop them. Now, under California law, when planning an operation like this, there&#39;s a checklist they&#39;re supposed to follow when writing the operational plan, specifically to make sure that they don&#39;t forget something important. Had they done so? They would have avoided <i>all four</i> of the important steps they screwed up. When asked about it? Nobody involved was even aware that that checklist existed.<br />
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The most important thing that the checklist would have warned them about was <i>do not screw up the chain of command.</i> Let me make clear who was in the chain of command. Under normal circumstances, it runs from university Chancellor Katehi, to campus police Chief Spicuzza, to campus police Lieutenant Davis, to his officers, including one I&#39;ll call Officer Nameless. (The report refers to him by a code letter.) Once the cops arrive on the scene, there&#39;s supposed to be one and only one person in a position to give orders to the other officers on the scene, including any higher-ups who are there (if any). Officer Nameless, who wrote the plan, was put in charge of the scene by Lt. Pike. By law, the officer in charge of the scene is not supposed to get directly involved. He or she (in this case, he) is supposed to stand back where he can see the whole scene, and concentrate on giving orders, and everybody else is supposed to refrain from giving orders. Officer Nameless instead ignored his responsibilities, and waded in, and so did Lt. Pike; Chief Spicuzza sat in her car half a block away, communicating with the radio dispatcher by cell phone, and at one time or another, all three of them, Officer Nameless and Lieutenant Pike and Chief Spicuzza were yelling out contradictory orders.<br />
<br />
But before it even came to that point, the student protesters had, with the help of Legal Services, gone over all the relevant state laws, city ordinances, campus ordinances, and campus regulations and concluded that no matter what the Chancellor thought, it was entirely legal for them to set up that camp. When the university&#39;s legal department found out that Chancellor Katehi was going to order the camp removed, they thought they made it clear to her that the students were right.<br />
<br />
I kept having to stop and slap my forehead over that one repeated phrase in the report: (this person or that) was under the impression she had made it clear that (some order was given), but nobody else present had that impression. Anybody who is &quot;under the impression that they made it clear&quot; that some order was given who who didn&#39;t put it in writing and who hasn&#39;t had that order paraphrased back to them? Should be slapped. Or at the very least demoted. Unless you actually said it, you didn&#39;t &quot;make it clear.&quot;<br />
<br />
It turns out that it is illegal for anybody to <i>lodge</i> on the campus without permission, but the relevant law only applies to people trying to make it their permanent dwelling. The law prohibits <i>non-students</i> from camping on campus for any reason, but neither student affairs nor the one cop sent to look could find any non-students who were there overnight. A campus <i>regulation</i> says that students can&#39;t set up tents without permission, but that regulation is not enforceable by police, only by academic discipline. Campus legal &quot;thought they made it clear&quot; that the law was on the students&#39; side, but according to multiple witnesses, what they actually said was &quot;it is unclear that you have legal authority to order the police to do this&quot; and Chancellor Katehi <i>heard</i> that as &quot;well, they didn&#39;t say I don&#39;t have that authority, only that it&#39;s not clear.&quot;<br />
<br />
Chancellor Katehi, on her part, &quot;thought she made it clear&quot; that when police ordered the students to leave, they were (a) not to wear riot gear into the camp, ( not to carry weapons of any kind into the camp, © were not to use force of any kind against the students, and (d) were not to make any arrests. But all that anybody else on that conference call <i>heard her say out loud</i> was &quot;I don&#39;t want another situation like they just had at Berkeley,&quot; and Chief Spicuzza interpreted that as &quot;no swinging of clubs.&quot;<br />
<br />
