Archive for the ·

war on cops

· Category...

December 31, 2012 8:15 pm

Naomi Wolf, Aaron Greene and Morgan Gliedman: Retro Radical Chic

17 comments
by    in war on cops

A few days ago, the glossy-haired fourth estate of the Occupy Movement, Naomi Wolf, joined other activist/journalists in accusing police, federal law enforcement, and “big banks” of committing “totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent” over Occupy protesters last year.  According to Wolf, Occupy was totally subjected to torturous police crackdowns of their peaceful, non-violent, property-respecting protests, for no reason whatsoever.

Wolf’s description of this “corporate-state repression” is, to be kind, histrionic.  She sees herself and other protesters as deeply and dramatically victimized freedom fighters and visualizes Occupy’s many enemies as some sort of highly coordinated giant squid, or maybe a huge fascist octopus.  I thought it was more like code enforcement, myself.  The main concern of most taxpayers, after all, was the scabies and the defecating in the streets.

Though, I would happily draft the biggest fascist octopus available to silence the round-the-clock drumming circles.

In an editorial in The Guardian, Wolf vividly describes:

a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council [try not to scream as punctuation gets tortured].  And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens.

Elsewhere, just yesterday, police busted yet another peace-loving armed-to-the-teeth political activist.  Aaron Greene, reportedly of Harvard University and Kennedy School of Government, had ironically stuffed the Greenwich Village apartment he shares with his very pregnant socialite girlfriend with enough grenade launchers, shotguns, and unstable explosive powder to totally recreate the famous 1970 Weather Underground Greenwich Village Townhouse explosion that killed socialite Diana Oughton and two other Weather Underground terrorists.  The three accidentally blew themselves up as they assembled nail bombs that were to be used to kill scores of servicemen and their girlfriends at a dance at Fort Dix later that night (see here and here for other recent bomb-related arrests of “peaceful” Occupy protesters).

The cynical way of describing this confluence of events would go something like this:

Naomi Wolf/Occupy Movement Peaceful: 0   —   Police: 1 

But, why be cynical?  It’s the most magical time of the year.  And thanks to a “totally integrated” police response to Aaron Greene and Morgan Gliedman’s little home-made lab, Ms. Gliedman is safe and sound and reportedly giving birth in a hospital as I write this, rather than possibly having what’s left of her fingertips peeled off the remains of a smoldering pile of rubble, which was the fate Diana Oughton met in 1970.  Contrary to what Naomi Wolf seems to believe, police possibly saved these two, and a newborn, and who knows who else, today.  The explosives they were messing with were not for amateurs: more than one building reportedly had to be evacuated to deal with their venal stupidity.

1970 Greenwich Bomb Factory Explosion

Morgan Gliedman, 2013: New Mommy

Diana Oughton, 1970: Dead

Yeah, I know.  The resemblance between these two women is downright creepy.  You would think that Ms. Gliedman was trying to look like Diana Oughton.  She certainly appears to have been working on turning out like her.  Hopefully, she will someday have the decency to thank the cops who risked their lives and their own families’ future holiday memories in order to save her from the stupidity of trying to hatch a baby in a retro hippy bomb factory.

  Just Doing My Job, Ma’am

But if I were the police, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for an apology.  Gratitude for being rescued from their own stupidity has never been a virtue of the radical Left.

Naomi Wolf, for example, is shown at the top of this post being arrested at an Occupy protest last year.  By her own description, she apparently believes that the arrest arose merely from her vigorous efforts to educate ignorant police about protesters’ rights by citing a chapter about sidewalk permits from some book she once wrote.  I’m just going to say it: no matter how much we all wish we lived in a world where it was illegal for Naomi Wolf to write book chapters, that’s not what really happened.  Yet, here is just one portion of the breathless, hair-tousled, cop-loathing Patrick Henry-inspired facebook entry she penned to memorialize her arrest:

The [Occupy] protesters were being told that they needed to leave the sidewalk outside of the Huffington Post event because “Huffington Post had a permit” to control the use of the sidewalk. I have a chapter in Give Me Liberty on NYC permits so I knew that could not be accurate. Sidewalks are public spaces and can’t be leased by private entities. I asked for a copy of the permit . . . Some press reports say that I was arrested because I ignored police warnings to get off the sidewalk or that I was arrested for using a megaphone without a permit. Both of these are untrue. I told the protesters that the NYC permit requirement that states that using a megaphone is illegal. . .

And so on.  And so on.

Is anybody else itching to gnaw off their arm to escape this?  Remember, the cops have to be there.

