"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=HequVgLRPUoOakland 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