Support Your Local Police

On a number of occasions, I have noted that police appear to be objectively pro fascist.

We have another data point with the conviction of former head of the Washington, D.C. police department's intelligence unit tipping off Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio about an outstanding arrest warrant, and then lying about it.

A former D.C. police lieutenant was found guilty in federal court Monday on charges that he improperly warned Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio of his pending arrest two days before the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, then lied about it to investigators.

Shane Lamond, a 24-year department veteran, withheld from colleagues that Tarrio had confessed to burning a Black Lives Matter banner stolen from a historic African American church during a pro-Trump rally weeks earlier and leaked word to Tarrio that a warrant had been signed for his arrest, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson found.

“Whatever the relationship had been before, after the banner burning the defendant was not using Tarrio as a source; it was the other way around,” Jackson said Monday. “He knew then, and he knows now, that it was wrong.”

She found Lamond guilty of obstructing justice and subsequently making three false statements in an interview with two U.S. attorney’s office investigators to hide his involvement: Lamond denied tipping off Tarrio to the investigation or the arrest warrant and claimed their communications were mostly “one-sided” from the Proud Boys leader.

The week-long trial spotlighted D.C. police interactions with extremist groups in 2020 and 2021, when liberal groups accused police of appearing to favor right-leaning organizations. Lamond, 48, of Stafford, Virginia, headed D.C. police’s intelligence unit at the time.

………

What mattered, she said, was that Lamond shared sensitive information with Tarrio and lied about it — the rest was “icing on the cake.” 

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Jackson set Lamond’s sentencing for April 3. The District obstruction charge is punishable by up to 30 years in prison upon conviction, and the federal false statement counts are each punishable by up to five years, but first-time offenders rarely receive maximum sentences.

This one should get the max, or something close to it.

Police know the law, and he abused his position, and then lied about it.

Cops should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us, because they are given the right to apply force, often deadly force, by the state.

To quote Peter Parker, with great power comes great responsibility.

The Portland Police Bureau is Objectively Pro Proud Boy

Yes, you are the baddies

This is the only explanation of their solicitous behavior toward right wing terrorists, see here, here, here, and here.

And now we have coddling of the Proud Boys by the Portland Police Bureau which has led to violence.

This is yet another example of how awful the Portland, Oregon police are on the side of right wing terrorists:

Proud Boys and other right-wing combatants in Northeast Portland on Sunday fired paintball guns out of moving trucks, toppled and looted a van, and brawled in the street with anti-fascist adversaries amid fireworks and smoke bombs, with police nowhere to be seen.

The Aug. 22 rally—called “Summer of Love: United We Stand Divided We Fall”—was held in the parking lot of an abandoned Kmart in Northeast Portland. The event landed about 48 hours after Mayor Ted Wheeler and Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell warned that police would not intervene in weekend skirmishes that resulted from the planned gatherings.

“We are asking you to choose love,” Wheeler said during the Aug. 20 press conference. “People should not necessarily expect to see the police standing in the middle of the crowd trying to keep people apart.”

Ted Wheeler is literally adopting the rhetoric of the Proud boys here.

The mayor and police chief kept to their word: There was no obvious sign of Portland police for the duration of an event that, at its climax, resembled scenes from a Grand Theft Auto video game. (Hours later, a gunman exchanged shots with armed foes in downtown Portland.)

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While the Portland Police Bureau made it clear Friday that they wouldn’t wade directly into a melee, it is unclear whether any police were present at all during Sunday’s rally—even around the perimeter of the nearly 7-acre lot, where armed attendees stood guard at the various exit points. (PPB and the mayor’s office did not immediately respond to WW’s questions about whether any police were present at the rally.)

These actions were explicitly to support right wing territories. 

You know that if there had been a handful of black faces in that parking lot, the Police would have been in there swinging night sticks and using tear gas.

………

That follows a pattern: Both Wheeler and Lovell declined on Friday to name the groups they anticipated arriving in Portland this weekend. During the rally, however, those affiliations were apparent: Most attendees wore gear affiliated with right-wing ideologies or paramilitary groups. The affiliations included the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, and supporters of former President Donald Trump.

Longtime street brawler and Proud Boys affiliate Tusitala “Tiny” Toese appeared to headline the rally by introducing speakers and queueing the music.

Maybe the Portland Police Bureau should update their uniform to include a white hood.

Meanwhile, in DC

Republicans in Congress are using the right-wing insurrection on January 6 as an excuse for bills targeted primarily at peaceful protesters like Black Lives Matter.

Republicans never miss an opportunity to use a crisis to rat-fuck the country, do they?

In September, Florida governor and Trump ally Ron DeSantis proposed a bill dubbed the Combating Violence, Disorder and Looting and Law Enforcement Protection Act to create new criminal penalties for offenses commonly committed during protests. He said it was needed to stop the “professional agitators bent on sowing disorder and causing mayhem in our cities” following months of largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests.

Hours after a far-right mob stormed the Capitol at the behest of the president, Florida Republicans introduced a version of the bill. That night, DeSantis said the violence in Washington shows that lawmakers “have no time to waste to uphold public safety” and must “swiftly pass this bill.”

DeSantis isn’t alone. Within the past year, lawmakers in 24 states have introduced at least 45 bills to create new penalties or increase criminal penalties for offenses related to protesting, discourage cuts to police funding, and provide protections to people who drive their cars into protesters or shoot protesters in an alleged act of self defense. Six of those bills—one in Utah, one in Mississippi, one in West Virginia, one in Tennessee and two in South Dakota—have been signed into law.

