gang article and the police

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gang article and the police

Postby Josh Young » Fri Nov 18, 2011 4:01 pm

http://ymaa.com/articles/gangs-a-bigger ... -you-think
I really enjoyed this article and wanted to share that it matched what my Wing Chun teacher told me about both Gangs and the Police.

It turns out that the Police are a lot like a legal gang, as opposed to a criminal gang, nevertheless the same guidelines apply to dealing with them as apply to dealing with gangs.

Basically with police, as well as with gangs, reputation, revenge and respect are the top concerns.
I know a number of people in law enforcement and tales of revenge killings are not uncommon.

Be cautious about any member of a group known for violence, bearing weapons and that is trained to be comfortable taking life.

A recent member and contributor to the forum shared in his posts that as an officer he struck suspects and lied about it, this type of behavior and a lack of accountability among officers makes them a much greater threat to many people than gangs are, because while gangs tend to bother and harass competing gangs officers are known to do the same to anyone. The news is full of recent cases of violence where officers struck unarmed women just to gain compliance and death in police custody is extremely common statistically speaking, in fact it is statistically more likely for a civilian to die in police custody than it is for police to be harmed by a civilian.
Basically police constitute a greater potential threat to the general population than the general population poses to police.

Many people, often minorities, have little to no fear of gangs but are very fearful of police, and for a very good reason. Gangs tend to target other gang members, for example in the article i linked to above it mentions a gang shooting where 12 people were killed, however it should be pointed out none of those people were civilians, they were all gang members. Gangs pose a far greater threat to members of other gangs than they do to the general population, however this is not the case with police, who are rarely held accountable for harming civilians or using excessive force. And while not all police are bad, neither are all gang members.

A good example is the beating death of a homeless man by the name of Kelly Thomas in california whose face was crushed in by a taser weapon by an angry officer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Kelly_Thomas
while officers are trained to use violence to force people to obey them, beating someone to death should not fall under this category.
according to reports this man was on the ground and unable to resist, he did not fight back, in fact records show that he fully complied with officers as best he could, the officers contradict this but the video and audio records of the event clearly show that he not only complied, but begged for his life as the officers beat him to death, crushing his face so badly that he drowned in his own blood from his smashed face.
Image
this is the work of the police
please be at least as careful around them as you would around any violent gang

My brother in law was found beaten to death in a Southern California park and many suspect the police beat him to death and left him, he had a debilitating disease called Huntingtons chorea that made him shake and appear intoxicated.

In the case of Kelly Thomas the police were only caught because the incident was caught on camera, and likely because Kelly Thomas was white.

I don't fear gangs at all and have lived in areas with a lot of gang activity, but i am wary of the police. But as my Wing Chun Sifu told me, the police are the most dangerous gang out there, be careful. A simple action such as defending yourself against an aggressive officer who is off duty can get you shot and killed, and cases like this are on record.

Other studies show that the same personality types attracted to gang activity are those that are attracted to police work, and while gangs won't attack civilians trying to obtain civil rights, police will. It should be noted that police used violence to opposed the civil rights movement that sought to give equal rights to black people and end jim crow laws. This is clear evidence that they are not serving public interest or will, but are simply following orders and have no problem hurting the very civilians they swore to protect.
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Re: gang article and the police

Postby Josh Young » Sat Nov 19, 2011 3:13 pm

i am sorry, this should have been posted in general chat, not here in general MA discussion.
feel free to move the thread if this is an issue.
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Re: gang article and the police

Postby John the Monkey mind » Sun Nov 20, 2011 10:03 am

I think less people die in Police custody than in gang attacks. I know some minorities fear the Police more than the gangs but the places they live require a strong arm. I have lived with the Police not being feared and people just do what ever they like. I would rather have a few people ruffed up even if that is a risk to life than be on the end of a gang assault again.