In her recent Guardian editorial, Wolf breathlessly tells the whole world that’s watching (or at least the part of it that reads The Guardian) about a nefarious plot by police, the FBI, and “big banks” located in different cities to use actual cellphones to communicate with each other about completely non-violent Occupy protesters who pacifistically announced in writing in advance their intentions to invade banks, destroy property, and physically attack police officers.

Here’s how Wolf describes this mysterious law enforcement plot to talk with each other on the telephone:

It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall – so mystifying at the time – was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves –was coordinated with the big banks themselves.

Mystifying group disruptions?  Canister missiles to the skulls?  Faceless banks wanting protesters to wet their pants?  Bondage?

Now I’m just going to say this: would it be at all possible for modern feminists to at least try get through an essay about ANYTHING WHATSOEVER without mentioning “bondage”?  Please.

Also, having spent a very stinky week in August tramping around after Occupy protesters who were trying to shut down the Republican Convention in Tampa by creating pure physical revulsion through the wearing of giant sweaty pink vulva costumes, I think I speak with a frisson of authority when I say that there was absolutely no need for anyone to “coordinate” with “big banks” in order to get that crew to soil themselves.

Anyone who has ever failed to properly clean their pet gerbil’s cage knows exactly what the Occupy encampments in downtown Tampa smelled like, all on their own, with no pressure from Wachovia.

Really, do we have to do this Occupy/Sixties nostalgia thing all over again?  Because somebody’s going to get hurt.  It was the cops in Tampa who were being pummeled with abuse as they handed out bottled water to masked “anarchists” wandering around looking for trouble while being trailed by their own personal ACLU attorneys and gaggles of argumentative middle-aged women dressed like vaginas.

Yet, Naomi Wolf apparently still feels that when lit.crit. majors with nary a mouse-pelt of common sense between them announce portentously in AdBusters that they are going to arrive by the tens of thousands to smash bank windows and meaningfully blockade Staples stores in order to transform reality itself with their ideas, police and federal agents should just stick their fingers in their ears and let them do it.