Chief Spicuzza &quot;thought she made it clear&quot; more than once that no riot gear was to be worn and no clubs or pepper sprayers were to be carried. What Lieutenant Pike said back to her, each time, was, &quot;Well, I hear you say that you don&#39;t want us to, but we&#39;re going to.&quot; And they did, including that now-infamous Mk-9 military-grade riot-control pepper sprayer that he used. Oh, funny thing about that particular model of pepper-sprayer? <i>It&#39;s illegal</i> for California cops to possess or use. It turns out that the relevant law only permits the use of up to Mk-4 pepper sprayers. The consultants were unable to find out who authorized the purchase and carrying, but every cop they asked said, &quot;So what? It&#39;s just like the Mk-4 except that it has a higher capacity.&quot; Uh, no. It&#39;s also much, much higher pressure, and specifically designed not to be sprayed directly at any one person, only at crowds, and only from at least six feet away. The manufacturer says so. The person in charge of training California police in pepper spray says that as far as he knows, no California cop has ever received training, from his office or from the manufacturer, in how to safely use a Mk-9 sprayer, presumably <i>because it&#39;s illegal.</i> But Officer Nameless, when he wrote the action plan for these arrests, included all pepper-spray equipment in the equipment list, both the paint-ball rifle pepper balls and the Mk-9 riot-control sprayers.<br />
<br />
The students set up their tents on a Thursday night. Chancellor Katehi ordered the cops to (a) only involve campus police, because she didn&#39;t trust the local cops not to be excessively brutal, and ( get them out of here by 3 AM Thursday night. Chief Spicuzza had to tell her that that wasn&#39;t physically possible, they couldn&#39;t get enough backup officers from other UC campuses on that short notice, it was going to have to be Friday night at 3 AM. Chancellor Katehi said &quot;no can do,&quot; that they had to be out of there before sunset Friday night, so that the camp wasn&#39;t joined by drunken and stoned Friday night partiers that would endanger the camp and even further endanger cops trying to deal with them -- arguably an entirely reasonable objection. So she ordered Chief Spicuzza to get them out of there by 3 PM Friday afternoon. Chief Spicuzza &quot;was under the impression&quot; (oh, look, there&#39;s that phrase again) that she made it clear to the Chancellor that for one thing, it couldn&#39;t be safely done, at 3:00 PM the protesters and passers-by would way outnumber her officers, and for another, it couldn&#39;t be legally done, because there was no way to legally arrest someone for &quot;overnight camping&quot; in the middle of the afternoon. Nobody else who was in that meeting thinks she made that clear, only that she made it clear that she didn&#39;t want to do it but couldn&#39;t explain why not. Still, when she gave the order to Lieutenant Pike, he very definitely did raise the same objections, clearly and unambiguously, backed up by multiple witnesses, who all agree that Chief Spicuzza told him, &quot;This was decided above my level, do it anyway.&quot;<br />
<br />
So, there&#39;s Lieutenant Pike. (Who, by the way, for obvious legal reasons since he&#39;s still being investigated by internal affairs and, last I heard, still being sued by his victims, refused to be interviewed by the consultants, so everything we know about his side of this comes from what he told other people and what he wrote in his reports.) As far as he&#39;s concerned, he&#39;s been given an illegal and impossible order: take 40 or so officers - unarmed and unarmored officers - into an angry crowd of 300 to 400 people who aren&#39;t doing anything illegal and make that crowd go away without using any force or getting any of your officers injured. For reasons Stanley Milgram could explain, it does not occur to Lieutenant Pike to disobey this order, so instead, he does the best he can, using his own judgement to decide which parts of his orders and which parts of the law to ignore. Unsurprisingly, it goes badly. Backed into a corner by an angry crowd (which has, by the way, demonstrably left him room to retreat, even with his prisoners, contrary to what he says in his report) that is confronting him with evidence that he is the law-breaker here, not them, he snaps. And rather than take it out on the more-powerful people who put him in this situation, he takes it out on the powerless and peaceful people in front of him, using a high-pressure hose to pump five gallons of capsacin spray into the eyes and mouths of the dozen or twenty people in front of him ... and he would have used more if he&#39;d had it, he only stopped when he did, halfway through his third pass down the line, because the sprayer emptied. When he gets back to the station, Chief Spicuzza (who has no idea what&#39;s just happened) congratulates him in front of half the department for how well he just did. And now, as far as he&#39;s concerned, he&#39;s being hung out to dry. We&#39;re apparently supposed to ignore the fact that multiple video sources contradict almost everything about his after-incident report because apparently, in his opinion, he was only following orders.<br />
<br />
This is not better than the initial media reports. This is worse. This is an epic textbook in official-violence failure.</p>
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<p>very well stated</p>
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<p>what say you, jack?</p>
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[vic]