The police need to be feared or society breaks down, its a sad fact of life. Just look at London, minority gangs looted many shops wile the Police stood back so as not to damage community relations, then when a broader section of society could see there were no consequences they then got in on the action and also took part.
It was only when the prim-minister said force would be used and parents should keep their children off the streets as people would be handled with a very heavy hand that it stopped over night.
If you don't come down hard crime grows and wile its regrettable some groups mistrust the police the solution is not to be softer on their streets but to use zero tolerance and stamp out the reason police are there in the first place.

When the police in London stopped doing stop and search in some post codes because it was seen as damaging "community" relations the youth murder rate went through the roof and it was mostly people from the "community" being killed although sometimes it was people from outside the "community" being killed. People from within the "community" often carry knives knowing they will not be searched and they have a "respect" culture that get the innocent killed over a perceived insult. I know someone who saved a friend from a stabbing like this.

I am sorry to hear you lost a family member to an attack but it seems the perpetrates are still unknown and wile you may suspect the police it is not the same as proving they did it. The police have a hard job and fear is a necessary tool the alternative is you get anarchy and that is much worse. Honestly if you think that its bad in the US you should see eastern European Police, people treat them with respect even wile the police are cheating them. Still I can picture Eastern Europe with soft Police and I would not like it one bit as it would be a very scary place.
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Re: gang article and the police

Postby Josh Young » Sun Nov 20, 2011 2:04 pm

interestingly several tribes without a form of law enforcement are entirely peaceful, others that are the same are very war like, it is perhaps facile to state that society would break down without the rule of law, in some cases this is demonstrated, in others it is not, so there appear to be other factors.

One of the worst things we can do is excuse something that is wrong by pointing out something worse, China and Syria have far worse police issues than we do in the USA, and they use the same excuse, that without police society would break down, however the abuse of human rights is wrong regardless of the severity of the impact of the abuse, thus that China is worse regarding this matter does not excuse our own problems regarding the police.

As for gang attacks, i bet you are right about stats for that, however gangs are far more likely to attack other gangs than they are to attack other civilians in general. That being said i have lived where gangs do shoot random people for fun and i do appreciate the police, however they are seldom held accountable for their actions when they do abuse their power.

I have friends with family in law enforcement, so i get to see and hear inside information about their conduct. My best friends cousin is an officer in New York in the Bronx, murder there is common and so is police corruption, there are a lot of stories about police beating people and how they do it in a way so as not to get caught, in this case they use the elevator in the station because there are no cameras, suspect gets into elevator and comes out with a broken arm and the police claim he slipped and fell. They literally do this for sport as much as anything.

My girlfriend used to live in LA and ran a business where she needed drivers who were able to be security as well, she hired off duty police and was friends with many of them, but the stories she has and was told by them tend to be very disturbing. It is not uncommon for gangs to hire police and for police to be paid to provide protection to specific gangs and to target their competitor gangs.

A friend of mine was kidnapped by police in mexico and played dumb, didn't tell them he spoke spanish, they called someone and described him and that he had a couple thousand dollars in his wallet and where to dump the body, they then told him they would dump him where only the coyotes would find him, and while they looked through his wallet they found his fathers business card, his father was a deputy sheriff, they ended up letting him go. Now in mexico they use the same reasoning you have, that they need to be feared or people won't obey.

Note that the USA has the highest per capita incarcerated population and that the majority of those behind bars are non-violent offenders, this includes sexual predation as violence. My point is that sure China and Mexico are worse, but that does not mean that we do not have many of the same problems here.

I had a friend who was at a gas station with his elderly father when police attempted to detain his father with force for no apparent reason, he stepped between the officers and his father and an officer attacked him, my friend is a boxer and he struck the officer, knocking him out. So my friend was taken into custody, quite forcefully, and then when he saw the judge the judge sided with my friend, noting the witness statements and no charges were filed. It was found that the police had no probable cause or right to act as they did. so what happened after that was on numerous occasions my friend would be pulled over and handcuffed and other officers called to the scene, where they beat him severely and then let him go, this went on for years and he was unable to hold them accountable despite numerous attempts to do so. They essentially destroyed one of his knees.