Let me try to explain this is language that can be understood: the police have the right to pick up the phone and trade hippy-punch notes with Sgt. Friday out there on the Left Coast.  OK?

~~~

Speaking of radical chic, it was sort of a Weather Underground thing to mix babies with bomb making, from Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers to Eleanor Raskin and Jeff Jones.  Make that Judge Raskin.  The future judge and her future labor lobbyist spouse were busted in yet another apartment/bomb factory with baby in tow in 1981.

Robert Redford is about to release a film that actually romanticizes all those toddlers-n-TNT moments.  You know, the terrorists will be the good guys.

Remember 1981?  Here are just a few of the police officers who didn’t get to go home to their own children around that time because of the murder campaigns against cops waged by the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, and others.  Always remember that cop-killers are revered by the peace-loving Occupy Movement:

Murdered in Brinks Robbery: Officer Waverly “Chipper” Brown

Murdered in Brinks Robbery: Sgt. Edward O’Grady

Murdered in Brinks Robbery: Brinks Security Guard Peter Paige

Murdered in the San Francisco Police Station Bombing: Sgt. Brian V. McDonnell

Murdered during the Assata Shakur escape: Trooper Werner Foerster

It’s only a matter of time — and the sort of self-indulgent cop-hating rhetoric Wolf and many others are spewing — before something ends in tears.

17 comments!
July 17, 2012 2:00 pm

Radicals Coming to Tampa to Disrupt the RNC, Using Your Money . . . and Soros Grants

1 comment
by    in Activists,Florida,war on cops

The Republican Convention in Tampa is only a few weeks away.  The Occupy movement seems to be missing in action or washing their socks, but other activists are still preparing to disrupt the convention.  Teamsters, Welfare Rights groups, “Graduate Assistant” coalitions, the ‘new SDS’ and coalitions of subsidized professional agitators such as the Committee to Stop FBI Repression are making plans to descend on Tampa.

Last month, these activists used the taxpayer-funded facilities of the University of South Florida to plan their attack.  Why did USF President Judy Genshaft allow our property to be used by a bunch of radicals who are openly planning to disrupt an important political event and violate the speech and participation rights of ordinary Americans?

Here is a description of the protest planning that took place on taxpayer-funded property:

About 50 people from across the country gathered here June 16, on the University of South Florida campus, for the Coalition to March on the Republican National Convention Organizers Conference. There were representatives from more than 30 labor unions, student organizations, anti-war groups and immigrant rights groups from Florida, Minnesota, Illinois and North Carolina, including the Graduate Assistants United at the University of Florida, Students for a Democratic Society, the Committee to Stop FBI Repression, the United National Anti War Coalition, and Students Working for Equal Rights.

The conference focused on reaching out to groups and organizations opposed to the Republican agenda, in order to bring them to Tampa for the march. . .

Marisol Marquez and Fernando Figueroa, two of the lead Florida organizers for the Coalition to March on the RNC, facilitated a full schedule of workshops and planning sessions aimed at building for the march on August 27, the first day of the convention.

“The Coalition to March on the RNC is a group effort, in every sense of the word,” said Figueroa. “We’re hosting this conference so all of our coalition partners – workers, students, immigrants, and others – can build for this historic march in August behind a unified message and a cohesive organizing strategy.”

Mick Kelly, an organizer of the massive protest at the 2008 Republican Convention urged an all out national mobilization for the opening day of the RNC. Joe Iosbaker, a key organizer of May’s NATO Summit protest, summed up the key lessons of the Chicago demonstration. Tracy Molm of the Committee to Stop FBI Repression noted that the government would work to derail the planned protest. Angel Buechner, of the Twin Cites based Welfare Rights Committee stated that low-income people would join the Coalition’s march. . .

[O]n Friday, July 27, coalition partners will hold demonstrations, pickets and protests outside of local Republican Party headquarters or corporate sponsors of the Convention.

“The city of Tampa insists on restricting our right to protest the agenda of the Republican Party,” said Richard Blake, a member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 385 and organizer with the Coalition to March on the RNC. “

Aww, the Teamsters feel “silenced.”  When did the Teamsters start channeling an Oprah audience?  Jimmy Hoffa must be squirming in his grave, wherever that is.

Unfortunately, some city officials in Tampa Bay have been caving to the protesters and granting them special access to elected officials, access not available to the real residents who pay public officials’ salaries and foot the city’s bills.

Occupy Protesters are also coalitioning with the radical Food Not Bombs to protest the RNC.  Food Not Bombs is a group that ought to be watched closely: they operate as a front group, using the excuse that they’re  ”feeding vegan meals to the homeless” while they set up camps that serve as cover for radical activists.  FNB is packing up their seitan snacks and heading to Tampa Bay.  Don’t let the happy faces fool you:

Here is an interesting blog post from one local activist trying (and not exactly succeeding) to get involved in the “real” protest planning:

[D]elegations from St. Pete, Lakeland, Sarasota, Bradenton, and Tampa converged on Lykes Gaslight Park in downtown Tampa [June 4]. Occupy Tampa had felt a need to do some planning for the Republican National Convention (RNC) . . .  So far, I know of Resist The RNC, Occupy The RNC, and March On The RNC, along with the official RNC itself. Within minutes of arriving at the Regional Gathering, I had gathered that although these separate groups are each coordinating strategy, tactics, and logistics for the RNC, they may not be coordinating with each other. And, at the moment, they are tight-lipped about their plans.

The activist writing this must not be not a member of the “in” group of radical protesters.  Interesting that the activists in charge are keeping such a tight lock-down on their real plans, concealing things from other activists who are trying to get involved in their events.  The blogger continues:

Upon our arrival, Food Not Bombs was on the scene serving a vegan lunch to all attendees. In Sarasota, the thoughtful Food Not Bombs crew has served the hungry during a number of the weekly Occupy rallies. I recognized Katie, who had been active with Occupy Tampa and is now volunteering with Food Not Bombs. I have met many people for whom the Occupy Movement has been a conduit, connecting their sense of injustice and disillusionment with a local activist group that stirs their passion. Like the Occupy Movement, Food Not Bombs is composed of volunteers who are dedicated to nonviolent, societal change. Like Occupy, each local group is autonomous. Like Occupy, there are no leaders and they involve everybody in the decision-making process. And like Occupy, Food Not Bombs supports protests organized by others. With that in mind, it is no surprise that they have decided to have an international convention in Tampa, during the week leading up to the RNC. Undoubtedly, there will be many more groups calling for a national march on the RNC.

