Slashdot Mirror
Sci-Fi Author Peter Watts Beaten, Charged During Border Crossing
JoeGee writes "On December 8th, Canadian sci-fi author Peter Watts, author of the Rifters trilogy and Blindsight, was crossing the US/Canadian border at Port Huron, Michigan when he was involved in an altercation with US Border Patrol agents. According to Watts, he was beaten, left half-naked in a cold cell, and finally dumped on the Canadian side of the border with no coat. A legal consultant from the Electronic Frontier Foundation was successful in helping a civil rights lawyer in Michigan free Watts. Watts faces US charges of assaulting a federal officer. Based on the accounts, one can assume Watts did so by hitting the officer's hand with his face. If convicted, Watts faces two years in a US Federal prison."
They should give the border patrol the Nobel Peace Prize for keeping America safe.
So, did they just forget about the other mandatory bullshit charge, resisting arrest?
I think I'd like to hear both sides of the story before I decide. Everyone who gets into an altercation with any sort of law enforcement officer always claims "I was like so totalllly innocent, dude!"
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
most federal officers should be beaten. you should probably have the shit kicked out of you too
If you consider the border patrols trustworthy, sure. I don't. I'd bet the only "crime" Peter Watts committed was of arguing back.
He back in Canada, do u think he would come back to the states to face charge? if they try to extradite him I'm sure the Canadian judge will laugh in the US face for wasting the courts time.
I'm struggling, but don't worry when i get it, it'll be electric
on the other hand, this may be another victory in the war on tourism.
What most people don't realize is ANY "unwanted" contact with any officer or agent of a government entity is assault. Tapping them on the shoulder when they're yelling at your friend would constitute assault on an officer. Something as innocent as brushing the agent's hand away would provoke that charge, which I suspect is the case here.
Wake up people, our laws are broken.
It sounds like the facts aren't all in yet, so let's not leap to conclusions. We're hearing the account of Cory Doctorow -- who in his novel "Little Brother" had an obvious axe to grind against Homeland Security and law enforcement, to the point of suggesting "9/11 was an inside job". (Says one of the leaflets dropped by the novel's heroic protesters.) We're also hearing second-hand from Watts and the other people in the car. We're not yet hearing the guards' account. Maybe Doctorow et. al. are completely right, but let's not assume so right off the bat, eh?
The Doctorow account quotes Watts saying that he got out of his car when questioned (mistake #1), then refused the order to get back in (mistake #2). No, of course that doesn't justify a beating. It just suggests we don't have the whole story.
Revive the Constitution.
Everyone who gets into an altercation with any
sort of law enforcement officer always claims
"I was like so totalllly innocent, dude!"
apparently you haven't seen the video of a bart police officer shooting in the back a man who was being held face down on the ground by other officers, or the more recent case where a bart police officer grabbed someone [who did need to be taken off the train], walked the poor guy across the platform and smashed a glass barrier with the guy's face.
it is incidents like these that make me less likely to believe the law enforcement officer's side of the story.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Well, that's only because I was!!!!
prevented the millennial bomber. No small thing.
We visited Canada this summer and our experience with the US border patrol when we were returning home leads me to entirely believe the story as told by Watts. I've honestly had better and more pleasant experiences with the East German border patrol in the mid-80s.
It seems he didn't. Looks like he was being delayed at the checkpoint, got out of the car to ask what was going on, the officer told him to get back in the car, and instead asked a question. Now, when a police officer is in a situation like that, he usually likes to have complete control of the situation (understandable, since sometimes they end up dead when things get out of control). If he feels like you are trying to take control, things can escalate quickly. It would have been better for our author friend to instead get back in the car.
Now, from what I've read, it seems the border patrol escalated quickly and unnecessarily. In tense situations that can happen. It basically sucked to be Peter Watts at that moment.
Also it's worth noting that in some jurisdictions, assault doesn't have to be physical, it can be verbal. So if you do end up in a similar situation, the best thing is to be calm and acquiescent in the moment, and then sue the hell out of them later.
Qxe4
In a mature society, "civil servant" is semantically equal to "civil master." - Robert Heinlein
Never understimate the power of human stupidity -Lazarus Long
...but I'm not sure what.
The initial interaction with the officers was most likely his own damn fault. Getting out of the car uninvited is an aggressive act. How were the officers to know whether or not he was a threat. Moreover, the guy is STILL upset and self-righteous over it, so I'd bet that at the time, he wasn't exactly calm and level-headed, either.
But his account of the following hours? There's more to the story that we aren't being told. Frankly, I'm calling bullshit.
Of course, being a sci fi geek he wouldn't have an inflated opinion of himself and a problem with authority, would he? He wouldn't have, say, raised his voice and shoved an officer, and gotten belligerent when they tried to restrain him, right? Of course he didn't resist arrest, did he?
Just imagining the story as I might hear it from someone in fandom...something about just going to help some orphans when for no reason some officer yanks 'em out of their car and beats 'em up...
your huddled masses longing to be free.
But you SF authors better stay the fuck out!
Look guys, this is the same story we hear over and over again. First we need to hear the side of the border guards; secondly, always assume that government officials are assholes. Do what they ask, obey their orders, don't be a smartass - as a result, you will generally speaking be OK.
If you talk back, disobey orders and give them a hard time, crap like this will most likely happen to you because you escalate the situation and make the lives of people who already have miserable jobs more miserable. That's not an excuse, but don't be surprised when stuff like this happens.
Let's wait for some actual facts, please, before lionizing this guy as a victim.
PS - Government police forces are supported by taxes. Quit voting for the guys who want to raise your taxes if you don't want government thugs to beat you up.
Not only am I raped over $40 in fees just to cross your petty border. You Americans must protect your tourism industry and stop this harassment.
Since quite a few are asking, I figured I'd provide the pertinent sections of TFAs.
According to an update in the Boing Boing article, Watts got out of the car to ask what was happening -- presumably because his car and/or person was being searched. When the officers refused to answer and told him to get back in the car, he asked the question again. At which point he was attacked, his property was seized, and he was asked to waive his Miranda rights.
Sounds like the unfortunate combination of a pissed off officer and a less-that-sympathetic citizen compounded by detectives/officers who get pissed when prisoners refuse to talk. I can empathize with both parties (first and second, not third -- right to remain silent means right to remain silent,) but -- assuming the accuracy of Watts' story -- the assault charge is probably trumped up. Convincing a judge of that is a whole different story.
in the blue corner it's "hasty generalisation" weighing in at zero examples and in the red corner it's "the opposite hasty generalisation" weighing in at two anecdotes! ding ding! round one!
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
I got a tweet about this earlier today.
I can't wait to hear what really happened here. It's wouldn't be so outlandish if Watts' version of the story is entirely true, especially with the number of police beatings that get online where the exact same thing has happened (i.e. someone not resisting at all, getting beaten up, and then charged with resisting arrest).
Over 10 years ago now, Indianapolis had the infamous "police street brawl" incident where a group of off duty drunk policemen went around picking fights with guys and harassing women in down town Indianapolis. Everyone that tried to protect women in that situation ended up in jail with a bunch of bruises on resisting arrest charges. I don't believe even one of the cases ever made it to court. Still the police union backed their boys to the very end. I believe they even called the mayor a commie at one point...
Those damn sci-fi authors. You know the type. Big burly guys, lots of leather, gnarly facial hair, riding around on their "motorcycles" and causing trouble. I say throw the book at him.
Okay, so there are two sides to the story; and the only thing published is a fiction writers. Judging from his blog, there are a lot of people looking for an excuse to be sorry to be American. Here I get to play the other side, who won't say anything because that's the appropriate thing.
He got out of the car during a border crossing, obviously without instruction from law enforcement. That he was half-naked suggests something of the state he was in before he precipitated the altercation. Without video, there's nothing to say he didn't take a swing at the law enforcement, who responded in kind. You never get out of the car when stopped by law enforcement without their explicit say so. There was a time when you could do that; but we've had enough criminals who have attacked that the cops can't take chances. By getting out of the car and refusing to return, he precipitated this event.
Sorry, no sympathy.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
I'm not clear on exactly where he was. The articles really don't do a very good job of describing what happened. At the border crossings I am familiar with, there is no barrier on leaving the US. There's a place where you can park and go in if you have some business there (e.g. notifying them that you're leaving the US at the end of a limited term stay), but there is no place where you pull up and are asked questions. Of course, they can close off the lane if they are looking for a fugitive or something, but in normal circumstances you just drive right on through to the Canadian side. So, was he singled out for some reason and pulled over as he left the US?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_TfBbR6L0M (canadian idiot)
The opposite hasty generalization? A couple posts upstream someone said, "I think I'd like to hear both sides of the story before I decide." Is that the same as, "He must've deserved it"?
Revive the Constitution.
I thought everyone knew not to trust Peter Watts.
apparently you haven't seen the video of a bart police officer shooting in the back a man who was being held face down on the ground by other officers, or the more recent case where a bart police officer grabbed someone [who did need to be taken off the train], walked the poor guy across the platform and smashed a glass barrier with the guy's face.
The BART shooting incident appears to have been incompetence in that the officer thought he pulled his taser. You'd have to be pretty brazen to shoot on purpose while surrounded by the public. The cop that threw the guy at the wall probably didn't realize that the glass would break. The guy was resisting and trying to attack the cop.
If slashdot was ran by people without (obvious) agenda, perhaps the headline could read:
"Sci-Fi Author Peter Watts Claims To Be Beaten, Charged During Border Crossing".
Other than that - all is well, though I am ready to bet that either there was more to this story or less. I.e. either he actually did something, for example being a douche and claiming he is a famous sci-fi writer and has a right to cross borders without being searched, certainly his hysterical blog post lends credence to this idea), or perhaps he wasn't beaten and left "half naked" (did the border guards seize his clothes?).
In any case,there is definitely additional information that needs to come to light, and it'd be nice if slashdot did not claim a post of offended party to be statement of fact.
I believe the point people are making is that if US troops are still mired in the mess that is Afghanistan and if the Middle East is still seething with anti-American hatred because of their occupation of Iraq, why exactly is this guy getting a Nobel prize for peace? It looks, and is, a political gift, not a recognition of achievement.
Misunderstanding the office of the president as being some supreme determinator of US policy is a mistake anyway. The President is the most visible of a group of people that determine what path the US takes politically, but not some sort of one-man policy machine.
Now the US is trying its best to hold back Israel from kicking off a war with Iran, and for that they get my respect (even if it is just sanity on their part). But I fail to see what Obama has done to earn a Nobel peace prize.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
The guards at Port Huron are not cool. I have had problems with them in the past.
This should not be treated as an isolated incident.
As a Canadian I will never understand why the US is so eager about its boarder security with Canada.
Take a look at a map of North America, we share a huge boarder. If some one wanted to get across undetected, they would go to Calgary, Edmonton, etc. Buy/Rent a off-road vehicle and just drive in across some open fields. It's not hard to figure out.
Boarder security at major ports of entry just pisses everyone off and hurts trade. The most they are going to catch are some teenagers buying pot and Canadian beer. The only real threat at the CAN/US boarder is people bringing handguns into Canada (where they are illegal) and selling them to Toronto street gangs.
Now they are giving a middle aged white guy a hard time? Please, this security theatre has gone too far.
I think I'd like to hear both sides of the story before I decide.
Hi, you must be new here...
When an unarmed man alone gets into a fight with multiple armed people, it's a rare case where the unarmed man is the aggressor.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
In all jurisdictions, assault is *never* physical. The moment something becomes physical it is "battery."
Assault is the threat of committing harm. Battery is the carrying out of that threat.
I was like so totalllly innocent, dude!
Is that you Ronnie Dobbs?
Surely one of the survelliance cameras will have footage of Watts assaulting an officer... or five.
Right?
And, you may want to be careful how you answer when asked the question "Did you touch the officer?" Based on my close friend's experience who spent the night at the local police station after standing between a man who was assaulting a 14-year old and his victim (who was being seemingly kidnapped), a touch counts as assault. Turned out the man was an off duty officer who later filed assault charges. The kid was screaming with pain on a city street and trying to get away from the man.
Happily posting as AC. This is a police state already.
I can't help but wonder about Canadian Health Coverage verses American Health Coverage. Maybe being Renditioned to Canada was the wiser result? Also, this event makes me think that the movie, "Born in East L.A." is proving to be not so whimsical after all.
apparently you haven't seen the video of a bart police officer shooting in the back a man who was being held face down on the ground by other officers, or the more recent case where a bart police officer grabbed someone [who did need to be taken off the train], walked the poor guy across the platform and smashed a glass barrier with the guy's face.
The BART shooting incident appears to have been incompetence in that the officer thought he pulled his taser. You'd have to be pretty brazen to shoot on purpose while surrounded by the public. The cop that threw the guy at the wall probably didn't realize that the glass would break. The guy was resisting and trying to attack the cop.
The first cop had to be pretty damn stupid to not distinguish a gun from a taser, while the second cop should be up on charges (GLWT) - who cares if the barrier is gonna break?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Now, when a police officer is in a situation like that, he usually likes to have complete control of the situation (understandable, since sometimes they end up dead when things get out of control).
This is a common myth. Police officers are *rarely* killed on the job. And border guards? I'm sure it must happen, but it seems it must be exceptionally rare in their case. But somehow that's given as an excuse when they beat the shit out of someone for *daring* to ask a question.
If he feels like you are trying to take control, things can escalate quickly.
"Take control"? The border guards have fucking guns. More to the point, they beat and imprisoned the guy. Even further, they can press charges against him. What did he do? Asked a question? HOW DARE HE!
It would have been better for our author friend to instead get back in the car.
No, it would have been much, much worse. The worst thing one can do in the face of fascism is to acquiesce. Worst thing for society, specifically. Whether backing down or not was something he should do personally depends on how much he cares about personal liberty and what exactly he did. If all he did was ask a question, I can't see any way in which he should have known better.
Also it's worth noting that in some jurisdictions, assault doesn't have to be physical, it can be verbal. So if you do end up in a similar situation, the best thing is to be calm and acquiescent in the moment, and then sue the hell out of them later.
Shit, in some cases, assault can be a dirty look. But you're right, the best thing to do is be a good little slave and bow to your masters...
I am just saying that you can't tar the entire border patrol with one brush. sheesh.
Even under the Obama administration the message to foreigners still seems to be stay away or risk getting beaten and generally abused.
Loose lips lose spit.
Apparently border officers like to beat people up.
http://articles.latimes.com/2004/jul/30/world/fg-tianjin30
"I suspect this is just red meat for the typical angry "Fuck the police", authority-hating responses."
Of course. All authority is bad and an interference with humankinds natural state of perfect lovingkindness.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
The cop that threw the guy at the wall probably didn't realize that the glass would break. The guy was resisting and trying to attack the cop.
Actually, that nut job punched the glass.
inb4 not your personal army
So it's OK to assault someone with a taser who is being held down and it's fine to smash someone's face but not glass?
You, yes You, are a symptom of a sick society.
But I fail to see what Obama has done to earn a Nobel peace prize.
He made the Norwegian leftists on the Nobel committee wet with the anticipation of what he might do?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I live in Port Huron, funny to see that as the head line today...
Being a "sci-fi author" gives him the ability heard in a public forum about entering the US.
As for past issues listen to : Steve Bierfeldt of Ron Paul Campaign for Liberty been confronted by TSA 3/27/09 in at the St. Louis airport.
He was carrying Ron Paul bumper stickers and cash.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3394970594491846292
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Well they got the order wrong. For resisting arrest it's 1. arrest 2. beat. For an assaulting an officer change they apparently beat you first, then arrest you.
(I defy anyone to take a severe beating without doing SOMETHING that, out of context, could be described as assaulting an officer.)
Come on guys, let's hear it.
"Watts had it coming."
"They were just doing their job."
"He should have kept his mouth shut."
"Sieg Heil!"
You pro-police assholes who jerk off to cop shows and cheer on police brutality have your chance to come out of the woodwork, as you always do, to tell us all how being a cop is so "stressful", and this kind of thing "just happens" from time to time, and we need to "deal with it".
Come on, out with it.
Whether he deserves it or not, he isn't really the one that deserves the criticism for giving it to him (I suppose he could have tried not accepting it, but I doubt that would have gone over any better than accepting it).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I've travelled between Canada and the US many times and I've never had to go through US border security when LEAVING the US. When did this change?
That said, in all my travels, I've never encountered any US border agent who was anything less than professional, even when under significant stress. Not saying that it cannot happen, but it must be a rare event.
linquendum tondere
Some of us lack the funds to sue anyone. Does this mean we should all be cowed before law enforcement unless we happen to be rich? This seems like a rather classist system you are arguing for.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
IANAL, and i'm only passingly knowledgeable about this in Canada.
scenario:
Person A walks up to Person B with a lead pipe and says "i'm going to beat your brains out with this lead pipe!"
Person B pees themselves and runs away.
Person A has committed Civil Assault
Person A chases down Person B and hits them with the pipe
Person A has committed Civil Battery and Criminal Assault
The Crown can charge Person A under the criminal offence, Person B can charge Person A under the civil offences
And make sure Neal Stephenson wrote it.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
There's no "law" at play in this kind of an incident. Thanks to the "War on Terror" and the "War on Drugs", our civil rights are forfeit.