Another friend of mine has a father who is a paraplegic, he was a highschool bully and he moved to the UK, married, had kids and then moved back to his hometown. When he moved back it just so happened that many of the kids he bullied in highschool had joined the police force, one night they jumped in a van, went to his house in swat gear, held guns to his family while they beat him, breaking his spine. This man was able to sue and was awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars by the state, but that will not bring back the use of his arms and legs.

Another friend of mine had a situation where his mother heard something outside in the middle of the night and went to check on it, she found an officer in my friends car in the driveway and confronted him, he said that he had seen someone run away from the vehicle and was searching it to see why. He left and she woke her son up and he went out to his car, he found a marijuana pipe in it that had been planted by the officer. So they went to the police station the next day to lodge a complaint and were directed to a desk where the officer in charge of complaints was, and guess which officer it was? it was the one who broke into the car, that department was notoriously corrupt and the chief resigned a couple of years later

In another local case the head of the anti-meth task force was found to be making, using and selling meth, so he was demoted but kept on the force.

in yet another local case the police told a man who they did not like that they were going to kill him, he went to the news agencies and his mother and these threats were in print before the event happened, they found out his location and kicked in a door and shot him and his girlfriend dead while they were in bed. There was an investigation into this but nothing came of it because the police have what is called Sovereign Immunity, which means that the law does not apply to them the way it does to civilians. You can look into this where shoot to kill orders have been given for women and children by the FBI and higher courts overturned the lower court ruling that this was criminal. A woman in idaho was shot by a sniper while holding her baby and standing in the door of her house, the sniper had been ordered to kill anyone he saw on sight and it was found that this was a lawful order because of sovereign immunity.

In another case i was walking home at night, it was winter, freezing cold and very late. An officer pulled up next to me and asked the usual where i came from where am i going to questions. I answered them and then he asked if i wanted a ride home, which was a few miles away, i told him that the car did not look like a taxi, he laughed and had me get into it and gave me a ride home. My point being that i have never thought they were all bad, i think most are good, but the problem is that the bad ones are not held accountable, they are even protected by the good ones.

if you look at history zero tolerance policies escalate violence, they do not prevent it, fear does not make people behave, it makes them more likely to use violence against others

I would like for all police and their weapons to have small cameras and microphones on at all times, these should feed to a public server. Only then can we assure that officers will conduct themselves properly and the truth will be told, maybe you know this, maybe you don't, but while it is illegal for a civilian to lie to an officer, it is legal for an officer to lie to a civilian, they are taught to be dishonest as a tactic, they are taught to kill. Teaching them to be dishonest entails many problems, they have no problem lying and cannot be expected to be honest when they are trained not to be. What keeps this lack of honesty to interrogations? What prevents it from being used in court? The answer is nothing.

We need police, but we also need them to be accountable to the public. Remember they opposed the civil rights movement and enforce laws, no matter how unjust those laws may be. It is a job for them, a paycheck and not a public service. Unfortunately the job is very hard, and it is often psychologically damaging to those that hold it, few officers start out corrupt, but the job is notorious for corrupting and desensitizing those who hold it.

I am in favor of more power to the police in many ways, but am also in favor of greater accountability. I would like to see them empowered to a greater degree at the same time as they are held to the highest standards of conduct.

As for gangs and violence and zero tolerance, areas with the most brutal and violent police are not known to have less gang activity or less violence, the reverse has been shown. Fear of the police does not work to prevent crime, but it does endanger police to a greater degree, which is unfortunate. Areas where police are notorious for killing people have some of the worst gang violence, historically speaking police crackdowns are not associated with reductions in violent crime, but are associated with increases in it.

It is not my opinion that police should be tolerant of criminal behavior, merely that they should be held to a very high standard of conduct and accountability, a higher standard than most civilians. If a policeman commits a crime, it is my belief that their sentence should be more severe than that of a civilian committing the same crime, not less severe. This is because they are entrusted with greater power than civilians, with that should come greater responsibility for ones actions, not diminished accountability as is the case today. The officer who beat that man to death with the taser should get the death sentence, as would a gang member who had committed the same act.

police corruption is worse than criminal, it is treasonous
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Re: gang article and the police

Postby Josh Young » Sun Nov 20, 2011 2:14 pm

I have a question, you appear to endorse police having a zero tolerance policy towards criminals, but not a zero tolerance policy towards criminal police.
Isn't there a double standard there?
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Re: gang article and the police

Postby John the Monkey mind » Mon Nov 21, 2011 8:54 am

Josh Young wrote:I have a question, you appear to endorse police having a zero tolerance policy towards criminals, but not a zero tolerance policy towards criminal police.
Isn't there a double standard there?