some of you might want to hear this, others may not

http://www.huffingto..._n_1436075.html

DAVIS, Calif. — The police chief who oversaw the University of California, Davis, police department during its notorious pepper-spraying of Occupy protesters said Wednesday that she is stepping down.
UC Davis spokesman Barry Shiller said Annette Spicuzza told the school she is retiring effective Thursday.
Spicuzza told the Sacramento Bee ( ) that she does not want the Nov. 18 incident to define her or the university, and she's leaving so everyone involved can move forward. http://bit.ly/HydOWH
"For the past seven years, I have accomplished many good things for both the police department and community here at UC Davis; and am grateful to those of you who have remembered this," she wrote to the paper.
Spicuzza has been on paid leave since the incident, along with Lt. John Pike, who sprayed the orange liquid into the faces of protesters who were seated on a sidewalk.
Last week, a task force led by a retired California Supreme Court justice issued a report that blamed the incident on poor planning, communication and decision-making at all levels of the school administration.
The report was especially critical of Spicuzza, Pike and UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi.

[Joker]

She should have stepped down. She fucked up from the very start and was probably the main reason the incident turned out the way it did

[MeOmYo]

she should have been fired, along with Pike

[vic]

ah, why the change of tone here?

[vic]

she should have been fired, along with Pike

well we all know the precedent....it is extremely rare, to put it lightly, that any police are ever fired for excessive force or corruption, even when the evidence is so overwhelming

it's little wonder why so many have so much disdain for the police

[Joker]

ah, why the change of tone here?

No change of my tone regarding the chief. I'm pretty sure this is the first time she's been brought into this discussion. Judging from the report she was more of a liability and put the cops doing the actual job in a tough situation right from the go

[vic]

fair enough...and how do you feel about pike now?

[Joker]

From what I gather, he used the wrong equipment, that was wrong.

I still believe the cops felt trapped and feared for their safety. I still believe they used as little force as they felt was needed in order to clear a path to get themselves and their prisoners out of there safely.

[Bone Daddy]

Now the students should sue the police chief and the sprayer Lt Pike personally for pain and suffering.

[Bone Daddy]

I say this so they can be made an example of, maybe other bad cops will think twice before using overly harsh tactics

[vic]

From what I gather, he used the wrong equipment, that was wrong. I still believe the cops felt trapped and feared for their safety. I still believe they used as little force as they felt was needed in order to clear a path to get themselves and their prisoners out of there safely.

also fair enough, however you're leaving out that he disobeyed orders in the first place that they were to show up and not make any arrests and trhat the officer in charge is not supposed to get involved...read the article from a few posts ago that summarizes the investigation...there's a lot more pike did wrong than just use the wrong spray, which he also used wrongly as it's supposed to be used 6 feet away from the targets and police are not even supposed to possess

[Joker]

If you're talking about the garbled mess from some bloggers site that you posted I'm not going to fight my way through it. I read a lot of the actual report.

The chief was there at the scene and supposedly in charge, not Pike

Like I said it was fucked up from the start by the chief. It's pure insanity to have a group of cops go into a large demonstration like that in order to dismantle the tents while giving them orders not to arrest anyone.

[PeaceFrog]

fair enough...and how do you feel about pike now?

you don't get it yet?

Joke can't formulate an opinion on his own. He waits for the general consensus (within his sphere of influence... ie Fox News) to make up his mind for him.

[PeaceFrog]

Now I completely understand why humans are not yet capable of a direct democracy.

[vic]

If you're talking about the garbled mess from some bloggers site that you posted I'm not going to fight my way through it. I read a lot of the actual report.

it's cool, just talk shit

you seem to be off your game today