This is called tyranny. We are therefore subjugated and oppressed. We have no real rights. The rights we're told we have are false. The US system of law has degenerated into a system of oppression. It's "might", not "right". Power trumps principle.
"American freedom" is a laughingstock. We are not a nation of justice, truth, and human rights; we are a nation of liars, cheats, and thugs. And we don't have any right to talk about "freedom", or "liberty", given that this is an entire history, not just a bad example or a bad decade, of injustice, oppression, propaganda.
Some people think Chicago didn't get the games because of border issues.
Athletes' families, friends, blabla all getting in the states? What about North Korean athletes? Iranians and so on
Don't know if this incident is true but this is just another one (real or not) that shows how bad the experience can be.
If Watts' account is even close to correct, those agents belong in fucking jail.
No, it would have been much, much worse. The worst thing one can do in the face of fascism is to acquiesce. Worst thing for society, specifically
Dude, if you want to fight for your civil liberties by putting yourself in front of a police baton, where it makes little difference, go ahead. As for me, I'll fight for what I care about in the courts and at the ballot box, where it can actually make a difference. You may consider that being a slave, but that's ok because I consider your method just dumb.
Qxe4
You have to realize that police have to deal with people from all walks of life not just rational logical people. There are many people out there that with the right mix of substances and provocations would be the aggressor against multiple armed people. "I can take on 10 cops"
I'd guess everyone at the border is videotaped. Where's the video?
http://www.thetimesherald.com/article/20091211/NEWS01/91211010/1002/Science+fiction+writer+charged+after+bridge+struggle
"Jones said Watts was crossing into Michigan from Point Edward when he was selected at random for a secondary Customs inspection. Watts exited his vehicle "angrily" and border officers began checking the black sport utility vehicle he was driving, Jones said.
Border officers ordered Watts back into the vehicle, and when he refused, officers attempted to handcuff him, Jones said. At that point, Watts began to resist and pull away from the officers "and became aggressive toward officers," Jones said.
Jones said a border officer used pepper spray to subdue Watts. Jones said Watts "choked" an officer during the struggle. "
(I suppose he could have tried not accepting it, but I doubt that would have gone over any better than accepting it).
It would have gone over pretty good with the domestic crowd, the overwhelming majority of which feels that the award was unearned.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I realise that. But I can tell the difference between an angry person and a man mad enough to charge armed police officers with his bare hands. I think cops that deal with these situations should certainly be able to do so.
Besides, its not for the police officers to initiate violence on the grounds that the other person might.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I saw the video of that. The guy being arrested was drunk and belligerent and was holding his hand out when it hit the glass. It wasn't his head but his hand that hit the glass. Did you see the video someone recorded of it and put online? The guy was picking fights with people on the train. When the officer pulled him off the train, you could hear everyone in the train car clapping. It was pretty clear that the officer didn't do anything wrong.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
I'm totally a fan for border patrols... however there should be a shift in their duties. Instead of keeping canadians and mexicans out, they should focus on keeping americans in.
Read what I mean, not what I wrote.
I'm not arguing for any system, I'm saying that's how it is. In my ideal system we don't need police because everyone is honest, but so far we haven't figured out how to do that.
Qxe4
I think I'd like to hear both sides of the story before I decide.
I have crossed the border into Canada several times since 9/11 (when border security changed radically in tone), and based off of my personal experiences with the border guards, I am going to have to just assume that this guy was in the right. They are a bunch of cocksuckers who are rude to their own citizens.
The Canadian border security forces have been polite, intelligent, and professional to me. The US security forces have like behaved surly, angry assholes. If my experiences were any watermark of what was typical, I am amazed we have any Canadian tourists at all.
I think it's retaliation for CBSA officers hassling Amy Goodman. Good on the Border Patrol for defending America's honour.
I make a reasonable middle-class wage by going to work and not spamming blogs with scams.
In the Halifax airport there's a preclearance for crossing the US border. Yes, they still do all of the annoying US border crossing stuff, but they are much much friendlier about it than at other crossings I've been to. Yes, It only really helps if your flying, but it takes so much stress out of flying to the US.
This is a common myth. Police officers are *rarely* killed on the job.
Why is that relevant? Statistically speaking our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are "rarely" killed in the line of duty. So I guess they don't have any reason to fear death when they go out on patrol? A police officer has to worry about taking a bullet every single time he has an interaction with someone. Have you ever known that kind of fear? Ever had to contemplate absorbing a small piece of lead at supersonic speeds when you show up at the office?
I cut them a lot of slack even though I've had my share of run-ins with asshole cops. Even if you are dealing with one that's a complete asshole it does you no good to escalate the situation. It's only going to make it worse. Suck it up and do what they tell you. If the abuse was particularly egregious then do the American thing and sue the hell out of them at a later date.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
It sounds like the facts aren't all in yet, so let's not leap to conclusions.
Border stations have more security cameras than you can shake a stick at. I guarantee the whole thing was caught on at least one security camera. And the border officers damn well know that both their supervisors, and the courts, will see that video.
Also, Doctorow WAS NOT A WITNESS. He's repeating what the guy told him, which means his information is from the accused, and was initially second-hand, since he then "updates" the story with words directly from the accused.
I heard about it early Wednesday morning in London
Also, accounts (which all appear to have come from the accused) seem to range wildly and aren't consistent on basic facts, despite them coming from the same source- the accused. Some mention him "getting shitkicked" and others simply say he was pepper-sprayed, put on the ground, and arrested. None of the accounts are a specific retelling. He doesn't mention EXACTLY what happened, what was said, etc. Since he's talking at all, that means he hasn't talked to his lawyer (or his lawyer is grossly incompetent, which is what you get for hiring a bunch of EFF lawyers instead of a criminal defense attorney. The first thing you do in something like this is SHUT UP ABOUT IT, unless you want to be hearing it read back in court.)
$5000 says he was told his car was being searched, he started throwing a temper-tantrum, got out of the car, was told to get back in the car, pushed an officer away from him, and that earned him being pepper-sprayed and arrested.
Much as I am not a fan of the border patrol's search powers, nor cops in general- police are usually trained to DE-escalate confrontations, and arrests and the like mean paperwork. Think about how much fun change control request forms and HR paperwork are...cops don't like it any more than you do.
Please help metamoderate.
Wow, no one has blamed Bush yet, what happened to everybody?
Overly officious US border agents, the "Guantanamo halo effect" (ie. there is no rule of law)and the general unfriendliness at the border have caused me to cease visiting the US. I can say that I am far from the only Canadian I know that now refuses to cross the border.
I don't buy there, travel there, spend there, or .... even do business there.
I'm hoping that with the Obama administration I (and others) will become a little more comfortable and eventually travel through/to the US, but I'm far from the only Canadian that feels this way. Pity .... the US in general are great neighbors and great people.
Some people think that's complete bullshit, considering Americans didn't decide the Olympics should go to Rio. Especially considering that Obama himself went to pitch Chicago before the IOC.
"one can assume Watts did so by hitting the officer's hand with his face."
He's lucky he didn't hit the officer's knee with his testicles.
They're called an exit inspection. At random times throughout the day, CBP will post a handful of guards to inspect random vehicles as they are leaving the US. They've been doing it, at least at the border crossings in SE Michigan, for at least 5 years.
Slashdot assumption of Watts innocents all the while going on the usual OMG FACISIM rant reminds me of how the the whole Hans Reisen fiasco unfolded. I'm with you, I want to hear the whole story here.
I am a Canadian citizen living in Canada.
I have been entering and leaving the USA for pretty much my whole life.
I am 53.
A few years ago I stopped going to the USA, except when absolutely necessary.
One of the most dangerous places I can think of is a US border crossing.
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
I see you have never dealt with addicts.
Are you so sure that they have video cameras covering the exit area? One weird thing about this is that the incident happened as he was leaving the US, where you normally don't stop at all.
Pardon, but being "*rarely* killed" is still being 'killed' nonetheless.
As a rule, I think it is not smart to fuck with armed people who work in jobs where they are much more likely to be killed (however 'rarely') than those of us in 'normal' jobs. I know that I personally would hate to be killed, and so can understand that it is probably a bit more stressful than what I am used to, working with/in the knowledge of that being killed on the job is a distinctly more likely possibility than in most other jobs.
Do I like subjugating myself to the control of a police of whatever sort? No, I don't. I hate it. But I can do it, when it means I can otherwise get along with my life in order to try and effect the change necessary to not have to deal with that sort of thing down the road. Whether that means working towards changing the system, or just getting the fuck away from/out of it.
Don't fuck with cops when things get stressful. It ain't smart. Wait 'til later, out of the stressful and high-strung situation, and you can be much more effective at whatever your intended purpose is.
The sci-fi authors audience on this story is not going to be appreciatively larger than had he done the things needed to _stay out of jail_ for two years, and spent that time as a free man writing and exposing the incident from the standpoint of someone who isn't in jail. Not to mention that the two years would be, for him, much more enjoyable.
Ask Mandela if he was able to do more from inside his jail cell, than from without.
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
The guards at Port Huron are not cool. I have had problems with them in the past. This should not be treated as an isolated incident.
Not my experience at all. I drive across lower Ontario 5-6 times/year - from Buffalo/Niagara Falls area to Michigan and return. Never had any problem at the Port Huron (Michigan)--Sarnia (Ontario) crossing. When leaving Michigan there is a toll barrier (for the bridge), but I've never seen any sign of US border guards as I leave. Just stick out my passport when I enter either country and answer a few questions. If they are profiling on appearance, I could be a prime target--ponytail and beard...
As for me, I'll fight for what I care about in the courts and at the ballot box, where it can actually make a difference.
Those make almost no difference. The courts don't matter because it would be your word against the word of a couple sworn upholders of the law (who of course would have erased any recordings that you might try to have subpoenaed). The ballot box doesn't matter because don't blame me I voted for Kodos.
What does make a difference is getting people in general to actually give a damn. So you get things like the organized civil disobedience of the civil rights movement, where demonstrations of what's wrong are forced into the public's awareness. This in turn leads to a chance that someone decent (at least with regard to that one item) might appear on the ballot and actually have a chance of getting elected, and that those running for reelection will have to at least act like they care so they have less risk of getting kicked out.
What did he do? Asked a question? HOW DARE HE!
Well, to be fair, he asked the question *twice*.
Maybe the cop-lovers posting in this thread will somehow spin it such that by repeating the question, he was "asking for it".
Apparently you aren't aware that when someone is 'assaulting an officer', an EMP blast is given off which results in all surveillance cameras in the area failing to record.
That isn't totally correct. The man's hand hit the glass first, causing it to smash, not his face.
I believe the point people are making is that if US troops are still mired in the mess that is Afghanistan and if the Middle East is still seething with anti-American hatred because of their occupation of Iraq, why exactly is this guy getting a Nobel prize for peace? It looks, and is, a political gift, not a recognition of achievement.
Congratulations. You win this year's Nobel Prize in Science! Obama won the prize for not being Bush, and that's it. It was the international community's way of telling America they don't hate us (as much) any more.
By the way, I've been through that border crossing several times, and they seem to have made it a point to hire the most disagreeable people possible. Canadians on the other side were totally cool though.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Uttering the phrase "I won't answer your questions; I want to speak to a lawyer".
Come back when you've researched "threshold inquiry." If police have reasonable suspicion that you're up to something criminal, they can investigate. That includes interviewing you. If you don't cooperate, and they still suspect you of a crime, they can arrest you while they further investigate, for a limited time, until they must charge you.
Given that everything there is legal, if you resist it, yes, you are committing a criminal act. And, whether you are required to present state ID varies state-to-state, but most only require that if you're driving. If you're not driving, you're not required to carry ID.
In MA, you are only required to ANSWER as to your identity- name and address, chiefly, if asked.
Please help metamoderate.
Something you do not understand, getting back in the car like he was told IS EXACTLY the right thing to do. Before you go around pretending you run the world, ask yourself this:
Is there a situation I am not aware of that the officers are? Is there a safety concern they know about that I do not? Do I expect them to converse with me about a situation while it happens? If you really thing that defying authorities is the best way to live your life, go right ahead, and we'll be reading about your incident next.
People are so egocentric. Consider the possibilities before you go causing problems.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
The day that we do pull out of there - which will be with our tails between our legs - will subject the peoples of Afghanistan and nearby states with the same dangers and indignities they'd face if that day were today. The only difference between now and then will be the body count.
I say this in the following capacity:
1. I deployed to a remote Sunni area of Iraq in 2007-08 with lots of rocket, mortar and small-arms fire.
2. I know dozens of people who have deployed to Afghanistan, including close friends.
3. I am at risk of deploying there myself shortly.
That said, I was against this intervention from the start. I am against it now. We should pull out yesterday. We cannot win. Afghanistan has proven intractable to central governance even with 105,000 Soviets there and the will to use armaments that we blanch at. There is no reason to expect that a lesser number of US troops will have any more luck. Only more death lies along that route.
Obama is playing LBJ's game of placating the public to the hilt, but he will understand failure soon enough.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
You're either a lizard, a lizard collaborator, or you're a.....
You know, for Border Guard?
Turning it down would have gone over very well with many of us (assuming that were known - I think they make discreet enquiries first). But I do agree that he doesn't deserve criticism for being offered it. That's a fair point and I'll retract any criticism I directed toward him.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
If he's smart, his lawyer has subpoenaed the surveillance camera footage before it's miraculously "lost". If they claim there isn't footage I'd have someone out there photographing the camera that was pointed where he was at when the incident took place cause I guarantee there was a camera recording the incident, they have camera's all over those places and half of them are hidden/non obvious.
The other thing I would do is take out ad's on both sides of the border in the paper asking for witnesses to come forward. If his account is correct he shouldn't have a problem beating the charges provided they can locate a witness or video, and with them he's got a slam dunk civil rights suit against DOHS. I'd also take out a civil suit against the border guards directly that the government will be forced to defend, and if not you get the pleasure of going after their personal assets as well.
The east german border guards also didn't get shot at routinely. Look at it from the border guard's perspective. Armed asshole is being abrasive. Armed asshole gets out of the car to assault you. Armed asshole refuses when you try to de-escalate the situation by telling him to get back in the car. Armed asshole gets mouthy and assaults you (that's verbally accosts you, to the ignorant on slashdot). Armed asshole is now a criminal. Armed asshole reaches for his weapon. Fight on.
The cops must assume that everyone is armed until frisked. That's the only way to stay alive. I'm sorry you're perception is that the border patrol is a bunch of bullies, but their perceptive is a little more rude and first person. http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hPSwshFPzVfadMmjIwIckSRrKxswD9C3FN1O2 is the most recent conviction, but hardly as rare as the news makes it out to be.
There may be good news. People are becoming tired of the Border Patrol's shit on the Southern U.S. border, even in ultra - conservative strongholds like...we'll get to that. Many of them are just now beginning to acknowledge that the "war on terror" is bullshit and the war on drugs will never be won, all while they are being harassed by belligerent border patrol agents. Read this, including the comments.
On a somewhat related note, Blackwater(now Xe) tried and failed to get approval to build a training center near Ocotillo. Now, they have a front group called Wind-zero which wants to try to shoehorn in a training center under cover of building a racetrack(as you can see from their page). They want to build a Disneyland for gun-nuts!
I know people who have attended the approval meetings and their HUMINT has verified that the Blackwater and Winz-zero reps were seen together looking at a map and discussing possible locations.
Well if he was dumb enough to do that then he deserves what he got.
They are nothing alike. They do not look alike, they do not feel alike.
Here's a recently posted article that includes the government's side of the story. It seems to back up Watt's account that the border guards overreacted violently. "A Canadian science fiction writer is facing a felony charge after police said he assaulted a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officer and resisted arrest at the Blue Water Bridge. But the writer, Peter Watts of Toronto, wrote on his blog that he was “punched in the face, pepper-sprayed, sh*t-kicked, handcuffed, thrown wet and half-naked into a holding cell for three (profanity deleted) hours, thrown into an even colder jail cell overnight, arraigned, and charged with assaulting a federal officer, all without access to legal representation (although they did try to get me to waive my Miranda rights. Twice.).” Neither Watts nor U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officials returned phone calls Friday seeking comment about the Tuesday incident. Port Huron police Capt. Jim Jones would not provide the Times Herald with a copy of a police report about the incident Friday. But, he read the police report to a reporter. Jones said Watts was crossing into Michigan from Point Edward when he was selected at random for a secondary Customs inspection. Watts exited his vehicle “angrily” and border officers began checking the black sport utility vehicle he was driving, Jones said. Border officers ordered Watts back into the vehicle, and when he refused, officers attempted to handcuff him, Jones said. At that point, Watts began to resist and pull away from the officers “and became aggressive toward officers,” Jones said. Jones said a border officer used pepper spray to subdue Watts. Jones said Watts “choked” an officer during the struggle. " http://www.thetimesherald.com/article/20091211/NEWS01/91211010/1002/Science+fiction+writer+charged+after+bridge+struggle
Et In Arcadia Ego
It's the pendulum effect. They couldn't give a Nobel Warmongering Prize to GW Bush, so they gave the Nobel Peace Prize to B. Obama.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
OK, what I hear you saying is roughly that if no one cares about a subject enough to get it on the ballot, then it won't be on a ballot. So you use civil disobedience to raise people's attention. Civil disobedience becomes a kind of advertising technique.