Yes and no. I would prosicute police who go to exstreams but if a guy has it a bit ruff wile being cuffed so be it. It sounds like the US police cross that line to often. Anyway didnt zero tolerance work in new york? Yes you need checks to the power of the police but streaming video would be a bad idea as highlights from a thousand hours of duty could misslead more than a bit.
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Re: gang article and the police

Postby Josh Young » Mon Nov 21, 2011 11:53 am

I know a retired officer who was a cop in NYC for a decade and my best friends cousin is an officer there right now. The mayor and others will claim that the zero tolerance policy was effective, but there are at least some officers who dispute this.

There is a lot of evidence that in regard to the NYC thing that crime began to drop there well before the zero tolerance policy was ever instituted, and likewise many major US cities without that policy saw very similar reductions in crime rates. The idea that it was the policy that brought the reduction about is political rather than factual and is at best disputable.
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Re: gang article and the police

Postby Cotton Over Steel » Mon Dec 19, 2011 4:17 pm

"It turns out that the Police are a lot like a legal gang, as opposed to a criminal gang, nevertheless the same guidelines apply to dealing with them as apply to dealing with gangs.

Basically with police, as well as with gangs, reputation, revenge and respect are the top concerns. "

Thanks Josh for the good advise. My experience is similar.

Some police departments are great, such as the California Highway Patrol and Berkeley Police Department.

LA and Oakland are notorius for Police brutality unchecked, as in Rodney King, the Bart Police assassination and attack of a Iraq veteran while peaceful protesting. OPD used to recruit in the rascist Deep South, for bigots that enjoyed their work. After years of demonstrations, police review commisons and lawsuits; they have improved very little in some areas.

'OAKLAND, Calif. — A clash between Oakland police and Occupy Wall Street protesters left an Iraq War veteran hospitalized Wednesday after a projectile struck him in a conflict that came as tensions grew over demonstration encampments across the San Francisco Bay Area.

Scott Olsen, 24, suffered a fractured skull Tuesday in a march with other protesters toward City Hall, said Dottie Guy, of the Iraq Veterans Against the War. The demonstrators had been making an attempt to re-establish a presence in the area of a disbanded protesters' camp when they were met by officers in riot gear.'

From: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/2 ... 34003.html

Watch at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HequVgLRPUo

Oakland is know as OINKLAND, where pigs run rampant.

BART police cold blooded murder.
Shoots non-violent suspect in the back twice,while face down.

He could not have thought it was a taser,since he fired twice.

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKy-WSZMklc

Seattle is no better.

Rick and Eric Williams sit at the end of a long row of wooden benches that line the Pike Place Market’s Victor Steinbrueck Park in Seattle. Pocket knife in one hand, small pieces of wood in the other, their heads are bowed in concentration as they slowly cut and etch the details of ravens, eagles and other mythic animals.

They will sell the finished totems – done in Dididaht tribal designs passed down for generations – to people passing by. It’s how they’ve always made their living and what their brother, John T. Williams, was doing at the corner of Boren Avenue and Howell Street in downtown Seattle on Aug. 30 when a Seattle police officer got out of his car and shot him four times after he failed to obey commands to drop his pocket knife.

It’s unlikely that Willliams, 50, ever heard the commands, Rick says, much less lunged at the officer with his pocket knife, as police first claimed. He was deaf in one ear, Rick says, walked with a limp, and his eyesight was poor – details that came out last week at a news conference with tribal leaders and civil rights activists who called the shooting a travesty and demanded a transparent investigation and review of the Seattle Police Department’s use of lethal force.

