Topic: ISIS is nothing compared to U.S. cops. - page 2. (Read 16631 times)

Palo Alto, CA — Gustavo Alvarez — despite not having a criminal record — says he's been repeated harassed by Palo Alto police. So, two years ago, he had surveillance cameras installed on his home in case his fears of police harassment ever materialized on his doorstep. Earlier this year, that is exactly what happened. Only because Alvarez had these cameras installed is he a free man today.

"I wanted to have proof of what they were doing because I want them to stop harassing me," Alvarez said of why he installed the cameras.

Earlier this year, police accused Alvarez — without any evidence — of driving on a suspended license. Instead of issuing a summons or a citation, the Palo Alto police department sent a unit to Alvarez's residence. When the officer confronted Alvarez, Alvarez asked him if he saw him driving a car, to which the officer replied, "No I did not."

After realizing he was simply receiving more harassment without any evidence of a crime, Alvarez went inside his home and closed the door.

"His opinion [was] that there was no legal justification to detain him," said Alvarez's attorney Cody Salfen. "And that ended up being true because the judge at the Superior Court level found that the officers lacked reasonable suspicion to detain him."

Instead of realizing they had no legal reason to detain him, the officer called for backup and a half dozen heavily armed cops showed up at Alvarez's home — over an alleged traffic ticket. One of those cops was Sgt. Wayne Benitez who appeared to take pleasure in doling out pain to the innocent gay man.

As the video shows, police rip Alvarez from his home where he is slammed on the hood of his car. Benitez then begins punching and slamming Alvarez for no reason at all. He punches Alvarez in the ribs, then the face, and then slams his face into the windshield causing Alvarez to start bleeding as a tooth is knocked loose.

^^^ If you see an ISIS member coming with his gun, you run because you know he is a terrorist.

If you see a cop coming with his gun, you don't run, because you don' know he has tricked you into thinking that he is not a terrorist... but he is.

^^^ Why do you think that ISIS kills without reason? It's a religious jihad.

As you say, cops are designed to protect us. But did you read the article right above your post? It shows that cops are doing a lot of the things that ISIS is doing. EVERYBODY expects ISIS to do thos things. But people trust cops until they get screwed... something nobody does with ISIS ( trust them). But, by law, cops are not required to help with anything. And they are proving it - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.50873402.

The point is, cops have religion. It's religion of selfishness and greed - get away with as much as you can. If they could get away with more ISIS-like activity than they are getting away with, now, they would absolutely do it.

"Sexual predation by police officers happens far more often than people in the business are willing to admit."—Former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper

How could this be happening right under our noses?

That's what readers wanted to know after my column went viral about the extent to which young children are being bought and sold for sex in America.

Where are the police when these children—some as young as 9 years old—are being raped repeatedly?

For that matter, what is the Trump Administration doing about the fact that adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in suburbs, cities and towns across this nation?

I'll tell you what the government is doing: little to nothing.

While America's children are being menaced by sexual predators, the Trump Administration and its congressional cohorts continue to wage endless wars, run up the national debt, and distract the populace with vitriol and kabuki political theater.

The police are not much better.

In too many instances, the cops are worse.

Indeed, while there are certainly many good cops in this country—and I've had the honor of working with a number of them—the bad cops have become symptomatic of a criminal justice system that is deeply rotten through and through.

We can no longer count on police to save us from the worst in our society.

In many cases, rather than being part of the solution, America's police forces—riddled with corruption, brutality, sexual misconduct and drug abuse—have largely become part of the problem. As the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, "Hundreds of police officers across the country have turned from protectors to predators, using the power of their badge to extort sex."

Let's start with sex trafficking.

In a number of cases, victims of sex trafficking report that police are among those "buying" young girls and women for sex.

In other words, as a recent study by the State Commission on the Status of Women and Arizona State University makes clear, "victims are being exploited by the very people who are supposed to protect them: police officers."

Civil asset forfeiture has become a widely-recognized term, largely because of the long train of abuses that has been brought to the public's attention over the last several years. Though few actually know from whence this practice originated, many are aware that the uptick in its use coincided with the rise of the government's War on Drugs. However, the use of civil asset forfeiture began long before the drug war. In fact, its use can be traced all the way back to medieval times and the American founding.

If It Pleases the Crown…

For anyone unfamiliar with the term, civil asset forfeiture is a practice that allows law enforcement to seize money and property from someone suspected of wrongdoing, but who has not yet been charged with a crime. Sadly, many are never charged with a crime and even still find it difficult, if not impossible, to get their seized property back.

The US Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Wednesday that the Excessive Fines Clause in the 8th Amendment applies to state and local governments.

Announced in an opinion written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on her second day back on the bench following a December cancer surgery, the ruling limits states' abilities to seize property and impose fines deemed excessive on citizens who break the law.

"For good reason, the protection against excessive fines has been a constant shield throughout Anglo-American history: Exorbitant tolls undermine other constitutional liberties," wrote Ginsburg, as the court sided with Tyson Timbs of Marion Indiana, whose $42,000 Land Rover SUV was seized by the state following a guilty plea for selling $385 worth of heroin to an undercover detective.

Following a plea bargain, Timbs was sentenced to a year of home detention followed by five years of probation, as well as $1,200 in fees.