The problem is most of the time it doesn't work that well, and it hurts. If you want to get your voice out, there are other ways to do it that work a lot better and don't hurt as much. A well organized ad campaign, for example, will be much more effective than trying to get in a confrontation with police officers.
Qxe4
or prostitutes lol
Jack of all trades,master of none
Now, when a police officer is in a situation like that, he usually likes to have complete control of the situation (understandable, since sometimes they end up dead when things get out of control).
This is a common myth. Police officers are *rarely* killed on the job. And border guards? I'm sure it must happen, but it seems it must be exceptionally rare in their case. But somehow that's given as an excuse when they beat the shit out of someone for *daring* to ask a question.
How is a police officer wanting control a myth? They're trained to do so to protect their own and your life. There's cops who take it too far, same as there's bad apples anywhere, but the idea of taking control of a situation to protect sounds fine. Cops do die and having control helps reduce that happening. Even border cops must see their share of crazy murderers who don't care going for the border.
If he feels like you are trying to take control, things can escalate quickly.
"Take control"? The border guards have fucking guns. More to the point, they beat and imprisoned the guy. Even further, they can press charges against him. What did he do? Asked a question? HOW DARE HE!
Again taking control is there job and what they're trained to do as it would be the best way in the majority to stop things escalating. They don't have time to explain to everyone what's going on, or to sit down and talk things through and listen to arguments. This guy didn't do what he was told by the cop and the cop turned out to be a bad apple. But cops do tell you what to do for a reason.
It would have been better for our author friend to instead get back in the car.
No, it would have been much, much worse. The worst thing one can do in the face of fascism is to acquiesce. Worst thing for society, specifically. Whether backing down or not was something he should do personally depends on how much he cares about personal liberty and what exactly he did. If all he did was ask a question, I can't see any way in which he should have known better.
What if some lunatic was up the road with the border cops mates hostage? What if there's a car full of tnt up the road? This is a country's border, not walking down the street in Hicksville. There's a point when you have to accept some authority to let the cop do his job and protect you. This isn't fascism or whatever your anon retard thinking is. It isn't just the guy asked a question and got dragged out and beaten, it escalated to that point.
Also it's worth noting that in some jurisdictions, assault doesn't have to be physical, it can be verbal. So if you do end up in a similar situation, the best thing is to be calm and acquiescent in the moment, and then sue the hell out of them later.
Shit, in some cases, assault can be a dirty look. But you're right, the best thing to do is be a good little slave and bow to your masters...
You're at a countries border, do what the guards tell you. This isn't bowing down or anything, it's following the laws of that country that protect you and everyone else there. Don't want to do what the border guard says? Good, fuck off. Want to argue and question what they're doing when they're just going by what they've been trained to do for your protection? You're gonna get beaten and thrown in a cell. Other countries you'd probably be shot.
To visit the family cabin on the US side of the border, I can say that about 50 percent of the US Customs agents are assholes on a power trip, pure and simple. Some at our border crossing have had sexual harassment charges leveled against them.
I've run into a few jerk-off Canadian Customs agents as well.
I hate putting myself in the power of these individuals - it seems the sky is the limit with regards to outcomes.
at the border, the police officer came into the bus. The first thing he did was to make a joke about how "smart" he was. So smart that he was able to get a job in which the only thing he had to do is to walk in into buses with a gun - touches the gun so that everyone can see it -, asking people for their documentantion and get paid for it. My mind translated that into an "I can shoot you if i want and noone will care cause if not, i will shoot them too, and end of the story". After the joke the ambience in the bus became really tense, and i started to laugh because of the surrealism of the situation....
If an officer is acting against the constitutional rights of any individual, that individual has not only the right but the duty to resist.
Such subhuman pieces of shit as this officer should be raped by dogs than fed to them.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
And the officer's story is always "he like totally assaulted me and junk, dude"...
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
He got the prize just for not being Bush It's how he was elected, and now it got him another win.
If the committee were sane, they should have waited until Obama actually ended the wars, unless the New World Order is going all 1984 on us and telling us that "War is Peace".
p.s. I'm diggin' your +1 troll, man.
He must have forgotten where he was. After all, in Canada (and most of the free Western world) I'm pretty sure you can get a straight answer to the question "Why am I being detained?" from law enforcement without a preliminary beating about the head and shoulders.
The DHS doesn't give a shit about individual civil liberties or rights...effectively they behave as if they were the American Stasi, and should be viewed as such.
that sure is a slanted story, i am sure watts was being an asshole and deserved that beating, hell they should have shot him for resisting a legal search and assaulting an officer of the law.
p.s. I'm diggin' your +1 troll, man.
It's always been my dream to get a +5 troll. Hasn't happened in 9+ years of posting to /. Maybe some day.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Cops are bullet stoppers, like front line infantry. They should be treated as expendable, as in reality they very much are. It is very easy to train a person to be a cop, usually takes less than 2-3 years.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
you're clearly neither a bouncer nor a cop. You are, however, an asshat.
Don't be a douche bag, know something about what you are talking about.
This year, 115 police officers have died in the line of duty. Half of those deaths were accidental or medical.
In terms of deaths on the job, police officer doesn't even make the top ten.
I stand by my statement. Police officers *are* rarely killed on the job. 50 people died as a result of tazering this year, and that's just *tazering*. Police kill more people that don't need killing than they themselves are killed. From a strictly numerical point of view, an innocent citizen being confronted by the police is more likely to be killed than a police officer is to be deliberately killed by an assailant.
Yet, in spite of this, we are supposed to bow down to the police who have chosen such a "dangerous" occupation, but when they attack an innocent citizen, no big whoop, they probably had it coming because they asked a question or something.
As an alternate persona to the Linux Geek I share here I am also a Cross-Border Truck Driver when the IT market takes a nose-dive.
I have crossed at Windsor/Detroit & Sarnia/Port Huron THOUSANDS of times.
I will _GLADLY_ add 2 hours to my day if I have the option of crossing at Port Huron.
Detroit Customs officer:
"How long have you been driving?"
"How long have you been with this company?"
"Did you check the trailer?"
"Did you seal the trailer?"
"What kind of seal on the trailer?"
"Why didn't you seal the trailer?" (A: because GM/Chrysler/Ford sealed it before I picked it up and I am not allowed by law to open it.)
"What are you bringing with you?"
"What are you bringing for lunch?"
etc...
Port Huron Customs:
"Hello sir, how are you today?"
"What are you hauling?"
"Have a nice day."
The difference is night & day. You can find assholes anywhere, but 100% of my experience at Port Huron has been positive.
B5_Geek: Truck Driving, Linux coding, Recumbent riding, pencil-neck Geek!
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
When an unarmed man alone gets into a fight with multiple armed people, it's a rare case where the unarmed man is the aggressor.
I'm not so sure about that:
EL MIRAGE, Ariz. -- Three firefighters were assaulted while responding to a late-night medical call on Dec. 5, according to The Arizona Republic.
The crew found a teen -- reportedly suffering from an overdose -- running around. They were able to calm him down to check his vital signs and insert an intravenous needle, but officials told the newspaper that the patient become violent when firefighters tried to place him on a gurney.
The 16-year-old began punching, kicking and scratching the first responders.
Police were called for assistance and were able to subdue the teen, who was on probation and wore an ankle bracelet monitor.
The firefighters suffered only minor injuries.
According to the report, a recent survey conducted for the Arizona Fire Chiefs Association show that 55 percent of responders in the state said they had been assaulted at least once while on the job. Ariz. Firefighters Assaulted by Patient
____
Daniel A. Noble, of Moscow, Wash., was allegedly driving erratically Monday morning on the Washington State University campus and struck two pedestrians - one in a crosswalk, the other on a sidewalk. The victims were taken to the hospital.
At the scene police said that Noble was uncooperative. "He was combative at the start, when we tried to take him into custody," Lt. Steve Hansen of the WSU police told The Spokesman-Review. Police used a Taser to subdue Noble.
Mark Moorer, Noble's lawyer, said Tuesday that his client was known to consume large amounts of energy drinks and Starbucks coffee. Moorer said in court that the caffeine could have accounted for Noble's strange behavior.
Noble's wife told investigators that he started acting strangely about three days earlier, was not sleeping at night and seemed confused. During Tuesday's hearing, Noble got up and tried to walk away from the defense table, but his lawyer pulled him back to his seat.
Following in the footsteps of the "Twinkie defense" , The Oregonian has dubbed this the "The Starbucks Defense." Lawyer: Driver Had 'Caffeine Psychosis'
It's been a bit since I've crossed the border at Port Huron, but last time I went there was no stopping until the Canadian Boarder. You only deal with US Border Patrol when *entering* the United States.
So what's the deal here?
Bring it back!? Who said anything about bringing it back???
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091207/us_nm/us_iraq_usa_equipment
It is interesting why the police generally behaves like this as according to my own experiences, carrying a weapon strangely removes any need of aggression you might have in a situation. It's probably something to do with the power over a life of another person and the corresponding feeling of responsibility combined with the knowledge of requirements set by the law and the surrounding society. But then again, I didn't serve my time in the USA, a phrase with which one can end most conversations.
Pardon, but being "*rarely* killed" is still being 'killed' nonetheless.
The important thing is whether the border guards who are killed are mostly dead or all dead, and I haven't seen that answered yet.
Also, plenty of people are killed by cars but that doesn't give others the right to beat the shit out of a driver for cutting them off.
I've known a few. I don't see them as particularly inclined to initiate an assault on multiple police officers unarmared either, actually.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Except that the story from the cop who shot the guy was "I thought he had a gun", until it changed to "i thought I had my taser" after he fled the state to avoid prosecution.
with no trouble. People there are not randomly stopped and beaten. If the border patrol told him to get back into his car and he didn't, he was disobeying a direct order by someone in a situation where he has very few rights. That's right, kids, you have very few rights at the border. The constitution takes effect inside the border, not at it. I'm not saying that the border officer was correct or right, but you always obey them, it's always "yes sir/no sir", and you just sit through the search until you're released. Getting out to show them who is in charge and demanding information is the incorrect action to take. I think that there is more to this story then he is reporting. I will be crossing that exact border twice again in January. My fears of getting hauled away and beaten? Zero. I want to hear the border patrol's side of the story.
Why is that relevant? Statistically speaking our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are "rarely" killed in the line of duty. So I guess they don't have any reason to fear death when they go out on patrol?
This is apples and oranges. They are in locations where they are shot at every day. They aren't surviving for lack of attempts on their life. In the case of the border guard, how many times do you think he's been shot at? Yeah, I don't know either, but I'll bet it's extremely low. I'll be even further that the times he's been shot at by someone simply asking him a question is even lower, and even lower still, from people who he's beating and then throwing into a cell.
A police officer has to worry about taking a bullet every single time he has an interaction with someone.
Bull. Shit. He has as much to worry about taking a bullet "every single time he has an interaction with someone" as I do. There are *some* interactions that are riskier than others, but it's absurd to state he has to fear every encounter.
Have you ever known that kind of fear?
Yes. And no, I won't elaborate, except that it's none of your business.
Suck it up and do what they tell you. If the abuse was particularly egregious then do the American thing and sue the hell out of them at a later date.
Fuck that. It shouldn't get to that point in the first place. While there are definitely some insane people who provoke cops for no apparent reason, this isn't what we're talking about. We're talking about someone who asked a boarder guard what's going on, then got a beating for it. Even if he was confrontational, the cop's response *was* atrocious.
We've got to quit treating the police like gods. They're men. Bad things happen when you treat classes of men as gods.
Whee~! You must have a fun time at the airport!
At all of the times I've crossed in a car from US to CA, I've never talked with a US agent, merely Canadian ones. Granted, I use crossings in NY, VT, but I thought you only talk to the country you're entering, not the one you're leaving. Is there something unusual at the particular border crossing in the story?
Watts has already made a statement on his blog that can be used against him.
I said it is a rare case that the lone unarmed man is the agressor, not entirely unknown. But that said, your first example is not a lone person attacking multiple armed people, but someone fighting not to be strapped to a gurney by three firefighters. The second case we don't know much about, just that there was an altercation when police tried to take him into custody.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Pardon, but being "*rarely* killed" is still being 'killed' nonetheless.
That's a meaningless statement. *Everyone* "rarely" gets killed on the job, unless it's more often than that. Police aren't even in the top 10 most dangerous professions. Garbage men and taxi drivers are both more dangerous professions.
Don't fuck with cops when things get stressful. It ain't smart. Wait 'til later, out of the stressful and high-strung situation, and you can be much more effective at whatever your intended purpose is.
In other words, when the adrenalin is flowing, it's *not* OK to ask a cop a question, but it *is* OK for a cop to beat you? Why is it the innocent citizen's obligation to be subservient to the cop?
Ask Mandela if he was able to do more from inside his jail cell, than from without.
Mandela was a political prisoner. Watt was beaten. Mandela was the head/figurehead of a movement. Watt was just one of countless people beaten by the police today.
The reason these stories are interesting are because they are (relatively) rare events compared to the number of times an officer chooses to use no force or the proper amount of force against a legitimate criminal. Your examples point out the need to be unbiased, not the need to be biased for the victim.
Seriously, I know that it's kneejerk to assume that cops are wrong. Generally all you have to do at customs is answer questions and get on with it. No one gets beaten up without at least some plausible reason. That's like 3rd graders complaining that they got a bad grade because the teacher doesn't like them. Considering that simplest answer is probably the one that's correct, Peter Watts was probably an asshole and got what he deserved. Of course when it's some uber nerd all you /. pussies get your panties twisted because there's no WAY he could have deserved it.
Mod me down now bitches but you know I'm right.
As history demonstrates, the most dangerous times to live in is when a Empire, particularly a bankrupt one is losing power.
To shore up the losses, at first legions of goon squads will become quite common place as those will be the best jobs.
(I love the propaganda on the "goon mobiles" or public police squad cars. I watched one video where one officer beat a unarmed mentally deficient man while the other tasered him with the Camera in one "Goon Mobile" capturing the side of the other "Goon Mobile" that had "Protect Honor Public Safety" written on it.)
I think Bugs Bunny said it best: "What a Maroon!"
Don't fight the Goon...at least not yet. Wait till the Empire is sufficiently weakened to the point where even the goons don't hold any loyalty or they are forced to shoot or incarcerate their own mothers or children.
Then you know its time to organize as time will be on your side.
But until then, your going to get run over, beaten, electrocuted or even Microwaved to a slow simmer so don't resist the goon squad.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
You say, "he got out of his car when questioned (mistake #1)". My response to that: What the hell? I'm not going to accept that we should sit meekly while the authorities talk to us. That's not the way a democracy works. The authorities are our servants, and the moment we forget that is the moment that we start letting the authorities run our lives instead of being our own sovereign power as We The People.
I find it scary that people can say the things you said here and apparently mean it.
I crossed the border several times to go to track driving schools. First border crossing, I was nervous. The Canadian officer was curt, and mostly concerned about the fact that I was unemployed at the time. Probably picked up on my being nervous. I just didn't want the hassle of being searched or giving the "wrong" answer.
Second border crossing, the Canadian officer was friendly and while they are trained to engage you in banter to judge how shady you are (which clearly Mr. Watts failed, want to guess why?), he seemed genuinely amused that I was taking MY car to drive on a racetrack. Have fun, he said, and handed me my paperwork.
Both times back, the US crossing was completely unmemorable. Drove up, handed over my license, answered some quick questions about when I came into Canada, what I'd done, and whether I had anything to declare. 2-3 minutes, tops- long enough to run my plates and license in the computer and see how fidgety I was. Nobody at any of the events I went to (all of them American) had anything bad to say, and some of them had been coming to the track for years.
I lost my license right before a trip to Canada, and called around trying to figure out if a temporary replacement license was sufficient. I eventually got put through to one of the actual border officers, who was audibly in the middle of his lunch break, munching on his sandwich. For a cop on his lunchbreak being pestered by some dumb shmuck, he was not only helpful but...chipper. He wouldn't make any solid promises, but he did ask me when I was coming, my name, and a few other things, and said if he was on shift when I came back into the US, he'd help if he could and take the fact that I called ahead etc under consideration, but he said I definitely needed to make sure I'd be OK getting IN to Canada. So he gave me the number for his Canadian counterparts, and cheerfully wished me a good afternoon and best of luck trying to get a 'real' license or some other government ID out of my state government (didn't.)
HOLY FUCKING SHIT. A very curt, annoyed, angry Canadian customs agent answered the phone, and read me the fucking riot act and demanded to know how I got the number for their office, why was I calling them, who was I, what the hell did I want. When I explained what I wanted (mainly to know if I'd be permitted into Canada with my temporary license, and was there anything I could do to smooth the wheels, like bringing extra documentation of some sort, anything to help), point-black refused to answer or discuss anything with me, and hung up after angrily saying "NEUO!" to several questions.
Please help metamoderate.
That's really fucking incompetent. Doesn't exactly make me feel better about the police officer.
I've crossed the Detroit/Windsor border a lot, and I remember on two occasions during long lines, someone getting out of their car and walking around to take a look at what the hold-up was. In both cases, border patrol officers responded by walking out to the line and looking for who it was. I don't think they found them either time.