One after another, people who knew John T. Williams and those who didn’t come up to the brothers to express their condolences. That includes Seattle police officers, who have been calling Rick Williams away from the bench to express their sympathy as well – men who work for a department that first described John Williams to the media as a good-for-nothing and homeless “Mr. Trouble” who was “well known” to police.

To Rick, it’s an outrage. His brother was a funny, gentle soul, he says, who gave his time and money to anyone who asked, even though he had nothing. The middle name on his birth certificate was, in fact, “Trouble,” longtime friend Susanne Chambers says, but that was a joke of his parents. John was never violent and the few run-ins he had with the law over the years never involved violence, recklessness or even resisting arrest, she says. Mostly they involved detox.

The Seattle police, on the other hand, have a long record of beating up Native Americans and minorities, tribal and community leaders said Friday at a news conference held at the Chief Seattle Club, a service center where John was a much-loved member. “He was always thinking of other people,” says friend Trina Thornton. “He was never thinking of himself.”

The police officer who shot his brother didn’t see that, Rick says. He only saw a stereotype of a drunk Indian. Now Seattle officers are calling him aside at the Market and saying they’re sorry, that they had seen his brother “whittling” for years. “Pretty words,” says Rick, who says using the word whittling instead of carving is demeaning. “I stand and stare and watch, never saying what I want, because [officers] said [to me] today you’re striking out in anger.

“So you’re judging us still?” he asks. “What makes you better? Because you own a home and have a credit card and you’re unhappy? You have everything. We have what we make out here.

“I want someone to tell the true story of John T.,” Rick says. “I want [people] to see the big picture the way it was for us, the reality of the world we’re in.”

The reality is that John T. Williams never had a chance at a middle-class American life. He came from a family of 12 brothers and sisters whose parents drank and beat them, scattering the children between the streets and foster care at an early age.

Their father, Ray, taught them all to carve in the tradition of their tribe, the Dididaht of Vancouver Island, the family’s original home before coming to Seattle. The elder Williams sold his work to Ye Olde Curiosity Shop and other stores, as John would later, but family members spent much of their early years piled in motel rooms, Rick says, that their father’s or, later, their own carvings might buy them for a few days or a few weeks at the old Atwood Hotel, the Hillside, the Seal or the Thunderbird.

John started carving when he was 6, was drinking at 7 and had only finished the second grade when his father moved back to Canada for a time. Two older brothers, Sam and Dave, followed, leaving Rick and John to fend for themselves as children on the streets of Seattle. Each later established a spot at which to carve and sell their totems – John at the Pike Place Market or on the waterfront and Rick at the Seattle Center, where he carved for 28 years before later moving to Concrete, Wash.

Only three brothers remain now, and only Rick and Eric still carve. Sam died in a hotel room, Rick says. Dave froze to death on a park bench in Vancouver, B.C., with $5,000 in tribal money in his pocket because he had no identification and couldn’t get a motel room. The youngest brother, Nathan, had been drinking when he suffered a heart attack and fell over a wall at the Pike Place Market.

Of the 12, John had been the most talented carver, the brothers and friends say, and a storyteller who always had a tale ready to cheer up a friend. Unlike other carvers, he didn’t need to sketch a design on a piece of wood before starting to cut it with his pocket knife. “He never needed a pencil to draw,” Eric says. “He could just see it.”

“[He could] take a piece of nothing, a piece of log or a two-by-two like you use for railings on a deck [and] flip it one way and carve and flip it another way and carve and in two hours he’d have three different characters on it, all cut through,” Chambers says.

The trouble is that a Native American trying to sell a carving on the street can’t get anywhere near its real worth. “I ask them for $200 and they give me $150 – just so long as I eat,” Rick says – and he’s from a family of known carvers. Years ago, says sister Barbara, who drove down from Canada with other family members on Friday, she can remember John and her father making and selling $5,000 worth of totems each to stores in one day.

But sometime in the ‘90s, Barbara says, a relative in Alaska discovered mass-produced versions of her father’s totems in a store in Alaska. It turned out that a major Indian arts and crafts distributor that she, her father and John had been selling their work to had taken molds of the work and were selling copies.

