Detroit and Missouri: a tale of two police raids
by Allison Kilkenny
True/Slant
Aiyana Jones is the 7-year-old girl who was recently killed during a raid on her home. Allegedly, the police launched a flashbang grenade through the window of the apartment where Jones was sleeping, and the device set Jones on fire. Her grandmother, quite understandably, got into an altercation with the armed men who stormed into their home, and during the struggle, the police claim an officer’s gun discharged accidentally, killing Jones.
This official narrative is being disputed by the family’s attorney, who claims video footage shows the police fired into the home at least once after lobbing the grenade through a window – before grandma and the officer ever had their interaction.
This terrible tragedy follows an incident that received considerably more (especially on-line) media attention — a Missouri SWAT raid.
First, a disclaimer: I don’t write this as a way to cast blame. After all, I covered the Missouri incident extensively. The Missouri raid is something that should attract a significant amount of media coverage. And there are several important differences between the story that might explain why one incident went viral, while the other remains in danger of being buried by the Next Big Thing to come along.
Unlike Detroit, the Missouri raid was videotaped, forever capturing the terrible drama of the event, while Jones’s last, awful moments will only be memorialized in the testimony of cops and her family. Additionally, the Missouri raid demonstrated the overzealous, destructive police response to the unwinnable War on Drugs, which 40 years after its implementation, has cost over $1 trillion, failed to meet any of its goals, while “drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread.” Most Americans believe the War on Drugs is failing, so video proof of the militaristic behavior of the police during drug raids reinforces widely held, negative views about drug criminalization. Simply: people like to watch what they already know.
The Detroit raid is much more complex, and reveals a more sinister reality. A little poor, black girl dying during a police raid in Detroit is considered as a somewhat normal event in America. It’s terrible, yes. It’s something that makes Americans tisk and shake their heads over, but many view Detroit as a kind of third world country in which terrible things happen. The ghetto is a poor, dilapidated place under constant siege by the police so as to keep the undesirables in order.
To reject the idea that the ghetto should be a bad place entails rethinking much larger American issues: race, class, poverty, wealth disparity, social hierarchy, the two-tier justice system. It’s much easier to accept that bad things happen in the ghetto and move on.
To Read the Rest of the Article
Showing posts with label SWAT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SWAT. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Monday, April 19, 2010
Dave Lindorff: I’m Not Shedding Any Tears for Daryl Gates
RedI’m Not Shedding Any Tears for Daryl Gates
by Dave Lindorff
Common Dreams
The former Los Angeles police chief, Daryl Gates, who died last Friday of cancer at his home in California, is being widely credited in mostly laudatory newspaper obituaries as the man who developed the idea of Special Weapons And Tactics (SWAT)units--those paramilitary police teams so loved by Hollywood filmmakers--who bring the art and weaponry of modern warfare into communities, breaking into houses with faces covered in ski masks, and carrying assault weapons in order to make arrests for often minor offenses, or blowing away people--often innocent people--in what the modern military calls "force escalation incidents."
But Gates was more than just the Sultan of SWAT.
He was also a proponent of the police-state tactic of massive surveillance and spying. Not that he invented it. As a deputy chief under Chief Ed Davis, and later as chief of police, Gates inherited the LAPD's notorious "Red Squad," known as the Public Disorder Intelligence Division (PDID), which had a sordid history going back into the 1920s, but he certainly expanded it dramatically.
I had my own experience with the PDID when I was an editor of the little alternative news weekly, the Los Angeles Vanguard, founded by myself and several other Los Angeles journalists in 1976, after the demise of the venerable Los Angeles Free Press. Our publication, which took on the issue of police brutality and especially the all-to-frequent shooting of unarmed citizens, very quickly became a special focus of the PDID. We learned, years after our publication had folded, that our volunteer staff had been infiltrated by a young PDID officer named Connie Milazzo, a woman just out of the Police Academy, who came to us posing as a journalist wannabe.
In a depositions taken by attorneys with the Southern California American Civil LIberties Union as part of a class action suit against the LAPD and the City of Los Angeles in the early 1980s, after Milazzo and other equally young Red Squad spies had been discovered infiltrating over 200 peaceful organizations in Los Angeles ranging from our newspaper to the local chapters of NOW, the Peace & Freedom Party, and even the office of City Councillor Zev Yaroslavsky, we learned that the PDID was gathering dossiers on literally thousands of local political activists, infiltrating and spying on protected political activities like peace demonstrations, anti-nuclear demonstrations and even political campaigns, and also engaging in provocateur activities, trying to encourage peaceful groups to cross the line into criminal actions.
To Read the Rest of the Remembrance
by Dave Lindorff
Common Dreams
The former Los Angeles police chief, Daryl Gates, who died last Friday of cancer at his home in California, is being widely credited in mostly laudatory newspaper obituaries as the man who developed the idea of Special Weapons And Tactics (SWAT)units--those paramilitary police teams so loved by Hollywood filmmakers--who bring the art and weaponry of modern warfare into communities, breaking into houses with faces covered in ski masks, and carrying assault weapons in order to make arrests for often minor offenses, or blowing away people--often innocent people--in what the modern military calls "force escalation incidents."
But Gates was more than just the Sultan of SWAT.
He was also a proponent of the police-state tactic of massive surveillance and spying. Not that he invented it. As a deputy chief under Chief Ed Davis, and later as chief of police, Gates inherited the LAPD's notorious "Red Squad," known as the Public Disorder Intelligence Division (PDID), which had a sordid history going back into the 1920s, but he certainly expanded it dramatically.
I had my own experience with the PDID when I was an editor of the little alternative news weekly, the Los Angeles Vanguard, founded by myself and several other Los Angeles journalists in 1976, after the demise of the venerable Los Angeles Free Press. Our publication, which took on the issue of police brutality and especially the all-to-frequent shooting of unarmed citizens, very quickly became a special focus of the PDID. We learned, years after our publication had folded, that our volunteer staff had been infiltrated by a young PDID officer named Connie Milazzo, a woman just out of the Police Academy, who came to us posing as a journalist wannabe.
In a depositions taken by attorneys with the Southern California American Civil LIberties Union as part of a class action suit against the LAPD and the City of Los Angeles in the early 1980s, after Milazzo and other equally young Red Squad spies had been discovered infiltrating over 200 peaceful organizations in Los Angeles ranging from our newspaper to the local chapters of NOW, the Peace & Freedom Party, and even the office of City Councillor Zev Yaroslavsky, we learned that the PDID was gathering dossiers on literally thousands of local political activists, infiltrating and spying on protected political activities like peace demonstrations, anti-nuclear demonstrations and even political campaigns, and also engaging in provocateur activities, trying to encourage peaceful groups to cross the line into criminal actions.
To Read the Rest of the Remembrance
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