Still, I remember wondering what planet this person would be from, getting out of their car and walking towards the checkpoint on foot. Not exactly a smart way to behave at the border. I'm not saying it deserves a beating, but it's dumb none-the-less.
Then if the guy asked you to get back in your car, you don't? Look, these people have the right to take you in a small room and search your body cavities. They can confiscate anything for any reason, including your vehicle. They can make you disappear and your family will never ever know what happened to you. They could easily plant stuff in your vehicle while you're in that back room. Yes, it's evil and fascist, but for goodness sake, when they ask you to get back in your car, just do it!
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
My father has been on the Maine border for the past 20 years.
From my memories as crossing 10 years ago, things have definitely changed- and there are many reasons why. One of the biggest is that since 2001, the number of border gaurds has increased by a factor of 4. There used to be high standards, with lengthy training. You had to learn spanish, and generally become reasonably educated in detecting lies, noticing suspicious people, etc. The handgun training weeded out a lot of people, and my father had to practice every 3 weeks, because if he didn't, he might not pass the handgun qualification test, which seemed to be at least 4 times a year. A lot of that went away when some politicians decided they needed to stack the border in the name of "Homeland Security". Immigration and Customs (2 separate groups 10 years ago) were rolled into Homeland Security after 2001. Instead of ambitious folk who didn't mind learning spanish, passing rigorous handgun tests, remaining current in their education, etc, you got the bottom of the barrel uneducated Joe. The kind who saw a cushy government job for little effort and took it.
Joe is not a fun guy. Joe does the bare minimum and nothing extra, collects his paycheck, and sits in the booth following his script.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
For assault to be verbal, there has to be a credible threat of violence. "I'm going to #%¥ you up" could be assault, but "#%¥ this shit" can not. IANAL
Are you so sure that they have video cameras covering the exit area? One weird thing about this is that the incident happened as he was leaving the US, where you normally don't stop at all.
Yes, because you're entering Canada, and they've got all sorts of cameras too. I seriously doubt there is a single square inch of a border crossing that isn't under 24x7, recorded surveillance.
Actually, that's an excellent point, one I didn't think of. At least the last time I hit one of the VT crossings, the into-Canada side, you only talk to a Canadian border agent. You talk only to a US agent on the way in.
I'm now really, really curious as to why he ended up talking to any US customs agents on his way out of the country. If you're leaving, the US doesn't give a rat's ass what you've got in your car or anything- you're literally someone else's problem. I know a number of people with restricted academic visas who didn't have problems leaving the US- they had problems getting back in, because their visa said they were not supposed to leave the US, and the US customs agent wanted to know why they were coming back in...
Please help metamoderate.
apparently you haven't seen the video of a bart police officer shooting in the back a man who was being held face down on the ground by other officers
In 1999 1.5 million vehicles crossed the Blue Water Bridge at Port Huron Michigan. Blue Water Bridge Canada
The US has a population of 300 million people and employs about 700,000 police officers. Q: How many police officers are employed in the United States
It is easy to find an incident but it is much harder to prove a pattern.
Bull. Shit. He has as much to worry about taking a bullet "every single time he has an interaction with someone" as I do. There are *some* interactions that are riskier than others, but it's absurd to state he has to fear every encounter.
Really? Wasn't there just a news story the other day about four police officers being gunned down while drinking coffee?
We've got to quit treating the police like gods
I didn't say that we should treat them as Gods. All I suggested was that they have a dangerous job and are entitled to some consideration because of that. I also suggested that discretion is the better part of valor.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Mandela was inside a jail cell after he founded an armed wing of the equal rights movement. Not sure if you guys are quite there yet with your border guard.
I don't know how much more likely you are to get killed while working as a cop than as a software developer -- or as a high altitude worker, for that matter. So far, none of the comments includes any actual numbers, so there isn't much value to taking a side.
Not sure I want to cut cops a whole lot of slack in any event. They're running around with guns and tasers and batons, there ought to be a pretty high standard for people who do that because the damage they can do is so terrible, doubly so because in very, very rare cases the damage is justified by our social contract. Not fucking with the cops is sage advice, though; personally I try to avoid fucking with any kind of armed thug while I'm vulnerable.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
This is a common myth. Police officers are *rarely* killed on the job.
Once is enough to make the rest of them kinda skittish
1
2
3,4,5,6
7
8
9
In less than 10 years, from one police force, in Canada. There have probably been more, but I'm getting depressed searching for them.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
After reading your post, I have to say that I'm ashamed that you feel doing 'the American thing' is to sue rather than stand up for your rights.
I'll agree, the full story isn't in here on exactly what happened. However every police office has made a choice to 'serve and protect the people'. Not the government of the people, but the people themselves. The militarization of the police; where every traffic stop is treated as a 'Life or Death' situation, is as much a result of the behavior of the police as it is of the risk.
The relevance of the possibility of death is a choice that the officers made, no one forced them to take these jobs. How they choose to interact with the people they are there to defend speaks directly to why the risk is higher.
I admit, I feel odd writing this after reading your .sig.
I'm reminded of Digby's comments during the Gates incident back in July:
"I have discovered that my hackles automatically going up at such authoritarian behavior is not necessarily the common reaction among my fellow Americans, not even my fellow liberals. The arguments are usually something along the lines of "that guy was an idiot to argue with the cops, he should know better," ...
"Now, on a practical, day to day level, it's hard to argue that being argumentative with a cop is a dangerous thing. They have guns. They can arrest you and can cost you your freedom if they want to do it badly enough. They can often get away with doing violence on you and suffer no consequences. You are taking a risk if you provoke someone with that kind of power, no doubt about it.
"Indeed, it is very little different than exercising your right of free speech to tell a gang of armed thugs to go f*ck themselves. It's legal, but it's not very smart. But that's the problem isn't it? We shouldn't have to make the same calculations about how to behave with police as we would with armed criminals. The police are supposed to be the good guys who follow the rules and the law and don't expect innocent citizens to bow to their brute power the same way that a street gang would do. The police are not supposed wield what is essentially brute force on the entire population.
Want to argue and question what they're doing when they're just going by what they've been trained to do for your protection? You're gonna get beaten and thrown in a cell. Other countries you'd probably be shot.
So now you're saying getting beaten up is just the expected consequence for "arguing and questioning"? I thought the cop was a bad seed? Other countries are even more fucked up and that's that? You've got a high standard there. No wonder your police does whatever the fuck it wants aka taking control of situations.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Slashdot assumption of Watts innocents all the while going on the usual OMG FACISIM rant reminds me of how the the whole Hans Reisen fiasco unfolded. I'm with you, I want to hear the whole story here.
If everyone assumes that all is as it should be or everyone just passively waits for all the facts to be presented to the public, how likely is it that all the facts will ever find their way into the public domain? The only way to compel authority to justify their actions is to assume authority was abused, get angry and demand an explanation.
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
I take it you've never lived in a city?
Where I used to work got robbed on a semi-regular basis, I've been shot at before and threatened with knives, bats, guns etc.
Yet, I have absolutely no sympathy for police officers who are overly aggressive. Yes, sometimes they do need to be that way in order to take down a perp before he causes any harm, BUT this kind of situation is more rare than you can imagine. At the same time, I've been arrested, and not told anything until after I was stripped naked and given prison clothes. Also, sitting in a cell for 4 days straight without getting out for a shower or anything is pretty shitty.
Now, the point is this, the police are people, but they are NOT citizens when they put on that badge. They are servants of the public. They are no longer allowed to expect the rights of the rest of us to apply to them. They are nonetheless given more rights in some ways than the rest of us.
This puts them in a special position of needing to be watched more than the general public due to the powers they possess.
First up, I've witnessed and had described by retired police officers occasions when an officer elected to go medieval on a citizen who was being only mildly disagreeable, or didn't immediately understand what the officer wanted, so I can well imagine Mr. Watts was unreasonably roughed up, and hit with trumped up charges.
That said, based on the information in TFA's links, as a practical, like-to-avoid-getting-my-ass-handed-to-me matter, I might question Mr. Watts' evident lack of "street smarts". I'm just a mid-aged, college-educated white boy who for the most part stayed out of trouble. But, even I have heard and read enough to know that:
Unfortunately, Mr. Watts may not have had any previous experiences that would prep him for the possibility that getting out of the queue at a border crossing wasn't the best plan. I hope his only lasting consequences are a bruised body and ego.
Luke, help me take this mask off
It seems the citizenry, officers, and/or agents of the U.S. gov't have forgotten a few, really pertinent, things...
e.g. A police officer and his partner (and/or dispatch)
My Favoritest:
If the officers had the leisure to ignore this mysterious "situation" long enough to beat the guy up, I'm pretty sure that the "situation" wasn't all that urgent or threatening.
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
Nothing would make me want to visit the US in this current climate. I am sure some of the stories of abusive attitudes on the part of US officials are gross exaggerations, but if any of them are true, then I can't think of a reason that would make me want to travel south of the border. Too much power seems to have been given to people who are not paid well, probably not that well educated, and under a lot of stress.
My only experiences with doing so were years ago mind you, and were generally unpleasant but not overly so in entering the US, and simple and peaceful crossing back into Canada.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
You apparently don't know what you're talking about.
This looks a lot like a gun. If you were to just reach and grab the pistol-grip handle without looking, you could definitely mistake this for a gun or vise versa.
Thank you for reminding me why I haven't come to /. in months.
First, we get a summary that doesn't get us enough information, but is more than happy telling us what to think.
Then we get someone who has apparently never watched a single episode of Cops in his life making a sweeping statement that is false on its face, and it is rated +5, Insightful.
The police defend themselves against unarmed aggressors as a matter of course. The cases where the police are the aggressors or egregiously over-react are vanishingly rare. It is because those cases are well-publicized and so outrageous that the reverse may seem true.
When enough evidence is available and the evidence points to wrongdoing on the part of the police I will be the first to suggest throwing the key away.
But shame on you, sir, for being so quick to prejudge the fine men and women who risk their lives to protect you every single day.
I still carry a USA passport, but when I'm travelling by car, usually through Port Huron, I get more of a grilling from the Americans than the Canadians.
This is the conversation with the American border guard last year for Xmas. In my car? Me, wife, child, cat in a travel box, several Xmas gifties and our clothes. He looks in, takes our American Passports and asks:
USA: Where you going?
RS: (city - state)
USA: Where you staying?
RS: in laws house.
USA: When you going back?
RS: Day After New Years.
USA: Got any food?
RS: Nothing of significance - just these cookies and bottled water.
USA: (jokingly) uh oh - we'll have to take those cookies.
(daughter bursts into tears)
RS: Great...
USA: just joking kid. You can keep the cookies.
RS: Thanks.
USA: (returns passports) have a nice trip.
On our return trip with USA Passports, the Canadian Guard says:
CAN: Passports?
RS: Here ya go.
CAN: Thanks. (looks in car at me, wife, child, and cat and bags) Have a good holiday?
RS: Yes.
CAN: Where do you live?
RS: Toronto.
CAN: OK. Have a nice day. (waves us in.)
I've only had one bad experience with Canadian officials, and he wasn't pissed at me, he was pissed at lazy ass colleagues who forced him to do their work.
Whenever I deal with American Border people, it's always more of a hassle. At the Airport, they even have American Customs in Toronto - you have to clear them in TO first. Nothing like an expanded sense of sovereignty.
So, like many people above, i simply reduce the amount of travel I do in the states. The place is so fucked up anymore, it's just not any fun.
I'd rather go to Europe. It's also fucked up, but in a much nicer way (at least where I travel....)
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Not in the video I saw.
Earlier today, in Tacoma, we had a scum bag pop out of the trunk of a car, fight with the police, jump into the car and try to run the officer down. So, do you understand while law enforcement in Washington is just a little on edge?
Because they mistook a trunk-monkey television commercial for a real situation?
The militarization of the police; where every traffic stop is treated as a 'Life or Death' situation, is as much a result of the behavior of the police as it is of the risk.
I understand and agree with your sentiment here but I don't think you can blame the police for this turn of events. We are the ones who tolerated and even encouraged the War on Drugs. We are the ones who tolerated and even encouraged the War on Vice. In so doing we transformed the police from being people that we turned to for protection to being people that we are all afraid of, on one level or another.
We the people created the militarization of the police. In 50 years we went from a police force armed with revolvers and shotguns to SWAT teams packing fully automatic M-16s and armored vehicles. We went from the beat cop who knew everybody on his patrol to nameless faces behind riot shields that kick in your door and shoot your dogs, all in the name of the fucking War on Drugs.
Ever watch the TV series "The Wire"? There's a great scene in it after a police officer gets shot during a drug bust gone wrong. His CO laments the fact that he didn't sign up to do this kind of work and would rather be doing things that are "worth taking a bullet for". I've known my share of police officers and I suspect that most of them share this thought process. For better or worse though they are trapped in the system that we created for them.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
if it vindicates the guy's account, it'll get "lost" or be shielded in the name of national security for revealing camera positions. The assaulting BP will get cover from his agency. OTOH there will magically be no security issue if it even approaches a vindication for the cops.
Pardon, but being "*rarely* killed" is still being 'killed' nonetheless.
Lots more people are killed by cops than cops by people. I'd say the cops are winning this one.
I am not a crackpot.
How is a police officer wanting control a myth? They're trained to do so to protect their own and your life.
They are not trained to protect your life. They are specifically trained to desensitize them to one's natural aversion to killing a human being. They are trained to protect their own lives by killing you. This is their reason for existence, to kill people
I am not a crackpot.
Like all successful police states these people aren't busted for expressing anti-Government views. Instead laws are passed taking away fundamental rights (remember your bill of rights is not an exhaustive list and IIRC amendment #9 basically states this) then the undesirables are targeted.
The favourite rights to be removed are things like the right to grow plants and have the products in your possession.
Okaaay. I so I guess you're pretty militantly pro-legalization on marijuana, but aren't you spinning things a little bit too much by calling drug possession your "right to grow plants and have the products in your possession?"
I mean, context matters. You might as well describe speeding laws as interfering with your "right to drive," noise ordinances as abridging the "right to enjoy music," and laws against shooting people as abridging your "right to play catch."
Plus, if you want to characterize prisoners in jail for drug violations as "political prisoners," then you're going to have to call anyone who is in prison for a crime they don't believe is wrong a "political prisoner." That just renders the term meaningless.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
This is disappointing. The States has been well known for a while as the most hostile and least welcoming country in the world. I refuse to fly to the States after all the awful stories I've heard from friends that have been there (border control, the people are apparently fantastic once actually inside). However a Canadian friend suggested I fly to Canada and drive to New York (somewhere I would like to visit). However, after everybody pretty much backing up the posted story with their experiences, I guess that is out too. Not a huge loss, as the States is just one small place and there are thousands of other more friendly places to go to, but still it's a shame to cross something from my To Do list for such a reason.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Now, when a police officer is in a situation like that, he usually likes to have complete control of the situation
A situation like what? Somebody who is asking him a question? Police like to talk about how they need to protect themselves. They need to wake up and understand that they are in an unsafe profession. It is their duty to GIVE UP their own safety in return for the privilege of being able to arrest and potentially kill people. You don't get to have the same level of safety as everyone else. Police love to use excessive force because it keeps them safe. While this probably does help keep them safe, they need to suck it up and realize they have no RIGHT to be safe. If you want the right to be safe, don't go into law enforcement. The civilian population has a higher right to safety than the police, expressly because the police are the only ones with a monopoly on legal force.
A few weeks ago in my locale, a police officer shot an unarmed 12 year old girl with a bean bag gun. Was the girl belligerant and uncooperative? Yes. Did the police officer perhaps make himself safer by beaning her? Yes. However, the man is a coward. If you want every day at work to be safe, why would you choose law enforcement as a profession?
If the police being safe means that people get beat up and shot, then they don't deserve safety.
And why would you need to tase someone who is face down on the ground and under control ? Tasing is the new way to beat-up without leaving massive bruises. Really it does relieve the itch of trigger happy cops. When taser showed up they where supposed to be the last line of defense so you would not kill a suspect where you would have shot him before.
I'm very sad to see that you're excusing murder because tasing someone on the ground is considered 'normal' and 'OK'.
The BART shooting incident appears to have been incompetence in that the officer thought he pulled his taser. You'd have to be pretty brazen to shoot on purpose while surrounded by the public. The cop that threw the guy at the wall probably didn't realize that the glass would break. The guy was resisting and trying to attack the cop.
I find it hard to believe that anyone's going to mistake their gun for their taser. In any case the subject had already been subdued. This excuse comes off sounding as plausible as the dog ate my homework.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
But I fail to see what Obama has done to earn a Nobel peace prize.
I heard the only other candidates were Kim Jung Il and Osama Bin Laden... Kind of a no brainer at that point if you ask me.
Or maybe you could KILL ALL COPS. That's the only solution. KILL THEM ON SIGHT.
You never get out of the car...
Traveled from Washington to Alaska, so both borders, before I left I read up on the protocols for getting across easily. You don't get out, you don't question, you don't wear sunglasses, etc.
FTA - After border guards asked to search his car, Watts got out of the vehicle and questioned what they were doing.
Yea, thats a tasering.
"Along some other timeline, I did not get out of the car to ask what was going on. I did not repeat that question when refused an answer and told to get back into the vehicle." It doesn't matter what border guards or police it is and what country, get out of the car and thats an aggressive act to them, welcome to the asskicking.