It’s a common problem, says Adam John, an Alaskan native carver and member of the Chief Seattle Club, that has left native artists like the Williams brothers competing with goods made for pennies in China. John saw no reason to do anything more than make exactly the number of totems he needed to buy what he or his friends might want in a day, Barbara says, which is how the seventh-generation carver came, in the end, to be selling his work for beer and cigarettes.

He had tried many times to quit drinking, says Chambers, who took John in years ago after seeing him carving on the sidewalk in a snowfall. He stayed with her five months and quit drinking, but it didn’t last. Over the years, Chambers says, there were many other attempts, but the bouts of sobriety became fewer and farther between.

That doesn’t mean he was homeless, she says. He lived at 1811 Eastlake, a residential facility for alcoholics that accepted him back even after he exposed himself to staff and threatened to pee on a counter if he couldn’t have more beer. “People do silly things when they’re drunk,” Chambers says. Alcoholism is an addiction, she says, but one that starts for psychological reasons – and John had more than his share.

“I used to get drunk to forget what I’d seen, the way [the police] talk to us, the way they judge us because I’m a long-haired Indian and I’m ‘making a mess on the streets’ [by carving],” says Rick, who is now nine years sober. “Other carvers — I could say names from Alaska to Canada – got into other drugs that killed them or they’re in prison forever. And no one cares …”

But, this time, Rick says, it’s going to be different. “They took something precious from Seattle,” he says of his brother. Rick has a lawyer now and plans to make sure it doesn’t happen again. “My people and I are going to stand up,” he says. “We’re going to make a difference and fight back.”

http://www.realchangenews.org/index.php ... _ASbbC&utm
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Re: gang article and the police

Postby Cotton Over Steel » Tue Dec 20, 2011 11:41 am

Community Control of Police

Affluent white neighborhoods, have always had community control of their police. Their concerns are normally handled by local political party members in the precinct. Familiarity of other neighbors is updated regularly through pot lucks, neighborhood block parties, and other social interactions.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, in the East San Francisco Bay Area, there were regular reports of police brutality, racism, and special treatment. Alameda County Sheriffs were known as the 'Blue Meanies'. Since the City of Oakland had recruited heavily from Deep South white racist crackers, who 'enjoyed there work' harassing minorities and busting skulls, hence earning the name Oinkland for the pigs it employed.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Berkeley had a petition demanding community control of the police, starting with an independent community-elected law enforcement accountability board. They insisted that this body must have the power to investigate police misconduct and indict law officers involved in criminal wrongdoing.

Oakland made some gains in hiring minority police officers; and Deep South focused recruitment ended.

Police were being monitored by citizen street patrols in Berkeley and Seattle university districts. In Berkeley the street patrol was defended by National Lawyer Guild award winner Steven Bingham.
http://www.eventbrite.com/org/37349630

The point of community control of police is that those people living in those neighborhoods will actually do the hiring and firing of the policemen who patrol that area, and those policemen will be people from those neighborhoods - black police for a black neighborhood, Chinese for a Chinese neighborhood, white for a white neighborhood, etc. The tax money which used to be given to the central police department will be divided up among the neighborhood divisions. All the facilities, all the cars, all the equipment for the police that the city now owns, would now be in the hands and in the control of the people in the community.

Progressive forces in the San Francisco Bay area strengthened community ties, as the foundation of community control of police, through block parties, meetings, and pot lucks. People became attuned to their neighborhood by knowing when a stranger might be a threat to the community, through knowing their neighbor's habits, and normal visitors. People now would tell their neighbors when they went on vacation.

If someone heard a yell from the neighborhood loud mouth, or from a couple who regularly quarreled, no alarm was raised, and false reports were minimized. When a community did not care about grass being smoked, no complaint was ever filed; no report

no crime. One could not make the local decriminalization stick because of federal laws, but they could insist that it being given the LOWEST PRIORITY of enforcement. An acceptable police response time for such a violation would be in the range of ten
to forty five minutes, resulting in few arrests. Violent crime police response improved to a three to ten minute range.