Bull.  Food Not Bombs is actually planning a pre-RNC invasion, starting August 20.  They’re calling it VEGANPALOOZA, and it has nothing to do with really “feeding the poor.”  Instead, it will enable FNB to establish camps throughout Tampa and refuse to leave while glomming attention from partisan, naive, or headline-hungry media types.  And what happens when they refuse to stay inside the protest zones meticulously planned by the ACLU and Tampa government?

What, exactly, will happen with all that nice, friendly, egalitarian and inclusive “protest planning” being showered on the activists by our City Council?  The protesters will ignore it, like they do at every event where city officials give them an inch — or a mile.  It’s not about “free speech.”  It’s about disrupting an actually free and peaceful gathering — the Republican National Convention.

The Tampa City Council is setting itself up as a pasty.  They’re bending over backwards to please the ACLU and the National Lawyer’s Guild, as those groups act in bad faith with the city.  Of court they’re being abetted in this by the St. Petersburg Times (now Tampa Times).

It’s a vegan-based recipe for disaster.  Somebody in City Hall needs to remember who they really work for and start asking some hard questions about the deceptive tactics and “spontaneous” disruptions being planned by Food not Bombs and their peers.

The outsider-blogger continues:

I was not fully aware of the depth of activity nearby. Occupy Tampa is producing a TV show. Occupy Daytona has started a radio show. Occupy Tampa is starting a street theatre group. The OccupPlayers from Bradenton, who performed at the WSLR radio station in Sarasota a couple of months ago, is planning a performance in St. Pete and will make themselves available as requested by other locations. And for those holdouts who still like to read, there is an Occupied Tampa Tribune.

The General Assembly whipped through a number of proposals. All attained consensus, but one. The Tampa Region stands in solidarity with the student protesters in Quebec. The Tampa Region will hold a General Assembly at different locations, every two weeks, until the RNC. A most interesting proposal was brought forward to put out a National Call To Action Against Bain Capital. The actions would take place all over the country on the day Mitt Romney accepts the Republican presidential nomination. There is something almost romantic about this idea. Romney continues to receive a passive profit share and interest in Bain Capital investment funds. Bain Capital always made a profit even when the companies they bought went under, even when many workers lost their jobs, their pensions, and their healthcare. Such vulture capitalism is the poster child for what’s wrong with how our economic system functions. What better time to highlight these cold deficiencies than on the day of Romney’s acceptance speech.

A recurring concern voiced at the Gathering was dwindling participation. Leslie from Occupy Tampa was curious and concerned about attendance at other Occupations. A local religious leader made a plea for presenting a clear and constant message about the profound issues of economic inequality. He is hoping for a format that will draw people in and get them involved. Jason, who is from Tallahasse but has been staying with Occupy Tampa for the last month, threw out a concrete suggestion to the General Assembly. How about renting a truck, covering it with sheets, projecting messages onto it, and driving through Ybor City on a Friday night. Go to where the people are and make a bold statement. Leslie volunteered to coordinate outreach efforts to help bring more people out to participate.

Soon after the General Assembly came to a close, folks made signs and marched around downtown in solidarity with the Quebec students. Students there had called for a tuition freeze. Nightly protests consisted of clanging noisy pots and pans in the streets. The students wore red felt squares to symbolize being financially in the red, crushed by debt. In Canada, as in the United States, tuition hikes are leading to increasing student debt. Even after almost 100 nights of protest, the students hadn’t garnered much community support. But, when the government passed emergency legislation to limit students’ right to assemble and protest, thousands of community members flooded the streets in support. As I understand it, the strike by the Quebec students is the longest and largest student protest in Canadian history. And yet their debt is small potatoes when compared with the $1 trillion in debt taken on by college students in the United States. In addition to marching in solidarity with Quebec students, folks here are motivated by the spiraling student debt in the United States. A jubilant procession from the Tampa Regional Gathering marched through downtown, banging pots and pans and wearing red felt squares.

Oh yeah.  And possibly doing this.

Welcome to Tampa, kiddies.  It’s going to hot in those balaclavas, though:

 

I previously wrote about what is coming to Tampa, here.  In upcoming weeks I will detail the ways some elected officials are selling us out to the protesters.  Meanwhile, it’s time to send the city a polite but firm message: we don’t want to have to pay for anti-social radicals to have air-conditioned public facilities to plan their attack on the city.

We’re already paying enough, getting ready to prevent them from causing chaos in the street — or worse.  And why should we have to pay for this?  Why aren’t the groups listed above being sent the bill?

 

 

1 comment...
July 16, 2012 9:46 am

How’s That Anti-Cop Crusade Working Out? Rochester Edition.

9 comments
by    in Activists,New York State,war on cops

Last year, a tedious brew of Occupy protesters and “Cop-Watch” activists took to the streets in Rochester, New York.  They mobilized behind a contemporary flower-child named Emily Good.  Good had been detained briefly after interfering in a police stop that occurred outside her urban hipster-neighborhood home.

After the actual subjects of the police stop slunked into the night, never to be heard from again (and doubtlessly grateful that Good’s hysterics had distracted the police), Good and her supporters tried to make hay out of her arrest.  She granted interviews to CNN and posed for pictures “doing ministry work” in a drop-waist dress, all the while denouncing the “horrors of police brutality” on Rochester’s violent streets.

Good on CNN

But it soon emerged that Good was not the earnest-random-citizen-witness-to-alleged-police-brutality she pretended to be.  Video showing her physically attacking an Olympic torch runner in Canada and feigning abuse at the hands of police during a violent squatter’s protest revealed her real identity as a professional anti-policing activist — one trained to incite and escalate conflicts with the police.  Luckily, the videos of Good’s prior activities were saved by a smart local blogger before Good and her supporters cleansed her Facebook page of evidence of her radical activities.

Good Pretending to Be Brutalized By Police

The Olympic torch video was particularly chilling.  Good and other “native Canadian rights” activists knocked down the woman runner, who was nearly ignited in flames from falling on the torch.  Rather than being chastened by the near-disaster, Good bragged about it online, gleeful that she had interrupted the “Gestapo” Olympic torch run.  She wrote:

The runner actually tripped over all of her security people who were frantically shoving us out of the way.  Anyway, the torch went down!  Hitler started that tradition for the nazi olympics — time to extinguish it!

What sort of person jokes about nearly setting another human on fire?  More importantly, who does such a thing while simultaneously believing she is on the side of angels, who sees herself not as a violent person but as a social heroine, feeding the poor and spreading justice to the dispossessed?  It is to our detriment that we have forgotten about the lost girls of the Seventies, those college-educated daughters turned glassy-eyed cultists who flocked to Charles Manson, shot at presidents, or blew themselves up wiring bombs in their daddies’ townhouses.

John Updike’s story, “The Lovely Troubled Daughters of Our Old Crowd,” says something about the starting point of this sort of social disintegration.  Not precisely, but read it anyway.

Good and her compatriots were protesting the “imperial” Canadian state and the evil corporations hosting the Olympics.  That justified almost setting an innocent woman on fire.

In the mindset of activists like these, anybody who does not agree with their politics is an expendable dupe, and the police are no less than the Gestapo.

Emily Good with Hugo Chavez: Just Another Young Woman Who Cares About Justice

Bread Not Bombs 

Emily Good is a member of the radical activist group Food not Bombs.  Good even wore a Food Not Bombs t-shirt to one television interview in which she denied that she had ever been involved in anti-police activism.  ”I have never agitated directly against the police . . . I wouldn’t say I’m an activist against the police at all,” she told the reporter, while wearing a t-shirt for an organization that agitates against police.

In recent years, Food Not Bombs Rochester has hosted events such as: “Open Mic Against Police Brutality and State Repression” and “Support the Police: Beat Yourself Up.”  The reporter didn’t ask Good about her t-shirt during the interview: the media has utterly failed to report credibly on the war on cops being waged by radicals ranging from activists like Good to national lawyer’s groups subsidized by billionaire financier George Soros.

Tampa, beware: the Emily Good story — the media’s epic failure to identify her, or to report on Food Not Bombs’ radical motives and training — is a cautionary tale for the city of Tampa, which is preparing to host the 2012 Republican Convention.  Food Not Bombs is planning to arrive in the city in advance of the convention and set up so-called “feeding stations” providing “vegan food for the homeless.”  These encampments will serve as cover for other radicals.  The local media is taking its marching orders from the A.C.L.U. instead of investigating Food Not Bombs’ tactics.  So the public remains uninformed, while elected officials pander to the professional activist classes instead of asking hard questions of the protestors, let alone holding them responsible for the trespassing and code violations they have committed so far.

 Nothing to See Here: Good Denies Anti-Police Activities While Wearing an Anti-Police  T-Shirt

The media’s failure to notice Good’s shirt would have merely been funny if the stakes weren’t so high.  Cities like Rochester are contending with exploding crime rates, while police budgets are gutted and police find themselves are under attack.

Rochester has been living through a 40% increase in homicides and a 73% increase in shootings.  Nevertheless, the A.C.L.U. keeps encouraging the public to resist all crime-fighting measures.  Through an initiative subsidized and orchestrated by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, A.C.L.U. activists advertise free phone apps that teach people to videotape police and interfere in crime fighting.  Meanwhile, Rochester burns.  Little wonder that people in high crime areas are less enthusiastic about A.C.L.U. lawsuits and anti-cop street-marches than the dilettantes who pack up after marching picket lines and return to nicer houses and safer neighborhoods.

Still, silly as they seem, there’s no underestimating the damage such people can do.

Last year, Emily Good and her trumped-up “persecution” cost the police time and money that could have been spent fighting real crime.  It also tied their hands, as activists descended on Rochester to take advantage of Good’s fifteen minutes of embarrasingly-non-vetted media fame.  Even now, as the murders and shootings pile up, the A.C.L.U. keeps playing by the script, accusing police of brutality no matter what they do to try to quell the crime wave.  But some residents are speaking out in support of stepped-up police protection.  Rochester Democrat and Chronicle Columnist Jermayne Myers recently wrote:

Kudos to Rochester Police Chief James Sheppard and the police department for shifting into over gear to help curb a recent spike in shooting, stabbings, robberies, homicides and other senseless acts of violence and crime in the City.

As I’ve said in the past, our city and its residents have been held hostage by the numerous senseless acts of violence and crime over the past two-three months. With 21 homicides and 95 gun assaults, and still counting as of last week, Rochester is on the path to seeing one of its worse and most violent summers.

One recent tool to help combat this rash of violence and crime is operation “Cool Down”. According to Sheppard, during operation “Cool Down”, additional officers will be highly visible, and engaging people on the street to prevent crime rather than reacting to its aftermath.

I commend and respect Sheppard for not being scared to use these tactics to target and make those that commit crime and violence in the city feel uncomfortable walking or riding around our streets, neighborhoods and communities.

As a young African-American man living in the city, I endorse these tactics (when used correctly) to help reduce violence, crime, homicides and keep our city safe.

I’m sick and tired of hearing about someone else getting shot, stabbed and/or killed on our city streets, and sadly both the victim and perpetrator are young African-American men. If you’re not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about. Just cooperate with police, thank them for doing their job and keep it moving.

This sort of attitude is anathema to the Emily Good and A.C.L.U. lawyers.  Of course, they don’t spend their nights worrying about their families’ safety or hauling bleeding young men to emergency rooms.  As Rochester mayor Tom Richards wryly observed, in response to a predictable media question about the civil rights implications of stepped-up police patrols:

 “The ultimate violation of your civil rights is to be shot to death.”

Neighborhood activists — not radical activists like Emily Good – cheered the increased police activity:

When News10NBC informed her of the police department’s “Cool Down Detail,” [Doreen Brown] was thrilled. “I would be very proud for that to happen. We care about out neighborhood, we care about our neighbors and we would love to have more patrols around here there is too much violence.”

Brown said, “We have people that are terrified terrified. We try to stay together to keep peace. We don’t want it to seem like we just a bad neighborhood with crime, but if we don’t have help from the police, what are we to do?”

 Adults in Charge: Rochester Police Chief James Sheppard and Mayor Tom Richards

The adults solve the problems, while the activists destroy, no matter the human cost.