"Peter, a Canadian citizen, was on his way back to Canada after helping a friend move house to Nebraska over the weekend. He was stopped at the border crossing at Port Huron, Michigan by U.S. border police for a search of his rental vehicle. When Peter got out of the car and questioned the nature of the search, the gang of border guards subjected him to a beating, restrained him and pepper sprayed him."
From what I read they go after rental cars because those are commonly used to transport dope, and he got out and asked questions. I also believe a group of police is called a "squad" or a "team" or maybe even a posse, not a "gang".
A lot of these posts don't seem to get the fact that he was leaving the US to enter Canada. And US Customs were stopping Canadian vehicles to search them. This is very bizzare behavior by US Customs, if they needed someone stopped normal policy would be to Inform Canada Customs to stop them before they "offically" enter Canada and send them back to US Customs. So what was US Customs up to that the "US" did not want "Canada" to know about?
apparently you haven't seen the video of a bart police officer shooting in the back a man who was being held face down on the ground by other officers, or the more recent case where a bart police officer grabbed someone [who did need to be taken off the train], walked the poor guy across the platform and smashed a glass barrier with the guy's face.
Nor do you see the video of the hundreds of thousands of incident-free arrests or those involving justifiable force. Ultimately, the quality of the system is determined by both the severity and frequency of it's failures. Humans might like to think in terms of individual events (kill one and it's a tragedy) but that's a very poor metric for overall quality.
BTW, the crowd was very audibly cheering the removal of the glass-face-guy, which seems to indicate they approve of the officer's actions.
Since when do you have to check in with US Border Guards when leaving the country? That's not the way the border works - you check in with the US side when entering the US, and you check in with the Canadian side when entering Canada. Something's not quite right with this story.
it is incidents like these that make me less likely to believe the law enforcement officer's side of the story.
Gosh, I guess those two incidents which were well-publicized indicate that the true nature of most police-suspect interactions are ones where the police are in the wrong.
Don't get me wrong, I don't 100% trust the cops at all, and I tend to be wary around them in person because of those rare incidents, but I'd say that 99% of incidents involving the police involve some level of idiocy/malice on the suspect's part -- including the guy being hit into the glass.
(Now that shooting... yeesh. That was a messed up situation. What was with the crowd beforehand, and what was with the police? I don't think I ever want to use that city's public transit wherever it was.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
That's a major part of the point. People are more likely to empathize with an injustice if someone is hurt.
One, a well organized ad campaign can be more effective, but people are easily desensitized to marketing, especially since one's opponents can fund a well organized counter campaign. Having an actual instance of injustice is harder to squash through a counter campaign. This is why, btw, news focus so much on personal stories.
Two, the point isn't "to get in a confrontation with police officers". It is to, when a confrontation occurs, do the otherwise reasonable thing and show how unjust the police respond. To spark a confrontation only hurts your campaign, as that fact can be used in an organized counter campaign. It is for this reason that the people who are most useful to a campaign against injustice are the ones who are most normal, who are simply sick of playing the game of being obedient to the unreasonable expectations of a situation, and who "snap" and start trying the situation as any other situation.
In short, when the emperor's clothes are removed by the most innocent and most common, people are much more inclined to acknowledge it than when a few people with a lot of money and a cause want to reshape society, no matter how logically right they can be proven to be.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Dude, if you want to fight for your civil liberties by putting yourself in front of a police baton, where it makes little difference, go ahead. As for me, I'll fight for what I care about in the courts and at the ballot box, where it can actually make a difference. You may consider that being a slave, but that's ok because I consider your method just dumb.
During the Civil Rights era, the images and videos of police using dogs, firehoses and batons
upon blacks were very powerful in currying domestic and international support for the movement.
Here's what Martin Luther King Jr. wrote while he was in jail:
As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community.
...
"You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling, for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.
...
The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation.
I only bring up MLK Jr. because you talk of slavery.
Ghandi and the Indian people were never slaves, yet they make for an equally compelling example.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
"This is a common myth. Police officers are *rarely* killed on the job. And border guards? I'm sure it must happen, but it seems it must be exceptionally rare in their case. But somehow that's given as an excuse when they beat the shit out of someone for *daring* to ask a question."
Its common enough that they are on guard against being attacked.
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/killed/2007/federalofficers.html
67 of the 1,650 federal officers assaulted in 2007 were on patrol or guard duty when they were assaulted.
Sounds poetic, but ignores the special groups that love to break the rule, "don't get into fights where you don't stand a chance."
1. Drunks
2. Druggies
3. People that feel entitled (like, oh, a Canadian crossing the U.S. border and arguing with an officer.)
4. Kids
5. Other
Tally them all up, and it's no longer a rare case.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
Leftists? In my Norway?
It's more likely than you think.
Has anyone ever succeeded at that? I ask only because maybe I could piggyback on it and get a +5 Offtopic.
Who is John Cabal?
I realize that what I'm about to say might not appeal to you. Please try to keep an open mind.
I've been reading Slashdot since about 1999. I've seen a lot of "outrage stories". Stories intended to get your blood pressure shooting through the roof. And they used to work on me.
Remember when Iraq invaded Kuwait? The story was circulated that Iraqi soldiers were taking premature babies out of incubators and throwing them on the ground. Turned out to be a total fabrication, created by Kuwait to get the US into the war. It worked.
Every controversy has two sides. No sane court will convict without hearing both sides. "There are two sides to every beef."
The "outrage story" is always based on giving you only one side. And it works - until you're old enough to recognize it.
Realize that every person who had an unpleasant contact with these border guards could tell a similar story. Only one in a 100 will recognize his own mistake. The majority will claim that he was nice, and the other guy created the problem.
The police were here to serve and protect, then we started to kill them. The militarization of the police, I think LAPD SWAT was the first, is because terror groups like the SLA and Black Panthers started murdering them. I'm no fan of the police, but I understand the reaction and events that have caused this.
Was that while they were high, or going through withdrawal?
Life is not for the lazy.
Take control? Yes, take control of a situation. Yes, they have guns. So do I. So do a lot of people.
Cops are trained to control a situation, if cop killings are rare, maybe this training has something to do with it?
I know you're enlightened and all, heck I've been saying "acquiesce" ever since I saw Pirates of the Caribbean too; but the dude was Canadian. He isn't standing up to fascism by arguing with a law enforcement officer from a different nation. His place is to say, "thanks for letting me enter your country, even if I have to wait in my car."
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
While it depends on the officer I several times experienced some really nasty border guards when crossing at the Windsor Detroit checkpoint. Some of them behave far worse than the second runners up that I encountered i.e. East German and Soviet border guards. The later at least didn't display the kind of Rambo cop mentality that some of these US goons do. Don't know where they find these people.
To me the way law enforcement officials and government representatives treat the public says a lot about the level of civil society and the freedoms you enjoy. Doesn't inspire confidence. If it wasn't for my mother in law living in Ohio I'd be more than happy to not venture down south any more. I hope once she retires I can convince her to move up here. I hate this border.
People in general have been gunned down in stores, malls, their home, in alleys, street corners, etc. The four police officers being gunned down recently is the aberration of multiple victim public shootings that have been reported for years. In short, those four police officers, if anything, merely cause a statistically inflation of police officer occupational deaths for one year.
Would you feel the same way if firefighters, in seeing a school burning down, would refuse to rush in to rescue trapped children? Or would you acknowledge that firefighters (and police officers) chose their profession with the intent to, if necessary, lay down their life to save others?
Besides, discretion is about "cautious discernment" not "excessive force". You seem to view police officers as if they are weapons, with their only choices being to shoot/beat or not. Instead, police officers are people, with the ability to question, order, detain, and/or arrest. None of this translates into a need for reckless abuse of people.
PS - If you believe that the danger of a job should be a factor in what consideration we give to people of a profession, how do you feel about farmers being able to beat and arrest people? Farmers, IIRC, have a higher fatal occupation injury rate than police.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Peter Watts has put up a new post on the event. All emphasis mine:
"I'm at the point now where I can't talk a whole lot about ongoing proceedings. I am seeing a few common misrepresentations making the rounds, though, that I'd like to set straight:
That's it for the technical items. I have only two more things to say. Firstly, I am absolutely flabbergasted by the online reaction to this story, and by the support (both moral and financial) that's inundated me over the past few hours. I don't have a hope in hell of answering even a fraction of the incoming traffic at this point, so for the moment let me just say I'm humbled and a little bit scared. I did not start this campaign; it actually started when I was still in jail, and had absolutely no idea what was going on. But to the catalytic folks who orchestrated it, know that I am looking into having my vasectomy reversed so that I can sire a firstborn son and sacrifice him to you.
Secondly, I'm going to bed.
You can get one on Aprils Fools Day by posting a request one for one. I've seen a couple that way. Kinda feels like cheating to me though :)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Yet, the end result is Person B is fined AND jailed for public urination.
You're comparing the oppression of millions of people to the few people that have a problem with the police...
For the most part, the police stay out of people's business and those people stay out of theirs. It's not like we're talking about opening people's eyes to institutionalized oppression of the masses. I'd say 99% of innocent people are content and unbothered by direct police action.
I don't agree.
If he had respectfully refused and said, "I haven't done anything to earn this yet" then he would have been the man I hoped I voted for.
Given McCain/Palin, I really didn't have a choice, but Obama is turnout to be much more of a tool of corporate interests and a lot less effective than Bush at getting *ANYTHING* done. I mean come on, we are closing on a year now. I could cut him some slack for the first 6 months because that was really Bush's policies playing out.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
http://www.constitution.org/uslaw/defunlaw.htm
I spent 3 1/2 years between Iraq and Afghanistan, so I suppose I have the kind of perspective you're looking for here.
Yes, I've "known that kind of fear." Yes, I've "had to contemplate absorbing a small piece of lead at supersonic speeds when you show up at the office." In fact, judging from the former cops who ended up in my unit, most cops have no earthly idea what real fear is.
But, to get to my point, that is absolutely no excuse. No excuse whatsoever. Police officers should never EVER be cut slack because of their perceived level of risk, because they accept that risk in exchange for their nearly unlimited power over civilians. When an officer (or soldier, or anyone else) abuses that power, they should be held to the absolute highest accountability. Life imprisonment is too good for people who use abuse governmental authority at the expense of the populace.
thanks for changing my mind about orwell. its ok to beat up homeless people, but only as much as 'is necessary'. how compassionate you are.
The WoD is a big part of it. We have this classic model of what drug abusers do, that I could sum up as "The Junkie climbing out the window with your TV". We have been telling police for decades that enforcing the drug laws is their second chance to get that junkie, when they didn't manage to prevent the robbery. Often, it's some variant on that, i.e. "You didn't catch the robber at the scene, you didn't catch him selling the stolen goods, now catch him buying his fix!".
The problem is, fewer people will report a drug transaction than would a burglary. There is some percentage of the populace, although it is sometimes very low, that would bother to call 911 if they saw or heard someone breaking and entering, and there's a fair chance the home-owner, at least, would cooperate with gathering evidence. Drug sales don't normally make noise, they can be consummated in private, and the chance a policeman would happen to just observe on in passing is far lower than for violent crimes or robberies. We need to stop it when a DA or supervisor implies that getting a drug conviction is a second chance to fix a police failure in other areas, as it's a lousy second chance at best, and treating it as one encourages some police to use such methods as illegal surveillance or even planting evidence to improve their odds.
Who is John Cabal?
Yeah, so the Olympic Committee's decision was justified after all!
I believe it's nearly time to upgrade our old outdated operating system controlling our laws when we ourselves can't vote each day, like checking e-mail on whatever's current, old outdated laws and reform them, and of COURSE future laws as 360,000,000 North Americans (330 America, 30 Canada, keep it simple. :D)
;)
:P
:D, i'm sure everyone'd still get paid, lmao, point is everyone then "has a say" on a national website, federal white hat guys. I don't even KNOW, I just know Firefox and Ubuntu ROCKED.
:) Anyways trying to get them doing it b/c they COULD and maybe make ad money, voip the cable tv market even. I just want things done by people willing to exploit me for money. Here's my 200 bucks/month, where's my fiber optic options? I'm alright /w being a slave. It's cool. Just pimp my slavery already.
:D). I'm sure all KINDS of awesome ideas could be done. I'd like to at least link to em.
I'm just a garbageman but Love Firefox for web browsing.
Then I loved Ubuntu Linux for an operating system.
Just figured the next step along the path of:
What's important to me?
I could give a shit about a vote every 5 years, most likely rigged, and once in WHOEVER it is, even the "good ones" are most likely given 2 choices, briefcase full of money, and, well, you don't want THE OTHER ONE.
So in tribute to Linux I made a crappy website, http://www.opensourceg.com/
I'm not sure it could handle slashdotting but I think the cause is just. I've posted it on torrent freak, http://torrentfreak.com/ , cbc (deleted or buried in oblivion of other people, ALL SCREAMING AT YOU, WHY WON'T YOU LISTEN??? DAMNIT! AHHHHHHHHHHHH
So ya, the very laws we obide by are in no control over. It's messed up with all this Internet we don't got an organized government to do daily online polls. Surely there are white hats up to the challenge (and black hats to cause troubles.
Ubuntu's got a live add remove programs for God's sake! The swarm is the most powerful. More then anything. Even p2p can't be shut down even if the guys buying the laws say it's illegal.
So I spent 15 bucks and thought the idea was great. Rather pick Open Source distros then politicians . The ground rules should be set like Linux stuff is. You guys will get it (if anyone has, it's been a crappy website for so long and a buddy helped me get a blogging feature so I can rant in a corner of the Internet)
Far as building a voting site, don't think "I'd" be able to. I'll sure as hell link to it if one get's built.
Closet things I found in my quest were: http://www.opencongress.org/ - American one, just liked the voting, just kinda wish a 3rd party does it, like, "here, were not rigging those electronic numbers". Protect a country militarily but the management needs an upgrade. Doing all THEY can in a restrictive environment. Imagine the 1 GOOD congressman pretending to be bad just to TRY and help their country? (or maybe they are all good and just fighting each other instead of the issues)
http://www.mysociety.org/ - UK based, they fix road problems or organized a nice "email your politician" thing.
Granted I'm a complete idiot who shouldn't even vote, I'm pretty ignorant to current politics b/c of lack of faith. No public trust from me. Enhancing people's lives instead of beating them down would be a GREAT start.
Kinda like sending out an email to get Google doing real tv. They are big enough to make it happen and I just want some smart dude to make the ir remote work as standard on websites.
Any way to port Linux to our govt? Format whatever junk was on the drive, install, reboot (once, ever,
Yahoo Answers, the 2 that replied both said no. Wouldn't work f
http://www.opensourceg.com - A Man Can Dream
Huh? How do you decide who is insane? Let me tell you.
First, they get out of their car. There is no reason to get out of your car - it is a simple border search - I have not asked you to get out of your car. This is Patrol Stop 101 kind of thinking. If you are getting out of your car you are most likely looking for a fight. Watch any episode of Cops.
Second, then ask why you are searching their car. Again, it is a simple border search, wtf are you thinking? You know as well as I do why I am searching your car, it is random. Don't bust my balls for it.
Third, you are asked to get back in your car - so you decide to push it. "Why am I being searched?" Its a damn international border crossing WhyTF do you think they are searching you? At this point the cop figures no one who is sane would do this and starts to get physical.
Now here I admit things go to shit. The guy should not have been treated this way. When maced people start taking swings - whether to hit someone or just grab stuff. Being instantly in pain and blind sucks. Next thing you know he is in a cell. Did he deserve it? Hell no. Did he help bring it on? Hell yes.
There is a time and place to fuck with cops - this was not one of them - and he is paying the price.
Again this is traffic stop 101. Keep both hands on the wheel, stay in your car, Yes Sir, No Sir are good answers. There are a ton of posts in this thread that boil down to "If I cant tell a cop to FUCK OFF to his face he has no right to be a cop". Yet none of them would put up with the same behavior on Slashdot. Being a cop is harder.
Are they all good? Nope. Have I met my fair share of asshole cops - yep. Have I met good caring people that wear the Blue with pride? Damn straight I have.
Paint with a bigger brush.
Seraphim
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
The sad thing is that if drugs were legalized we wouldn't have to worry about the junkie crawling out of the window with our TV. He'd be at home poisoning himself to death alongside the tobacco smokers. How many of them break into homes to get the money for their next fix?
Recreational drug abuse should be considered a medical problem, not a legal one.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I don't think they should be cut slack by the system when they abuse their power. All I'm saying is that the people who are interacting with them might want to consider cutting them some slack.
There was just a case that went down in Syracuse. A woman wound up getting tased in front of her kids during a traffic stop that escalated out of control. Now I think the officer in question deserves to lose his job, however the woman arguably contributed to the escalation of the situation and should not be let off the hook either.
She was initially pulled over for allegedly talking on her cell phone. She argued this point with the officer and insisted that she could prove she wasn't by showing him the call log on her cell phone. Then the officer informed her that he would citing her for speeding, some ridiculously low figure, I think 40 in a 35 or something similar. At this point she again argued with him and demanded to "see his evidence" and started to get out of her car. He told her to stay in her car and that she could see the evidence when she went to court.
He went back to write her citations and she got out of the car. He again ordered her to get back in the car. She started yelling at she wanted to "see the evidence". He then informed her that she was under arrest for disorderly conduct. At this point she started to get back into her car, he ordered her out, she refused and he tased her.