But the bills aren’t aimed at reining in the kind of violent insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol, and federal prosecutors already have a litany of charges at their disposal to hold the perpetrators accountable. The bills seek to criminalize conduct typically associated with Black Lives Matter protests, like blocking streets or highways and camping out at state capitols. Provisions of DeSantis’s bill seek to discourage local governments from cutting police budgets, but what happened on Jan. 6 can’t be pinned on a lack of police funding or intelligence—the FBI knew extremists were planning to commit violence in Washington days before, and Capitol Police rejected offers for additional manpower from the National Guard. While some police officers were brutally attacked or took action to protect the lives of others, others shook hands with a member of the mob. One police officer even took a selfie with the insurrectionists.

This is why I oppose changes to the current laws in response to the January 6 insurrection.

The people who will be enforcing these laws, cops, prosecutors, etc.  are objectively pro-fascist and institutionally, if not necessarily personally, racist.

All that more laws get you is more opportunities for abuse.

About Bloody Time

Following the insurrection at the Capitol, police departments across the country are finally looking into the unsavory extracurricular activities of some of their members. 

I've been saying for a long time that police are objectively racist and pro-fascist, maybe now some of the tens of thousands of police forces, and the civilians who nominally are in charge of these institutions, will actually start policing the police:

Police officers and at least one police chief from departments across the United States are facing termination, suspension or other discipline for their proximity to or alleged involvement in a chaotic gathering in Washington on Wednesday that ended in a riot at the U.S. Capitol and left five people dead.

Departments in California, Washington state, and Texas are among those that have announced investigations into their officers based on tips, social media posts and other evidence, though more officers could be identified as evidence emerges in the coming days.

The probes come after an especially fraught year for U.S. policing that saw massive civil rights protests against police violence. They are likely to raise questions about free speech, the expansion of surveillance and public trust in law enforcement, while legal experts warn the scrutiny could have unintended consequences.

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Police are the Same Everywhere

And by that, I mean, as Yanis Varoufakis notes, that they are objectively pro-Fascist.

He is talking about Greece, but the same thing happens in the US, France, Germany, the UK, former Soviet Republics, etc.

Perhaps the only police force that MIGHT not tilt toward Nazis is the Saint Petersburg constabulary, but that is an accident of history, specifically the 872 day Siege of Leningrad.

I rather imagine that even in the former Leningrad, the police are still reactionary:

October 7 was a good day for democrats. The Greek Court of Appeals upheld the convictions of the leaders of Golden Dawn, the only openly Nazi party to have won seats in any parliament since the 1940s, on charges of murder, grievous bodily harm, and directing a criminal organization. A crowd of 20,000 Athenians celebrated outside the court.

Our celebration lasted precisely 40 seconds, before the police dispersed us with teargas. Gasping for air, my wife and I tried to join hundreds of others struggling to escape via a narrow street leading to the safety of nearby Mount Lycabettus. A dozen riot police were there, firing gas canisters into the fleeing crowd. I pleaded with their commanding officer to stop. “There is no purpose in gassing people trying to go home,” I told him calmly. He swore at me. When I produced my parliamentary ID card, his response startled me: “Yet another reason to fuck you.”

The conviction of Greece’s Nazi leaders is a decisive victory against the revival of far-right extremism in Europe. But while they were being sent to prison, their ideas, manners, and hatred of parliamentary democracy were in police uniform, terrorizing the streets.

A week later, a police internal affairs officer interviewed me as part of an investigation triggered by my testimony. I could not recognize the riot policeman’s face, because I was unable to breathe or see properly at the time of the incident. But I did recognize one thing: the look of calm loathing in his eyes – a look that reminded me of Kapnias, once a trained Gestapo interrogator.

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When I met him in 1991, I had assumed that figures like Kapnias were relics that would disappear one funeral at a time. I was wrong. A sense of permanent defeat, hopelessness, and widespread humiliation create an environment in which Nazism’s dormant DNA reawakens. Once Greek society was immersed in wholesale indignity, following our state’s bankruptcy in 2010, a new generation of Nazis, with Kapnias’s look in their eyes, took their seats in Parliament. Now, most of them are in prison for heinous crimes. But that look remains in the eyes of too many, not all of them in uniform.

At this I'm inclined to believe that law enforcement is INHERENTLY pro-Fascist, and pro-Nazi.  It just comes with the job.

Objectively Pro Fascist

In Clackamas County, Oregon, a deputy has been placed on leave after he was caught on video blaming "Antifa" for setting the fires ravaging the state.

Let's be clear here:  This is not an isolated case.

Police have been openly and aggressively supporting white supremacists and militia members, no where more so than in Oregon:

A Clackamas County sheriff’s deputy was placed on administrative leave Saturday after a video was posted online of the deputy claiming anti-fascist activists had been starting fires in the area.

The patrol deputy’s statements in the video are in direct conflict with efforts by law enforcement to dispel false rumors that antifa is responsible for wildfires burning in Clackamas County.

The deputy, whose face and name badge are not fully shown in the video, is recorded saying: “Antifa motherfuckers are out causing hell, and there’s a lot of lives at stake. And there’s a lot of people’s property at stake because these guys got some vendetta.”

The sheriff’s office said in a statement Saturday that the on-duty patrol deputy was tasked with ensuring residents knew of wildfire hazards in the area. The agency said he has been placed on administrative leave while its Professional Standards Unit investigates a potential policy violation. The deputy has not been publicly identified.

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Law enforcement officials across the state, including with the FBI, are attempting to dispel rumors that political groups, including antifa — a loosely defined leftist group that is a frequent focus of far-right conspiracy theorists — are behind the unprecedented wildfires that have burned more than 1 million acres in Oregon. One plea law enforcement has made is that conspiracy theories take resources away from law enforcement who are attempting to keep the public safe.

There needs to be a persistent and aggressive effort to get right-wing terrorists and right-wing terrorist sympathizers out of law enforcement.