If a neighborhood had a lot of children, or was in a school zone, laws would enforced differently; focusing on the impact of the greater younger occupants.

In dry communities, alcohol would be banned for sale or consumption.

Maryland has many laws favoring private school subsidies for a high density of Catholics; Utah for Mormons etc.

If a threat was spotted a neighbor would be called for immediate help, and then the police if needed would be called, since they would be farther away and arrive later.

This cut down on false burglary reports to the police, so it helped decrease their workload, and increase their response time. This added community control also provided a better foundation for prosecution, since there were eye witness(es)'s accounts.

Burglary rates went down, and the police force's effectiveness statistics went up, so the police no longer had any objections.

Once a neighborhood group was functional for a month or two, it might invite the local police officer over, to be accompanied with his choice of either a police spokesperson or his patrol partner. This prevented the police from being ganged up on, and provided the neighbors an environment wear they would not be treated negatively for their direct criticism. Local focus and priorities might be brought up by some. A neighborhoods’ resulting lower false alarm rate, was a good bargaining chip; since it showed an immediate positive result of a community controlled neighborhood. This is a good reason to wait a little, before inviting the police. Best not wait too long, on the other hand, since it might be beneficial of all concerned, for a follow up visit.

In some of the friendlier, compatible areas, such as the South and North Campus area in Berkeley; individual backyard fences were taken down, on two blocks, and a neighborhood communal backyard resulted in a park and/or community garden. An exceptional alliance of multiple neighborhood block alliances, created a large park in north Berkeley. This group eventually annexed some unused railroad tracks, and Bart tracks. Eventually the City of Berkeley bought up, negotiated, or annexed large segments of this, to become a city park.

People in multiple neighborhoods would join together to make group bulk purchases of their non-perishable foods; such as dry goods (rice, floor, nuts etc.) If this went well, fruits and vegetables and dairy products were added. Fish and meat were not used to avoid Health Department monitoring. Nobody was paid, so no tax. If it was profitable, multiple neighborhoods would band together, and get a business license, wholesale certificate with a 10-50% discount), and pay the business tax.

A household would volunteer for a particular duty that month, all members had to volunteer. Duties were rotated every time to keep tasks equal. In order to weed out the slackers and dis-interested, the food purchases would start out once a month for a couple of months first, before becoming weekly.

Community control: where the people who control the police are elected by the people of the community. Police must enforce the laws according to the local community' priority. When the do not, they can be removed by police review commissions.

The result was that Oakland started to recruit local and Blacks for their police, no longer advertised in the Deep South, and through time became responsive to the community. The Berkeley Police became a model police department.

Uniform enforcement is required for a law to be fair and just. For fishing allocations are based upon the groups: commercial fishing, sports fishing, charter fishing, and subsistence fishing. All but subsistence fishing has out of state interests represented.

The groups of fishing harvesters should be monitored to show proportionate uniform enforcement, relative to:
groups ethnic composition relative to its population percentage in the state, and
the sentences to be uniform when found guilty;
groups representation percentage of state income generated,
groups allocated quota representation percentage relative to all fish taken;
other groups ethnic composition; and
locations within and between groups are enforced relative to all of the above.

For example, if more fish and wildlife enforcement time was spent enforcing resident Native subsistence fishing in Angoon, Alaska than the affluent resort type area of Taku, Alaska; the law is invalid, since it is not uniformly enforced.

If fishing enforcement spent twenty percent of their time, enforcing all subsistence fishing, and subsistence fishing’s allocation is only ten percent of the states entire harvest; there is a clear case of selective enforcement, bias, and discrimination.

Without community involvement, there is no community control, only special interest control. Common causes require the investment of active participants.

Other cities and states have benefited immensely from having their police force trained by the California Highway Patrol; it has helped here in Alaska.

"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.", Thomas Paine.

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." Wendell Phillips.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.", Edmund Burke.
Cotton Over Steel
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Location: Juneau and Admirilty Island, Alaska


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