In review, the officer was being petty (who writes a speeding ticket for 5 miles over?) but the woman contributed to the situation by demanding to "see his evidence" (in this respect the officer was right, that's what the courts are for) and ignoring his instructions to remain in her vehicle. Then when informed that she was under arrest she refused to comply and submit to being cuffed. A messy situation that could have been avoided with better judgment on the part of the woman and a little less pettiness on the part of the officer.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
He put his hand/arm up to protect his face and head from hitting the glass window the cop threw him into.
Then ask why the USA spends more on 'defense' than the next 5 countries on the list combined.
The USA projects its power well. That tends to have an effect on decisions made elsewhere.
The reason these stories are interesting are because they are (relatively) rare events
The only thing rare is the act getting caught on video. And, quite frankly, it's getting less and less rare. Look at the number of 'police abuse' videos from, say, 20 years ago, compared to last year, for example. Either the cops are abusing people a lot more lately, or they have always been abusing people, bu tit's being caught on video a lot more. Either way, it's not very good for the cops.
lol.
Okay how about...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cases_of_police_brutality
This is a great one here!
November 17, 2007. Angela Garbarino was taken into custody by a police officer in Shreveport, Louisiana on suspicion of driving while intoxicated. In the interrogation room Garabino acted frustrated and in emotional distress, screaming and protesting. The officer in charge turns off the camera. When the camera is turned on again, Angela is lying on the floor, severely beaten in a pool of blood. The officer claimed that she had fallen into a shelf. He was eventually fired. Garabino sustained severe facial injuries from the abuse. [1]
On the main police brutality page it says...
Other studies have shown that most police brutality goes unreported. In 1982, the federal government funded a "Police Services Study" in which over 12,000 randomly selected citizens were interviewed in three metropolitan areas. The study found that 13.6 percent of those surveyed claimed to have had cause to complain about police service (including verbal abuse, discourtesy and physical abuse) in the previous year. Yet only 30 percent of those who acknowledged such brutality filed formal complaints.[15]
This is why our police *NEED* required 24/7 multiple cameras and recording devices. To protect them from turning evil. To protect them from false accusations. To protect *US* from paying millions of dollars to for their abuse.
June 25, 2003. Albert Mosely was picked up on a probation violation and brought to the Baltimore's Western District police station where, after getting into a shouting match with police officers, he was picked up (while handcuffed) and thrown "headfirst into the concrete wall of a holding cell." Mosley was rendered quadriplegic, sued the city, and was awarded $44 million in damages.[29]
44 million dollars. sheesh.
On a last note...
February 25, 2007.* Metropolitan Airports Authority Police beat up Robin Kassner, a 31 year-old New York City native at Reagan National Airport, throwing her across the room into another woman and a metal chair. They, then, bashed her head into a metal table, giving her a concussion and permanent brain damage. Police Officer Michael Jose Urbina, who delivered the concussion blow to her head, filed false criminal charges against her for disorderly conduct. Kassner is suing the police for assault and battery.[11] Surveillance Video
Exactly why do the police need to beat up a 31 one year old woman? Is she perhaps some kind of ninja trained assassin?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
My solution is simple: I'll stay away from the US.
With all these stories about police violence, etc, it just does not seem like a safe country to visit.
It probably shouldn't be too hard to convince a judge of this since, as far as I know, all border patrol stations are video taped. I would assume they'd also have audio in there... First thing I'd be doing, if I were truly innocent, is requesting the video for the time in question.
The first thing you do is STFU.
Watts can't retreat from anything he posted to his blog without the risk of a jury concluding that he is a cynical, manipulative, liar.
I don't know if this is your source, but I figure a citation couldn't hurt. Number of police deaths.
Out of curiosity, where did you get the numbers for farmers?
"My baby didn't do nuffin!" or "But I wasn't doin' nuffin!" are all too common. Nobody says "Oh, yeah, I really deserved that."
"He was just asking them questions" can just as well be "He ignored thirty seven requests to get back in his car, and ten additional warnings."
Before I jumped to any conclusions... I would want to know what really happened.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
When this happened to another famous Canadian author, Farley Mowat, he wrote a book about it. "My Discovery of America." It's true Mowat and a good read. Perhaps Watts ought to take a page out of Mowats book and start keeping notes in contemplation of a publication.
You have to train anyone who might have to use a firearm that way, because many people naturally won't immediately aim at a human target and pull the trigger even if their life depends on it. Most of the ones that will, will forget to aim properly, and miss... requiring more shots to defend yourself, and with every extra bullet fired risking killing some bystander.
Anyone who is considering owning a gun for home defense (or in states where you can legally carry for your own self-defense outside the home, generalized self defense) should take similar training. Get used to shooting the gun, then go to a properly equipped range with pop-up or flip-on targets which are photos of real people not just silhouettes, and practice shooting those too.
Officers, and anyone likely to be going in to and having to deal with ambiguous potentially lethal but usually not situations, should also get the video based shoot/no shoot training. Officers who have good basic firearms skills typically shoot a few perfectly innocent people, and get killed by a few innocent looking lethal people, in those training scenarios, before they internalize procedures to protect themselves.
Any police officer who does not come out of that training with an acceptably safe approach for dealing with situations on the street is likely to be let go by the department. Because if they will not shoot when their life is on the line, they are placing other officers' lives and innocent crime victims' lives at risk. If they will shoot inappropriately, they will wound or kill someone who didn't deserve it, and wreck themselves mentally, and get a huge lawsuit against the department.
A vast majority of the people police shoot are career criminals, who have guns or knives, and who pose an immediate and obvious risk to the officers or civilians. See for example the nutcase in New York City a couple of days ago, who was threatening and scamming tourists and when stopped by police pulled a MAC-10 (semiautomatic) and started shooting.
If police can't stop those people, then we're all screwed.
If we let the police turn into those people, then we're also screwed - but isolated incidents are not the totality of what police in the US are. Most are out to protect us, not screw with us.
You must not watch too many martial arts movies..
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
You would be surprised what a pissed off person will do when confronted by the armed police.
Peter should have came in from the south instead of the north......they would have given him a free pony, free college, and free healthcare for him and his family.
Note: This doesn't excuse or compare to what is alleged to have happened to Mr. Watts
I'm a US citizen and out of four times I've been to Canada for work, I've been "held" for almost 9 hours, flat out threatened with official detainment and denial of entry. I have no criminal record, no arrest record, I have never had any problems with entry into any other countries and I'm always exceedingly polite and patient b/c I know how frustrating it can be to deal with the same headaches day in, day out (and it pays... can't count how many times I've gotten free hotel/car upgrades or even just drinks on the plane just by being nice instead of an a**).
In every case I was told that I did not have the proper paperwork and that I was coming in to "steal" jobs from Canadians. The hell it was I was coming in to do contract work for the Canadian Revenue Agency (CCRA) and all my paperwork was from the CCRA. In the worst case they tried to deny entry b/c I did not have my hotel reservations on me (they were in my luggage that Air Canada misplaced) but did have my papers from CCRA. They wouldn't allow me to pull up the hotel reservations up on my laptop b/c it was "illegal" to use it until I had cleared customs. They finally agreed but only with a official watching everything over my shoulder and insisting I provide them with the password(s) for my laptop just in case they needed it for "evidence" (and that took an hour of reasoning and me asking for a written explanation of why I was being denied entry).
It's a shocking contrast to the people you meet and work with once your past the gates.
http://cobweb.ecn.purdue.edu/~agsafety/IRSHC/Docs/Fatality/Fatality.Summary.2006.pdf
Looks like 8 in indiana in 2006.
But the report does say "Since several other Midwestern states are reporting 3-5 times more fatalities than Indiana, it might also be concluded that we are doing something right. Is it a reasonable goal to de-clare that we never want to go back to the "good old days" of agricultural production when 60, 70, even 100 farmers a year died due to farm-related injuries, 30 or more farm chil-dren died annually and over 100 farmers lost hands or arms to corn pickers, balers and PTOshaftseachyear? Let's hope so!"
Here...
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/childag/docs/2001131a.html
It looks like an average of over 100 people under 20 die in farm work per year, every year. No national news for them tho like cops.
(also reported here http://kidshealth.org/teen/safety/safebasics/farm_safety.html)
Here...
http://www.agsafetyandhealthnet.org/Myers%20Old%20Farmers%20Conference%20Version%20071015%20Final.pdf
CFOI data show
that farm workers aged 55 years and older accounted for over half of all farming deaths between
1992 and 2004 (3,671 of 7,064 deaths), and had a fatality rate of 45.8 deaths per 100,000
workers compared to the overall farming fatality rate of 25.4 deaths per 100,000 workers. Most
common sources of fatality were "tractors" (46%), "trucks" (7%), and "animals" (5%).
---
Having a devil of a time breaking out farmer fatalities as one number. all the studies are picking slices.
---
There are as of 2006, 683,396 full time state, city, university and college, metropolitan and non-metropolitan county, and other law enforcement officers in the United States. There are approx. 120,000 full time law enforcement personnel working for the federal government adding up to a total number of 800,000 law enforcement personnel in the U.S.
The EPA states:
There are only about 960,000 persons claiming farming as their principal occupation and a similar number of farmers claiming some other principal occupation.
That would make around 1.9 million primary and secondary occupation farmers.
So this means that farmers are dying at a higher rate than cops and in higher absolute numbers.
---
I tried to find some links on "Farmer Brutality" but apparently they don't stop and beat people up because they die a lot in a high risk occupation.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Supreme determinator of US policy? No.
Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces that are fighting in a war that was not legally declared? Yes.
Money is the root of all evil?
BTW, the crowd was very audibly cheering the removal of the glass-face-guy, which seems to indicate they approve of the officer's actions.
Right... approval of the mob obviously makes an inappropriate use of force A-OK.
"From a strictly numerical point of view, an innocent citizen being confronted by the police is more likely to be killed than a police officer is to be deliberately killed by an assailant."
Your numbers are out of scale. This only works if every such confrontation ends in a death.
Being a police officer is a dangerous occupation. Danger is is more than death, but let's just take death here:
That's about the same as the number of firefighters that die per year (except for 2001). Construction work is about 10x that number.
Military has the highest casualty rating I cared to look for (although it contained homicides and such, and my other statistics were all line-of-duty), which is to be expected, but it's still less than the number of people murdered in a year. Doesn't mean you're more likely to live if you go into the military. The pool of potential murder victims is just so much bigger.
These are all dangerous jobs. You can't compare on an absolute scale.
None of which changes the fact that border guards, taken as a group, are overzealous and violent assholes. Annnnnd because I just said that I'll post anonymously, for I am one paranoid traveller.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Moscow Idaho, not Washington State. Moscow is just across the border.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
. . . was ask for orange juice. Poor bastard.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm not excusing it by any means, but rather pointing out that he probably didn't intend to murder the guy.
I agree with you that tasers are frequently misused, as its simply too easy. I do feel that cops need a non-lethal means of subduing someone such as the taser at their disposal, provided they are held accountable for their use.
I would like to point out that in both of these cases, the subjects in question were under the influence of drugs, and presumably they would have both acted differently sober (and it appears that both of those situations were caused by the drugs in the first place). Watts was, presumably, not under any such effects.
If you can't expect to sue and win when they beat the shit out of you over nothing, then how can you expect to sue and win when you acquiesce and turn the whole thing into a non-incident?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
So some of the comments on the boingboing post, e.g., this one, have had their vowels removed and a "Moderator note" added, with a link to an article about "disemvoweling". The article says, "comments on blogs and in other online forums can be incredibly annoying, not to mention hate-filled and obscene. How can moderators walk the line between unregulated anarchy and oppressive censorship? Some have begun discouraging problem commenters by simply removing the vowels from their posts, a process known as disemvoweling. The offending message is rendered less obnoxious, but it's still possible for other readers to decipher it — f thy rlly wnt t."
So let's try to decipher one of the disemvoweled comments:
So that is what the moderators consider "offensive" enough that they think it should be censored? I looked a few more of the censored comments, and they were of a similar vein--suggesting that we don't know the whole story, but doing so politely. Sure is nice to see dissenting viewpoints being suppressed!
Here are the facts to back up your statement. Police or border agents don't even make the list.
Top 10 most dangerous jobs in the USA (Fatalities per 100,000)
Timber cutters 117.8
Fishers 71.1
Pilots and navigators 69.8
Structural metal workers 58.2
Drivers-sales workers 37.9
Roofers 37
Electrical power installers 32.5
Farm occupations 28
Construction laborers 27.7
Truck drivers 25
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics; survey of occupations with minimum 30 fatalities and 45,000 workers in 2002
Just to be a devil's advocate... Do those numbers and statistics you trot out take into account the difference between a patrol officer and an officer with a desk job?
It's not really the full tale, but the Port Huron Times-Herald did speak to a police Captain. Their article is here: http://www.thetimesherald.com/article/20091211/NEWS01/91211010/1002/NEWS01/Science+fiction+writer+charged+after+bridge+struggle
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
"From a strictly numerical point of view, an innocent citizen being confronted by the police is more likely to be killed than a police officer is to be deliberately killed by an assailant." Your numbers are out of scale. This only works if every such confrontation ends in a death.
Yes, that's what he said, someone ended up dead.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The fact that people were glad to have him removed does not mean the cop didn't do anything wrong. It is precisely when it is inconvenient that we should demand legal and civil rights be upheld, otherwise laws are nothing more than empty phrases to be abandoned when some cop has characterologic problems or there is a handy mob nearby.
We should once again try to own the phrase "government of the people, by the people and for the people."
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
...as "Sci-Fi Author Wants Peters Beaten, Charged During Border Crossing." I was having real trouble figuring out who the two parties were.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Want to beat random people up?
Want to legally charge them for assault as well?
Want to ruin their car, their house, and their family?
And finally, want to leave them in Siberian cold without a shirt?
You don't have to be Joseph Stalin to do all these! Join Homeland Security today! Keeping America safe, one mangled skull at a time!
I see you have never dealt with addicts.
Fucking moron. Was the dude an addict?
Has anyone ever succeeded at that? I ask only because maybe I could piggyback on it and get a +5 Offtopic.
Score:1, Offtopic
Hey, you're halfway there!:)
I've got one more proof that cops are so dumb, they don't even read books.
I knew that anyway, feel free to call me biased.
And I work with literally a dozen Canadians here in the US. And they make the trip back and forth all the time and none has any problems. They did it in the last two weeks! Hell, for one of my Canadian friends, his parents moved to Chicago a few years before him, then he moved to San Jose, then his brother moved to Palo Alto. He got married last year. As you might expect, half the wedding guests came from Canada. Do you know how many didn't come because of the problems at the border? None.
My Canadian friend from London, ON worked in Chicago in the summer. He comes across the border to buy stuff like iPhones from time to time. He goes to see hockey games in Buffalo.
I curl with a huge pile of Canadians (as you might expect), none of them has these problems.
I'm sorry you are having problems. But I'm not as sure the full situation is exactly as you say.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I'm sorry but under very few circumstances is pushing a guy through a piece of glass "doing nothing wrong."
I'll give you that if he's got bombs strapped to his waist, or has some other weapon that will cause more damage than you're about to cause him.
Police do not have an implicit right to injure people unnecessarily in the course of their duty.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I think the previous poster must be implying that police officers have a low self-esteem and self-control problems, since most people of moderate intellect are not threatened by simple questions.
If you find yourself threatened by questions about what you're doing on the job, please seek therapy.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Ever had to contemplate absorbing a small piece of lead at supersonic speeds when you show up at the office?
At my "office", I have to contemplate absorbing a small amount of any number of highly toxic compounds that could, among other things, cause me to die a slow painful death of cancer five years down the road. But my drive to the office is probably a whole lot more dangerous than either the supersonic lead or the toxic compounds. Point is, pretty much everyone risks their lives to do their job.
Cops are bullet stoppers, like front line infantry.
Talking about front line infantery makes me think much more about specially trained armed forces, such as the French gendarmerie, who get called in by the cops if a situation requires more armed skills than your average cop has.
IMHO, a cop is just a civil servant. But then again, I'm living in a NW-European country with ponies and legalized pot.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
A well organized ad campaign - riiiiight . and, ah, you're going to pay for that yourself, right? You and your impoverished brethren are going to accumulate enough funds to effectively finance AGAINST the corporate-bought-and-paid back-pocket politicians? The ones who need to "look tough on crime" and rely on the police force to maintain their privileged existences and cancel-my-daughters-speeding-ticket behaviours?
In your fucking dreams, Jack. But you know, whatever you do, don't "get hurt", just acquiesce, eat your bread, watch your circus, and bend over properly when instructed.
> Because they only way to make the cops become something other than corrupt power-mongering jerks is to stand up, make a fuss, get noticed, and have someone above those cops do something about it. Which takes public outcry and attention.
Yeah, but you should be smart about where and when and how you make a fuss. If you start yelling at the man with a taser, you'll soon find out what it feels like. Instead, you try to avoid escalating the situation in the first place and fight over what they did wrong later, in a court of law (or the court of public opinion). It's a lot less painful and it makes your case a lot better if it's clear that you did your best to make things easy and the cop was just trying to be a jerk.