~~~~

More information about the radical anti-police movement:  The Soros-Funded War on Police

9 comments!
June 29, 2012 1:01 pm

PBS is Re-Educating America’s Schoolchildren, One Cop-Hating Poster at a Time. So . . . Give Your Money to the Kurt Wyman Fund Instead

1 comment
by    in media coverage of crime,New York State,war on cops

Mary Grabar (of the excellent blog Dissident Prof) and I have a new report out at  Accuracy in Media.  It’s about the political manipulation of schoolchildren by PBS Teachers:

PBS: Re-Educating America’s Schoolchildren, Thanks to Your Contributions

Part of our report discusses a PBS lesson plan in which students are encouraged to “learn about historical research methods” by investigating the origins of a cop-hating poster that was plastered around Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention riots.  Of course, the lesson plan celebrates the protesters and doesn’t mention the slaughter of police and others by the Black Panthers, Weathermen, and radicals associated with them.  The Panthers, for example, are described as social workers who fed children breakfasts and taught them about politics.

Sort of like PBS:

These “educators” behave as if they’re just teaching children how to gain library skills while using the word “pig” to refer to police over and over again.  I hope our report shows how far from pedagogical decency PBS has strayed.

If not, here’s an anecdote:  

Thanks to the generosity of the Alexander Hamilton Institute, I’m staying for the month in Clinton, New York.

The town of Clinton could not be more bucolic, in a Mennonites-and-hippies-selling-whoopie-pies-and-heirloom-tomatoes-in-the-town-square sort of way.

But bad things happen everywhere.  I was walking around town buying whoopee pies and heirloom tomatoes yesterday, and I saw a different kind of poster about cops.  This one was promoting the second annual Kurt Wyman Memorial Ride.  Kurt was a 24-year old war veteran, sheriff, father, and husband gunned down protecting the people of this beautiful place.

His wife gave birth to their second child upon hearing of his murder.  I previously blogged about him here.

Now imagine a world where teachers educated their students about the poster below, instead of slyly celebrating the cop-hating one above.  This world does exist, of course.  It exists in the town square of Clinton.  It exists just about everywhere, but it does not exist at PBS, which uses our tax dollars to train children to see cops as less than human.

Instead of donating to PBS this year, why not send your money to the Kurt Wyman fund to support the children he left behind (information below), or the Kurt Wyman Memorial Park (information here), or the Kurt Wyman scholarship fund (link needed).

Then, be sure to send PBS a letter telling them why.

 KBW Ride 6437 Pillmore Drive Rome, NY 13440.