"Excessive fines can be used, for example, to retaliate against or chill the speech of political enemies . . . Even absent a political motive, fines may be employed in a measure out of accord with the penal goals of retribution and deterrence."

Timbs drew wide support from civil liberties organizations, according to the Washington Post.

Other USSC Justices were highly critical of property seizures and fines, with Justice Clarence Thomas suggesting that civil forfeitures had become "widespread and highly profitable."

"This system — where police can seize property with limited judicial oversight and retain it for their own use — has led to egregious and well-chronicled abuses," Thomas wrote, referring to reporting by The Washington Post and the New Yorker.

At oral argument, Timbs's lawyer said the case was a simple matter of "constitutional housekeeping." -Washington Post

PHOENIX — The Maricopa County Attorney's Office has asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation to review the actions of Glendale police officers at the center of a 2017 incident where a man was tased 11 times by Glendale police.

"After having personally reviewed all available video evidence, I have determined further investigation is warranted," county attorney Bill Montgomery said in a Wednesday statement. "In order to ensure the public's confidence in any future determination of whether the use of force was lawful, review by an uninvolved agency is appropriate."

Montgomery's statement comes the same day Arizona Governor Doug Ducey called the initial investigation into the actions of Officer Matthew Schneider unacceptable and said he wanted to see the investigation into the actions of the Glendale officer re-opened.

"What I saw on that videotape did not represent the law enforcement that I know in the state of Arizona. What I saw was completely unacceptable," Ducey said. "And it seems to me that the investigation was whitewashed. I'd love to see the county attorney's office re-open the investigation and get to the bottom of what happened there and hold people accountable."

In a statement, an FBI spokesperson said the agency is responsible for investigating potential violations of federal civil rights statutes.

"Any time civil rights violations are brought to the attention of the FBI, the FBI collects all available facts and evidence and will ensure they are reviewed in a fair, thorough, and impartial manner," according to spokesperson Jill McCabe. Citing department policy, McCabe said the FBI cannot confirm particular investigations or comment on cases where criminal charges have not been filed.

I admit that I haven't been running around questioning people about the way they feel about cops. Have you?

Wherever you get your stats from, how do you know they are being reported on correctly and honestly. If it is from polls, they can be adjusted any way the pollsters want to adjust them. And the questions asked of people polled are often very ambiguous in their meaning between the pollster and the people polled.

Google hits is a much better way of taking a look at how people really feel.

Further, the percentage doesn't matter with this comparison between ISIS and cops. Why? Because ISIS is expected to terrorize at times, but not at other times. Cops are expected to never terrorize.

In America, have you ever heard of innocent 'til proven guilty? The jails are full of people awaiting trial, who were not violent, and are not proven guilty. And the prisons are full of innocent people who harmed no-one, but were talked into agreeing that they were guilty, by the courts. And cops terrorized them to put them there. Cops are way worse than ISIS.

Right, because google results = real statistics? If I type ''gay'' in google and I get 2.3b results, does it mean that there are 2.3b gays in the world? Are you actually dumb? There were like 1000 people killed in 2018 by police and that's overall, not counting which were justified or not but even then that's still not even 1% of cops.

Well, Google doesn't really go along with your stats, even if they say they do, formally. Try a bunch of antonyms for "brutality" in Google, and you might possibly get triple the hits that you would with police brutality. That doesn't equal out to 0.1%.

If you Google a bunch of words that are synonyms of "brutality," you get a whole bunch more hits for brutality.

I guess I'm a little surprised at how many people are against cops. Besides, that wasn't the point. The point was that ISIS does their job way better than cops, if they terrorize or if they don't. Why? Because cops aren't supposed to terrorize at all. But there are times when ISIS gets to take a break from terrorizing.

Statistically police brutality is less than 0.1% of the cops mate, I already showed you stats.

I don't know what you are talking about. All big-city cops are in a branch or chapter of the Police Union. Many of the rest of them are, as well.

Perhaps the legal definition of terrorism doesn't include the terrorizing that cops do. But there are a whole lot of average people who include cop terrorism in their common law definition.

Google gives us almost 30 million hits on police brutality. You can find loads of people who talk about police terrorism.

The ''police union'' is formed by a few people so I don't know what your point is. Cops when acting wrong are not using terrorism, by definition.

In certain ways, anyone who does wrong is like ISIS. But if the wrong doesn't include terrorism as ISIS does, then they are not like ISIS.

And I have shown you that there aren't any good cops. All of them will back the police union in almost any case, no matter how the police union decides, good, bad, or indifferent. The best that cops might be is silent on an issue.

Horribly wrong analogy. Anyone is like ISIS then when they do what they are not meant to?

''Cops are worse than ISIS because they terrorize'' Also I have shown you that most cops 99.9%+ are good cops and the other ones do not terrorize either since it doesn't fit the definition of terrorism.

ISIS acts as ISIS does because that's the way they are supposed to act.

Cops in Arizona are forbidden by Arizona law from asking for ID without a reason. The turn signal thing was simply an excuse to make people think that they had a reason.

In other words, ISIS is law abiding because they do what they are lawfully meant to do... terrorize.

Cops are worse than ISIS because they terrorize when they are strictly forbidden from terrorizing, but they do it anyway.