Read Harlan Ellison's "The Tombs", an account of when police and the system almost ruined his life back in the 50s over possession of a single little handgun.
Still no reason to walk somebody against a window. I don't care if it was Osama Bin Laden himself.
it is not something a society should agree with.
Remember that "Innocent until guilty" part? It is not the officers part to decide that he is guilty and evene more not decide to give anybody a punishment 'because they deserve it'.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The really scary part is not that he stand up to his masters, but that he stands up to other peoples masters. Now some might say that he has no rights to get involved in anything, because it is not his country and I would say 'right back at ya.'.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Right, so an alternative "advertising technique" might be to create a fictional story to deliver your message. Since this deals with sort of dystopian control issues, you would probably have to write science fiction in particular.
So I think the real question would be why doesn't this guy just chill out and write some science fiction, right? BUT NOOO. Here he is getting himself beaten by cops in person and making a big deal about it.
From a strictly numerical point of view, an innocent citizen being confronted by the police is more likely to be killed than a police officer is to be deliberately killed by an assailant.
That doesn't follow from the figures you've cited unless the average police officer confronts a mere handful of people per year. I know that the paperwork after each contact with the public is a nightmare, but I don't think it's quite that bad.
If your normalize the number of job related deaths to 1... office workers are about 0.8, police are
around 1.2. Roofers about 20.... and they rarely get benefits.
When crossing into Canada, you do not encounter any US Border Patrol at the Blue Water Bridge. At the Port Huron crossing, when crossing into CA, there's a toll taker (it's a toll bridge) on the US side, you cross the bridge, then stop for Canadian border inspection.
The process is reversed when entering the US (pay toll on CA side, go through border inspection on US side).
There's something not right with this story.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I'm having trouble with my opinion on this. On the one hand, it does kinda devalue the prize. On the other hand, the Peace prize has frequently been used to make political statements; this isn't new. And I can sort of see the committee's point. Not-being-Bush is pretty praiseworthy in itself, in the cesspit of current US politics.
So the crab fishermen of Alaska are certainly allowed to fuck with cops then?
Number of US police officers who died in the line of duty in 2005: 156
Number of US police officers in 2004: 731,903 state and local
Deaths per 100,000: 21.31. This includes all kinds of deaths like having a heart attack on the job
Occupations with higher risks of dying on the job:
Workplace fatalities
Fishermen 147.2 deaths/100,000
Pilots 90.4 deaths/100,000
Timber cutter 84.6 deaths/100,000
Structural metal workers 61.0 deaths/100,000
Waste collectors 40.7 deaths/100,000
Farmers and ranchers 37.2 deaths/100,000
Power-line workers 34.9 deaths/100,000
Miners 34.5 deaths/100,000
Roofers 33.5 deaths/100,000
Truck drivers 27.5 deaths/100,000
The list only shows the top ten professions.
Essentially what you're arguing is, that anyone on that list should be allowed to smack you across the face with one of their work implements while on the job, because they have a dangerous job.
Sure, the police have a dangerous job. Big fucking deal. It's not like they didn't know before they signed up. It's not sprung on you after you've gone through training like some kind of huge secret. Unlike waste collectors - that one surprised me.
I live in Berkeley so I know about the Bart and broken glass situation. Bart cop had a concussion and needed sto itches. The drunk asshole just had some minor cuts. This goes along with the Bart story that the drunk wasn't neccesarily the one whose face broke that glass.
This is one of the reasons why I will never go to the U.S...
Along with facts like:
- The U.S. has got the largest prison population in the world (even more as China).
- If you're a foreigner you've got no rights whatsoever.
- The possibility to be detained indeffinately without being charged for no reason at all.
- Law enforcement officers in urgent need of psychiatric treatment.
- Law enforcement officers which appear to enjoy immunity from the law.
- The default treatment of distrust for foreigners.
- Death penalty (government sanctioned murder), there is no excuse for it.
Having seen the second video I don't think the officer meant to break the window. It really looked like he was just trying to put the guy up against the wall to handcuff him. It was surprising to see that glass break like that. When you see it at the station in looks much stronger. It also looks like the breaking window cut the officer more badly than it did the suspect.
The other situation though, the one with the man being shot in the back....That officer deserves a nice long stay in jail.
Cheers,
Greg
Yeah, why can't we all be like Canadians?
Sorry to break your bubble, but your country is not doing well because you are nicer, better, or smarter people, it's because you have a powerful and stable southern neighbor and because your ancestors managed to grab a huge landmass rich in natural resources and with no hostile neighbors, and to keep people out so that it remains settled sparsely.
As for those laws that people keep imposing on you, that's related to your political and economic significance. Where do you think companies and activists are going to lobby? Canada? Why would they bother? They lobby in the biggest and strongest nation because that's the nation that can then push other nations to comply. If the US weren't kicking you around, the same kind of laws would be imposed on you by some other nation. And if you were big and strong, you would be imposing these laws on others.
But you may get your wish: Americans are getting really tired of foreign adventures. If the US turns inwards, you may find yourself getting pushed around by the EU (British, French, Germans). But you already have experience with that, don't you?
Yeah, you sit on one of the largest and richest pieces of real estate on the globe, lets other nations do your dirty work, benefit handsomely from the usually strong economy and innovation of your southern neighbor, and then whine about why everybody can't be as wonderful as you. Aren't you wonderful.
So far, all we have is his side of the story, and I don't find it particularly consistent. But, yes, it is possible: border guards sometimes screw up.
The incident has almost certainly been video taped, so we should just wait for the legal system to work it out.
There used to be high standards, with lengthy training. You had to learn spanish, and generally become reasonably educated in detecting lies, noticing suspicious people, etc.
As if being able to speak Spanish is necessary at the border posts between Canukistan and the United States of Amerika. US Border Patrol agents used to be professional until the lies about the 9/11 hijackers coming into the US via Canada started being spouted by idiots in Washington and the media. Uneducated Amerikans believe anything their government tells them.
Police officers most certainly are not trapped in the system. A) they volunteered to enter the occupation. There is no draft, or risk of one. B) If police officers really shared the thought process, why are none of them telling their superiors that they will not, in fact, uphold useless laws (and then go on to not uphold them). If they don't think it is worth taking a bullet for, but risk taking a bullet for it anyway, they don't get credit from me for their belief.
I don't blame them for compliance, given that their careers and pay are probably on the line. But they don't get to get paid for upholding wasteful law and bank credit for the principles against that same wasteful law.
I don't expect morality, equality, consistency, or justice from the law. I expect only legality.
Which shows that officers aren't as likely as some to die on the job, it says nothing of how likely they are to be killed through intentional acts of directed violence. The parents stat that half were accidental also does nothing to clear up the issue. The original posting stated that officers sometimes die when situation get out of hand, I don't think he was talking about slipping in the shower at the station.
How about this for a pattern: Find me a single cop that's broken the law and has been sentenced more harshly than the median punisment for that crime.
The "war on drugs" is fundamentally political. It was started by Nixon as a way to punish what he saw as his chief enemies: the hippies who were constantly protesting against his Vietnam policies. Before Nixon's war on drugs, while drug use was technically illegal, there were far fewer arrests and incarcerations than after it got underway. Even then, the really intense number of incarcerations didn't happen until Reagan - again as a political measure against those he had seen as his enemies since they opposed his governorship in California - redoubled the effort.
Of course the war on drugs has been hardest on blacks. One of the chief political complaints against the hippies was they were taking too much of their culture and attitude from blacks. And blacks are less likely to have political connections - say through parents and college friends - to defend themselves against drug persecution. So they've been the easiest target. Still, the war on drugs is essentially Nixon's - and Reagan's - war against the hippies, based on their perception that the hippies were there personal enemies, and arguably enemies of everything essential to "America" - unbridled militarism, for instance.
There's nothing more political than substances that can help break people out of their followership trance.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Way to go, man. Conflating Hans Reisen's murder case with Peter Watts case of being stopped and beaten while LEAVING your country for no special reason whatsoever. Fucking idiot.
Yeah, right. The cop "had concussion".
If you watch the video it's clear that the cop's head hit nothing. The cop claimed that he "had concussion" to justify a bogus claim that the victim of the cop's violence assaulted him.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
ONE guy killed all five of them at once. It wasn't 5 separate incidents. Additionally, that case is scandalous because the guy was a known felon who had been released from jail despite his record of violence and mental instability.
I live in Port Huron. I frequently cross the bridge to Canada. These border guards have one of the toughest jobs around. The first thing we learn from our parents or others before crossing the bridge is that when you cross you shut up, answer their questions (no matter how strange they seem), and you will get out of there without a problem. They have to deal with tons of assholes (like the one in the story it seems) so as long as you are polite and answer correctly they are going to let you through. These guys have to make sure that tens of thousands of cars get into the United States safely everyday, so they don't put up with anything and shouldn't have to. Good for them for doing their job.
Note: I've been pulled over for a search many times and even then as long as you cooperate and treat the officers with respect it causes a very short delay at most.
'This is a common myth. Police officers are *rarely* killed on the job.'
In fact, according to the Worker's Compensation Board where I'm from, which collects workplace accident and injury stats, being a police officer is one of the safest jobs, *safer* than "office worker".
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Er, I understand that some cops can be kind of dicks--more than kind of, sometimes--but when a cop tells you to get back in your car, you DO IT. If you get pulled over for speeding or a broken tail light and you get out of your car, the cop is probably going to draw his gun, and I have zero qualms with that.
You have a problem with what the cops are doing, you deal with it later. You don't deal with it while they're searching your car, by getting OUT of your car. They search because they think something's up, and you really, really don't want to support that idea. They're in charge...and they're just thinking about going home to their families at the end of the day. Some guy starts acting belligerent, not following directions, putting himself in a potentially threatening posture, and yeah, at one end of the bell curve, you're going to get overreacting cops. But I figure it's at least half your fault if you're doing that stuff.
Really, what did he even think he was going to accomplish? Was he going to say "Hey, guys, please don't open my trunk"? If the cops decide they want to search your car, they ARE GOING TO search your car. And honestly, at a border crossing, I don't mind.
So he got chucked in a cell. Sorry, guy. Somewhere along the chain of communication, someone said "He was acting all belligerent at the border crossing and trying to stop us from searching his car", and someone else said "Ugh, I don't know what else to do with him right now, chuck him in a cell until my superior can handle him". Outliers happen. Yeah, please continue to post stories when this stuff happens--but right now it doesn't happen enough to scare me. Right now it just seems like a very reasonable tail end of the bell curve. I don't see malice, I just see people who weren't at their best...and guy who decides to raise a fuss and get out of his car is one of those people.
Your list is old or BS.
The top deaths on the job is pizza or food delivery guy. They get shot by robbers at a rate that far surpasses the death rate of Fishermen.
There is precisely one member of the committee (Ågot Valle) that could be described as a leftist (party SV). There are two from Labour, one conservative and one ultra-conservative (slightly to the right of the republicans). On the other hand, since the ultra-conservatives in the Progress Party have no desire to dismantle our national health care system, you might call them leftists after all ...
Sounds to me like the Detroit officer was trying to verify that nothing was tampered with on the truck seal, in case someone tried to smuggle something in.
A copy of the 2006 Lancet study of excess deaths in Iraq during the war. http://web.mit.edu/CIS/pdf/Human_Cost_of_War.pdf
For a very good reason- It turns out that the Southern border is not all that popular. It's hot, you're mostly working outside, always busy, and you have to deal with people at the bottom of the economic ladder all day long. So, generally, border agents are required to spend some time there before moving on to their permanent assignment. When all the agents were required to learn spanish, this was good. Now, I wonder how they are properly screening people.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I cross this same border regularly, and after reading the story, something is confusing to me. The story says that he was "returning to Canada". When returning to Canada there's a toll booth on the US side where you pay the bridge toll (staffed by employees of the bridge authority -- who are not customs agents). The customs inspection is always on the far side of the bridge, in this case the Canadian side. This would have been staffed by Canadian customs agents.
Does this article mean to say that there were US Customs & Border inspection at the toll booth on the US side? That would be very irregular. The only time I have ever seen an exception is during the weekend of the Mackinac Race when police are trying to curtail drunk driving across the bridge (there's a huge party just before the race, heavy drinking, etc.).
I really feel for Mr. Watts. I'm just trying to understand what happened.
I found a news article explaining that Mr. Watts was selected randomly for a "secondary Customs inspection" and that he was belligerent about it. I don't know what actually happened, but there's always another side to the story and, in typical Slashdot fashion, it doesn't appear anyone's considered what the other side to this one is. For instance, his being half-naked in a cell is likely because he was subdued by pepper spray, which has a tendency to get into your clothing and make you want it off of your body. I have seen one individual tear off his sweatshirt pro wrestler-style in the dead of a Montana winter night because of the pepper spray in the shirt.
It's quite likely that the US border agents went too far, but it's less likely that they beat up a Canadian celebrity just for sport.
Unless any of you were there and saw what happened or a video is released of the entire event its nothing but speculation. I like how immediately everyone jumps on the oppressive fascists bandwagon. Police officers dont run around randomly beating the shit out of people for no reason in front of numerous witnesses. Thats a bad idea. Unlike you axe grinding authority hating anarchists, ill wait to make judgment until all the facts come out. See in this country, we examine the evidence before condemning people. Oh wait, unless cops do something we dont like, then who needs proof? Theyre all rotten bully's.
Though I'm as much against stupid governments following the policies of other stupid governments, I think you citizens of the US need to take responsibility for your own privileges of citizenship, such as the casual way in which you can provide arguments such as the above. Sometimes, our crappy governments dare to oppose your crappy government, and we end up having to experience certain problems such as "foreign"-funded assassinations, military coups, "sanctions", economic interferences (eg IMF, WB), covert "operations," or even "civil" wars or pretty much outright military attacks, wars, and invasions...
Taking the meaning and practice of "sovereignty" for granted is a luxury some of us cannot afford.
Oh, and, please shove your American Dream (TM) and blame-the-victim (R) rhetoric up your arse. Thanks.
Not a simple border search-- I've gone across the border a million times and never been searched _by the country I'm leaving_.
In fact, there's no way to easily do that at such border crossings like the Peace Arch (between WA/BC).
and both of those examples are of someone hopped up on something. is there any indication that watts was on drugs, legal or not? If not, then I don't really see what your point is. Perhaps to be super-ass pedantic for the nerds that can't think with any amount of common sense he should have said--
When a sober unarmed man alone gets into a fight with multiple armed people, it's a rare case where the unarmed man is the aggressor.
I hope that the EFF can successfully bring the truth to light in court.
Everywhere in the world are cops who figure the badge is a ticket to power and adventure.
In the U.S.s haste to fill homeland security positions, I'm sure they haven't been as discriminating as they should be in hiring.
Any monkey with even some national guard experience is first choice hire. I know a few and believe me I don't sleep any better knowing they are on duty at the airport.
Bad cops are an embarrassment and should be corrected with some prison time in general population if only for the Darwinian aspects of passing their genes on to further generations.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Here's the thing: it's not a crime to argue with an officer.
Since Watts was crossing into Canada FROM Michigan, I'd say that story is a bit sketchy from the get-go.
I think you miss the point of much of this. This seems to fit the script of our new administration's bullying tactics. If you fail to knuckle under, well, there will be consequences. It's the 'Chicago Way'. Truth and fairness have no venue here. Power is all that matters. Yes, in this town Money = Power and if you buck the system, you are going to lose. Oh, did I mention that I'm from Chicago ? Keep your head down and your mouth shut if you know what's good for you. It's all part of the 'Chicago Way'.
Normally I ascribe all life to intelligent design, but in your case I'll make an exception.
http://trolltalk.com/blog/blog/article.php?story=20091212120550767
by his own account, he refused to get back in the car when ordered to. Cops with guns vs. arrogant Canuck prick with frozen brain == predictable outcome.
I was thinking that the aggregate reaction would be about the same if he refused (different sets of people would be pleased and upset, and the reactions would have about the same level of emotional intensity; I mostly don't care, I don't think Obama is going to be bragging up the prize on television interviews 7 years from now).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I visited for a week in California in the Februrary after 9/11.
On an internal flight from SF to LA I got "randomly" selected 3 times between the check in desk and the plane! I'm pretty much the exact opposite of a Muslim Terrorist. I'm white and obviously middle-class.
After we came back we began hearing reports about how it was getting even more onerous. Obstreperous TSA guards at airports etc etc so we've decided that we won't be coming back in the foreseeable future. Which is a shame as both my wife and I would love to visit SF again and Las Vegas and NY and DC: but not where there's a *perception* that any visit has the strong probability of getting into trouble at the airport.
Unlike you I don't (and never did) believe Obama, "The Black Bush", will make any difference whatsoever. A year into his lame-duck presidency and nothing has changed.
About the most effort he's made was to collect his entirely un-earned Noble Peace Prize. The committee must have a very warped sense of humour. Either that or they're just plain stupid.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Nerd gets beaten. Idiots doing the beating (some of those guys on the Canadian border are really bored and stupid - I've known a couple).
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Yes but this is just one of too many stories about over-reactions (to put it kindly) and outright dishonest behaviour by the boarder guards of various types, including the TSA.
Why risk it when there's the rest of the world to visit?
I've been to Japan, twice, since deciding not to go to the US anymore. They have pretty much the same checks as the US (fingerprints, photo on entry, declaration that you're not evil, IR checks to see if you have a fever) but not once did I feel threatened. The finger-print machine is more like playing a Nintendo DS or some Hello Kitty game! And none of the staff acted in a threatening or even over-bearing manner. They were cool and professional.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
When people are killed, they tend to die.
Maybe you mean that the ratio of "had aggression directed at them" to "was killed by said aggression" is higher for policemen - but even if we assume that everyone who is ever angry at a policeman immediately ends up killing the cop, the data still shows that fewer policemen die. If we assume that aggression against policemen is more likely to be fatal, the only possible conclusion is that policemen don't draw aggression as much.
In short, you argue that policemen are more well-liked by everyone than, say, timber cutters. I don't see how that meshes with their job being especially dangerous.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Or a situation which could have been resolved if she could have had absolute confidence that the officer would lose his job & get at least a year in prison for (a) trying to issue a baseless ticket (b) changing tack and issuing a fraudulent ticket on no evidence to save face. If people knew that they could:
they may be more likely to take the ticket & see them in court.
FGD 135
Who said it was a baseless ticket? It was a petty ticket but that's not the same thing as baseless. If he had her clocked on radar in excess of the speed limit then she was in violation of the law and the citation was proper.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Lets not forget that most of those black people went obediently to the back of the bus even though they didn't want to. Then they walked past the public water fountain though they were thirsty, and their kids didn't go to school though they knew that lack of education would perpetuate their situation.
The police is full of thugs who like being thugs. They opress not just racial minorities but every citizen who scurries past looking the other way. Police Officers should not be something to fear, they are public servants and their motto is 'to protect and serve' (in a cop show I saw once, probably not everywhere :)
Watts was, presumably, not under any such effects.
I could find nothing about this story that was more than a quote from Watts' blog. There is no way of knowing - objectively - whether he was drunk or sober.
Or, and stop me if this is too complicated for you because I said it once already, I'm saying that I'd be interested to know where police rank in intentional deaths. I would make an informed guess that it's quite a bit higher than loggers, fishers, or pretty much any other civilian profession. Since the OP was commenting on the fact that when situations get out of control officers can very realisticly die it's entirely irrelevent if 100% of loggers are killed in accidents every year because the statistic has nothing to do with the conversation. The parent stated that only 50% of police fatalities are accidental, try to say that about any of the other jobs on that list.
fascist propaganda is full of stories that are outright fabrications or contain only a tiny grain of truth, but are designed to amp up the emotional reaction of the reader to the max
and lo and behold: look at the reactions under this story. for all those reacting in high holy indignation: you're all fodder for fascism, as your mind is primed to overreact in kneejerk emotional ways and jump to absurd conclusions based on the sketchy details of a border dispute
none of you overreacting in this thread represent a protection from fascism. in your overreactions is a good representation of the soil in which fascism grows: jumping to angry and emotional based on flimsy sketchy evidence
fucking pathetic
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
anyone think that if cameras should have caught a record of the events, and there should be tapes, and those tapes should be in the control of the police, and the tapes are missing, there should be a presumption that they contained unequivocal proof in support of the defence?
FGD 135
The key word here being "if."
Yup, Rosa Parks should have just gone straight to the back of the bus and taken out a small ad in the Montgomery Advertiser instead.
Though I'm as much against stupid governments following the policies of other stupid governments, I think you citizens of the US need to take responsibility for your own privileges of citizenship, such as the casual way in which you can provide arguments such as the above. Sometimes, our crappy governments dare to oppose your crappy government, and we end up having to experience certain problems such as "foreign"-funded assassinations, military coups, "sanctions", economic interferences (eg IMF, WB), covert "operations," or even "civil" wars or pretty much outright military attacks, wars, and invasions...
If you live in Iraq, Afghanistan, or even some poor Latin American countries, this argument might have some validity.
If you live in Canada, UK, any Western European or NATO-member country, Russia, China, Australia, or similar country, then you're full of shit. The idea of the USA bringing about a military coup in Australia to pass silly IP laws is just ridiculous. And with these IP laws, it's not the poor, backwards middle eastern and Latin American countries that Slashdotters are complaining about these dumb IP laws being passed in. It's countries like Australia, Canada, and the UK; countries that are completely free to give the US the finger if they wanted to, and more than strong enough to get away with it. As someone else here pointed out, the French give our government the finger all the time; maybe the rest of you need to start acting more like them.
So basically, your argument is full of shit.
Peter Watts has given his side of the story. While I believe the Border Patrol is capable of doing what he said, I don't know if I necessarily believe what he is saying is what happened. By the same token, I will take what the agents say with a grain of salt as well. I want to see the video. There should be multiple cameras that recorded that confrontation. Unfortunately depending on who is telling the truth we may never actually get to see it.
Actually if you read around this is one of the few that does do searches both ways - I was a bit surprised too.
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
As a fellow biology Ph.D., I'll remain skeptical of his story until I hear all sides. Those who donate large sums of money based on a one paragraph blog post are gullible at best.
Your second story seems relevant enough, I'll give you that, but the first is completely unrelated. These were firefighters. Firefighters are not armed.
Huh. You've never worked security at a club, have you. Or even been to one. Drunk idiots will do stupid things.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
"I'll fight for what I care about in the courts and at the ballot box, where it can actually make a difference. "
Has it made a difference in the last decade or so? Patriot act gone? Congress balancing the budget? Healthcare of any use being passed? Police less violent?(seattle cop killing, suspect killed running away). Any recent SCOTUS decisions cut and dried?(gun control)
Fact is, the ballot box is a dismal failure when both sides a crooked. The courts are only useful when they follow the law and not playing politics.
Fact is, ballot box doesn't go your way when most people disagree with you. If you harbor some illusion that the US is becoming a police state because of certain wire tappings, then most people are going to consider you delusional. Most people are happy to allow wire tappings if it catches terrorists. If you want to get anything done with the ballot box, you're going to have to explain to the majority why what you want is a good idea. And you don't seem capable of that.
Qxe4
Cory Doctorow -- who in his novel "Little Brother" had an obvious axe to grind against Homeland Security and law enforcement, to the point of suggesting "9/11 was an inside job". (Says one of the leaflets dropped by the novel's heroic protesters.)
I thought the 9/11 troof reference in that scene in Little Brother was to show how every protest movement can attract crackpots and others with an axe to grind; also specifically to show how Marcus's protests were being portrayed as anti-American by the DHS.
Awesome book by the way, I got a free signed copy when I joined the Open Rights Group.
...a decent fraction succeed...
Ah yes.. That makes it all okay. Tell me, what's a "decent" fraction? You know all that crap about "zero tolerance"? Well, on the authorities is the perfect, if not the only place to apply it. And who's going to court for the guy in a bad shooting? Has a single cop received the death penalty for it? Being an apologist for the cops makes you an ass.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Really? Which states?
I agree with you, but whether or not the people on the train were clapping has nothing to do with the officer doing anything wrong or not.
the cellphone ticket was presumably baseless, else he wouldn't have changed tack immediately when shown even the most rudimentry proof that it wouldn't hold up. And if he were pulling her over for the cellphone thing, why would he have radar data on her speed? AFAIK that data isn't collected continually for all nearby vehicles. He'd have to have gone out of his way to have got it.
FGD 135
(I suppose he could have tried not accepting it, but I doubt that would have gone over any better than accepting it).
It would have gone over pretty good with the domestic crowd, the overwhelming majority of which feels that the award was unearned.
FOX News would have found something wrong about it. And would have convinced the ditto-heads (or Beck-heads or tea-baggers or whatever). I'm not disturbed enough to say what they'd complain about, but they would.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
You really cited two articles where both individuals had overdosed on mind altering substances as your evidence that sometimes the unarmed man is the aggressor? Why don't you find some articles where this aggressor is also sober and trying to do some rather normal activity.
An eye for an eye, an unjust harassment at the border for an unjust harassment at the border.
or something like that.
The cop didn't push the guy through the window. The guy held his right hand up and put it through the window, breaking it. Here's the video. The window breaks at 0:25 so decide for yourself. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKhnKoQAfXA
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
I agree completely with what you say. Having seen the video, I don't believe that the cop did anything wrong. The drunk guy held his hand up and put it through the window. Whether it broke because he punched it or the glass was brittle, I don't know. But it's clear from the video that the cop wasn't using excessive force. He was getting him to a wall to get his hands behind his back and get him handcuffed.
Here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKhnKoQAfXA
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
I understand what you are saying. What I am saying is that the glass breaking wasn't because of the cop using excessive force. The drunk guy put this hand through the window, either because he punched it or the glass was brittle. It's pretty clear from the video that the cop was just taking him to the wall of the station, where there are windows, to cuff him. Here's a link to the video so watch and decide for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKhnKoQAfXA
And remember, innocent until guilty works for both parties: the drunk guy and the cop.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
In Vermont they had a permanently established border point at a rest area about half way down the state on I-91. It was there for a long time and widely discussed in the newspapers. A terrorist would simply need to get off at the exit before and get back on at the exit after. This internal border check point was a totally pointless waste of tax payer dollars. Or they could look like your typical family of five in a minivan and get waved right through.
Send a letter to your congress(person). That's the only way this kind of thing will stop, it's the only way an investigation of this incident will happen, it's the only way that 'foreigners' will be able to feel safe coming into the country.
K.
Yeah, like the Jews screwed up by not holding enough candlelight vigils.
Watts was in a position I refuse to put myself into, dealing with the Homoland Stasi butches. They are there specifically to hassle, harrass and humiliate US citizens. Send the good old boys from Georgia up to Maine to frig with the Mainers born across the border and send the Mainers to the southwest to get freaked out by the skin colors. Standard imperial practice.
Watts went wrong crossing the border in the first place. Those of us with a "bad attitude" should know better than to put ourselves in a position where we have to stand up or wimp out. Existential is the right word, I think.
And yeah, there are good cops. And good soldiers. But fewer and fewer every day - so few it's already too late.
"...As for me, I'll fight for what I care about in the courts and at the ballot box, where it can actually make a difference." That sounds like your excuse for doing nothing! Read about Gandhi. The fight back to a free country is a long hard road, littered with bullies and Gestapo worshippers. All working in the name of "security."
Now, when a police officer is in a situation like that, he usually likes to have complete control of the situation (understandable, since sometimes they end up dead when things get out of control).
This is a common myth. Police officers are *rarely* killed on the job. And border guards? I'm sure it must happen, but it seems it must be exceptionally rare in their case. But somehow that's given as an excuse when they beat the shit out of someone for *daring* to ask a question.
If he feels like you are trying to take control, things can escalate quickly.
"Take control"? The border guards have fucking guns. More to the point, they beat and imprisoned the guy. Even further, they can press charges against him. What did he do? Asked a question? HOW DARE HE!
It would have been better for our author friend to instead get back in the car.
No, it would have been much, much worse. The worst thing one can do in the face of fascism is to acquiesce. Worst thing for society, specifically. Whether backing down or not was something he should do personally depends on how much he cares about personal liberty and what exactly he did. If all he did was ask a question, I can't see any way in which he should have known better.
Also it's worth noting that in some jurisdictions, assault doesn't have to be physical, it can be verbal. So if you do end up in a similar situation, the best thing is to be calm and acquiescent in the moment, and then sue the hell out of them later.
Shit, in some cases, assault can be a dirty look. But you're right, the best thing to do is be a good little slave and bow to your masters...
He got pulled aside for secondary screening. What this means, is that the guard who has been talking to you at your car window points to a parking area and says "we need to have you pull over there for a random security check". The guards don't care if you get out, and there are actually bathrooms and a grassy area to let your dogs shit & kids run, and so you can smoke a cigarette while you wait for the guards to get to you. Usually it's because you did something dumb like forget to throw away all the fruits/vegetables that you have in your cooler. Sometimes it's purely random. Sometimes they might be looking for someone with a similar car, or name. Lots of reasons.
But what you don't do, is talk a bunch of trash, and then get out of your car, still screaming, and approach the guard station yelling and demanding answers. And then when told to return to your car proceed to try and get in someone's face. And then when they get sick of your shit (remember, they are still trying to process other people who are ahead of you in line) they go to cuff you, it's not generally a good idea to get into a scuffle and physically choke one of the guards. Tends to get your ass beat up and tossed in a holding cell.
But go on, talk about your "liberty" and "fascism" and get all indignant about "the man" hassling you, look at how far it got this guy. There's a difference between standing up for yourself, and just being a class A prick... and this guy obviously was simply being a prick.
it's time to abolish the US - Canada border and put all those pr*cks out of work.
You don't know that. His side of the story (with a witness to back him up) is that he didn't assault anyone or provoke the violence. You're taking the officials' word at face value - for no good reason because you weren't there either, so STFU.
So you believe Police should just pull out there guns and start shooting?
But there probably is more delivery guys than fishermen, thus deaths per capita is lower.
- Raynet --> .
Thank you for the voice of reason among lynch mob.
What is the truth here?
- Did Watts draw the Border Patrol Crew from Hell and get his tail kicked for the sin of politely asking why he was singled out and what their intentions were?
Or...
- Did he come flying out of the car swearing like a rap star...
- Refuse orders to get back in his car (maybe to move it over to the screening area, get out of the way so others can go through and possibly not get run over in the process)...
- Continue to mouth off until the border guards lost their patience with him...
- Get a life lesson on what happens if you physically resist being handcuffed.
I don't know. I wasn't there. Neither were Cory Doctorow or any of the people writing here.
I have a great idea. Just to be unique this one time, how about we sit back and wait for the reports and video before we decide the evil jack-booted thugs of the United States are just doing business as usual again. I suspect the truth lays in the middle somewhere.
Or, and stop me if this is too complicated for you because I said it once already, I'm saying that I'd be interested to know where police rank in intentional deaths. I would make an informed guess that it's quite a bit higher than loggers, fishers, or pretty much any other civilian profession. Since the OP was commenting on the fact that when situations get out of control officers can very realisticly die it's entirely irrelevent if 100% of loggers are killed in accidents every year because the statistic has nothing to do with the conversation. The parent stated that only 50% of police fatalities are accidental, try to say that about any of the other jobs on that list.
here's the uncomplicated part: it does not matter if they were directed or not. The number of dead is not high on the list. So... planning for a higher number is not consistent with the facts and your strawman can go away.
And I'd like to compare your numbers with those of, oh, say "inner city school teachers". I bet their deaths are 75% directed and intentional.
Or "abortion doctor". I bet he takes a higher day to day risk that someone is out there trying to see him end.
Can either of those baton you with impunity? Ok, rhetorical, just in case that's too complicated for you.
Anyone know a good country in South America to emigrate to?
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Are we talking about arrests using force or beating people up, because you know, there IS a difference.
I just do not understand why people have still not figured it out: it is the COPS job to know what to do and when.
THEY are trained for it, THEY (should) know the law inside out and THEY must keep their cool
Not the junkie, nor anyone else.
If they cannot handle that, then they should seek other employment.
As long as the cops always get the reasonable doubt (if it ever even comes that far) and can basically do what they want, this will always be the result.
I see a cop pushing a guy through a window. The guy putting up his hand to keep his face from hitting it first is hardly the wrong move.
What would you do if someone was pushing you into a window? Would you take it in the forehead? or put an arm up to protect yourself?
The police officer should expect a suspect to put his hands on the wall/window for the pat-down, and as such should be at least partly responsible for what happened.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Deathrate: (per 100,000):
Loggers: 100,000 (Obviously the highest)
Police: 4 (What an easy job!)
Rate of intentional death:
Loggers: 1
Police: 2
it does not matter if they were directed or not. The number of dead is not high on the list.
Actually, it does. In the example logging is a terribly dangerous job, but not because as was being argued, someone failed to maintian control of the situation. When loggers have a dispute with paper mills I doubt things tend to get violent on the level they do when someone gets pulled over with outstanding warrants or a car full of drugs. The point isn't a strawman, it's the point the OP made that you're trying to argue with. That some jobs are overall more dangerous due almost entirely to the extreme environment they're performed in somehow affecting the confrontational nature of law enforcement is a strawman. You can say it's not the most dangerous job, you can't say they don't have a reason to worry about a situation escalating.
As to your question about teachers and abortion doctors, I would be interested to know as well, as I stated. Those are some interesting and potentially correct ideas, but I think I'll stick with my bet for the moment.
A topic about a Canadian getting beat up and people make it political.
I always have mixed feelings about reports of abuse by police. I hate police harassment as much as anyone and I know people personally who have been victims.
On the other hand, I live in an American city where three policemen were ambushed and shot to death six months ago, another policeman was shot to death last week, and finally a policewoman was almost carjacked yesterday.
You may be correct that statistically, police work is no more dangerous than other jobs. Emotionally, I do think there is a big difference between working a job where violence is expected instead of, say, being a farmer trying to avoid farming accidents.
Police are jumpy and have a good reason to be. When I'm around them I never get too close.
In terms of deaths on the job, police officer doesn't even make the top ten.
I stand by my statement. Police officers *are* rarely killed on the job.
Tasing is Torture.
Torture is the application of overwhelming physical pain in order to gain information or compliance.
The purpose of a Tasor is to gain compliance via the application of overwhelming physical pain.
Tasing is Torture.
You should test your theory in the name of SCIENCE!!
Spoiler: you're wrong.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.