 

1 comment...
May 3, 2012 2:58 pm

Today, Seattle: Tomorrow, Tampa. Or, It’s Not Registered Gun Owners Mayor Buckhorn Should be Complaining About.

3 comments
by    in Activists,Florida,media coverage of crime,war on cops

While the Tampa City Council and camera-hungry Mayor Bob Buckhorn eagerly grandstand (with the aid of the MSM, of course) about the non-issue of legally registered gun-owners having their weapons with them during the Republican National Convention, take a good look at the types of problems they’re refusing to confront: violent Occupy/black bloc/anarchist thugs destroying businesses in Seattle Tuesday — and sure to be on their way to Tampa for the Republican Convention in August:

Watch the video here.  It’s disturbing. (someday, I’ll learn to imbed YouTube videos as well as the average 8-year old): wYT82Fec3cQ

Where, you might ask, are the Seattle police?  Well, spineless Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn probably reined them in, afraid that any response to these destructive thugs would turn into accusations of “police brutality” and the inevitable lawsuits.  At 2:23 in the video, the police show up . . . on bicycles.  How would you like that to be your son or daughter, wading into a hostile, club-wielding mob on a bicycle because the mayor wants to placate . . . the hostile, club-wielding mob?

Seattle Mayor McGinn.  Don’t bother shaving or anything, dude.

So businesspeople trying to make a living in Seattle are left to the mercy of the mob while the Mayor placates the looters.  Note the number of businesses that already have plexiglass or covered windows because of previous riots.  Taxpayers who pay extra to have storefronts in downtown Seattle?  Screw ‘em.  Elected officials there have decided it’s worth risking the lives of their police and the safety of their citizens and the profitability of their business class — all to score brownie points with a bunch of inarticulate, screaming animals who will not only not be placated, but will be empowered by the Mayor’s impotent “gesture.”

Of course, Mayor McGinn gets a taxpayer-funded security detail.  The employees at that Niketown store being mobbed by thugs?  Not so much.  And when the store closes because its evil corporate overlords decide that it’s just not worth doing business in a place where elected officials privilege thugs over decent, ordinary citizens and businesspeople, those employees won’t have jobs, either.

I have a lot of faith in the Tampa and Hillsborough County police forces, and in the Chief of Police and the Sheriff.  But Mayor Buckhorn and some members of the Tampa City Council are beclowning themselves — on our dime — with hysteria over registered guns and other non-issues, while pandering to the wishes of the ACLU, which apparently has a direct line to the Mayor that ordinary, taxpaying citizens lack:

City officials met last week with the American Civil Liberties Union about “an exhaustive list of things” the ACLU thinks impinge on protesters’ First Amendment rights, said Joyce Hamilton Henry, director of the ACLU’s Tampa office. ”The city was very receptive,” Hamilton Henry said.

How nice.  Now it’s time for Mayor Buckhorn to stop playing games and get serious.

Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn.  On a Segway.  What is it with Mayors and Segways?

~~~~

Because, these people . . .

. . . are coming to Tampa for the Convention.  And if I owned a business in the protest zone and had to shut down for a week, or shell out money for new windows, or security guards, or worry about my employees getting to and from their cars — I’d be mightily pissed off watching Mayor  Buckhorn preen for the national press over his registered-guns hobbyhorse.  I’m outside the city limits, and believe me, Bob, such feelings — and business interests — don’t stop at the train tracks.

Speaking of pissed, here’s the reason they’re banning squirt-guns at the convention:

Bottles of Human Waste for NATO Protesters to Throw on Chicago Cops

From Second City Cop, a blog out of Chicago:

This is part or the whole of an extensive stash of bottles recovered in the 010th District the other day. All filled with human waste and no doubt whatever extra fecal matter the ne’er-do-wells were able to pick up on the parkways. Counts range from 100 to 500 bottles recovered depending on the rumor you believe.  We’re sure this isn’t the only stash floating around out there. How about the Department try something novel and get the media to cover what the protestors and anarchists are planning and maybe get the public overwhelmingly on our side?

Good question, as usual, from SCC.  Someone should ask Tampa Mayor Buckhorn the same.  He could have gotten behind his city’s police officers, and gotten out in front of this, and explained the squirt-gun ban to the public, but that might have cut into his gold-plated national media tantrum.  So he said this, instead, and his pals at the Tampa Times let him get away with it.  Without, like, asking any hard questions:

“The absurdity of banning squirt guns but not being able to do anything about real guns is patently obvious,” Buckhorn said.

In other words, why behave responsibly when you can glom a few moments scoring political points on the national news — after all, what’s a few cops being doused with urine and feces (and urine mixed with bleach, and battery acid, and other silly protester stuff?)

By the way, the allegedly peaceful Tampa Coalition to March on the RNC has already issued a declaration that they stand by “diversity of tactics.”  This means, specifically, that they are rolling out the welcome mat for black bloc/anarchist and other violent protest.

So, did the mayor ask any questions about this the last time he chummily confabbed with the protesters’ lawyers at the ACLU?  

Did anyone in the media bother to ask him why not?  

Nope.  They were too busy featuring giggly thingies like this, who think it’s hilarious to mock security efforts designed to keep all of us safe — conventioneers, protesters, business owners, but most especially the police, who will be the ones dealing with the thugs — that is, when they aren’t busy arresting this woman again, when she probably ought to be at her desk at work — working for the taxpayers who employ her, that is . . .

Arrested Occupy Protester, AFSCME Union Rep, Public Employee: Your Tax Dollars at Work

So long as Mayor Buckhorn and his echo chamber at the Tampa Bay (formerly St. Pete) Times keep attacking law-abiding gun owners instead of the anarchists and Food-not-Bombs lunatics and their black bloc “diversity of tactics” peers, our brave cops can expect to be soaked with human waste; business owners can expect to be cleaning up broken glass and laying off workers, and the rest of us can expect to be footing the bill for the mayor’s pre-emptive lack of spine.  As a taxpayer, I keep expecting something something different.  But I know that’s just a personality flaw.

 

 

3 comments!
April 16, 2012 6:18 pm

Cops Attacked With Pipes and Bottles in NYC, Occupy Lawyer Alexander Penley Arrested; Elsewhere, Christian Science Monitor Declares End to Non-War on Cops

no comments
by    in war on cops

Suspects Alexander Penley, Nicholas Thommen and Eric Marchese

The N. Y. Post is reporting that police officers were injured by a gang of thugs who got all hopped up at an anarchist book fair and attacked the first cops they saw, shouting “All pigs must die”:

Customers at an East Village Starbucks escaped a shot of shattered glass in their lattes when the cafe windows withstood an anarchist onslaught. Patrons at Astor Place coffee shop dashed underneath tables as metal pipe-wielding protesters attempted to shatter its floor-to-ceiling Plexiglas windows during a Saturday night riot, police and workers said.  Luckily, the unbreakable panes prevented injuries, one barista said.

“It was scary, we didn’t know what was happening,” she said. “There were a lot of them with bats and wearing masks.”
The frightened woman and her coworkers scurried to lock the door, she said. “No one got hurt in here and that’s all that matters.”

But two NYPD officers weren’t so fortunate. A sergeant was hit repeatedly in the head, body and hands with a metal pipe, a police source said, while a lieutenant also sustained injuries. . .The group carried on and marched against traffic into the streets near Washington Square Park after leaving the Fifth Annual New York City Anarchist Book Fair at Judson Church on Washington Square South, police said. They began chanting “F— the NYPD”, “All pigs must die,” and “Cops are murderers’, officials said.

Read my report on the Soros-funded war on police at America’s Survival.  

John Hayward of Human Events reports that one of the two thugs who attacked the police is a lawyer for the Occupy movement:

The cops swiftly arrested these “anarchists,” and one of them turned out to be “Occupy Wall Street attorney Alexander Penley.”  The Daily News doesn’t mention it, but Penley is one of the original OWS organizers, not just an attorney they keep on speed-dial.  Here he is in a November 2011 article in USA Today, talking up the wondrous “diversity” of his movement: ”We come from all walks of life,” says Alexander Penley, a 41-year-old lawyer who helps organize protests for Occupy Wall Street, where the crusade to protest corporate misdeeds and income inequality began Sept. 17. “In 25 years as an activist, this is the most diverse group I’ve been associated with.”

I don’t know, they all look the same to me.  Except for the nose ring.

~~~~~~~~~~

Meanwhile, leave it to the anti-cop brain trust at the Christian Science Monitor to find some way to attack people for caring when cops get gunned down, or otherwise attacked.  Earlier this week, they reported that the recent rise in cop-killings, spiking even higher after a rising, years-long trend, doesn’t, you know, really matter to thinking people:

Modesto cop killing highlights spike in violence against police

The number of cops killed on the beat had been declining since the 1970s and was bound to end, say experts. But the killing of cops in Modesto, Calif., and Greenland, N.H., Thursday could point to other trends.

By “other trends,” what they mean is: How dare you care about violence against police, you fascist pigs: 

Two high-profile shootings of police officers in small towns – one on each coast – are highlighting statistics that show a sharp spike in police officer deaths nationwide during the past two years.  But experts caution against the conclusion that criminals are ramping up a new “war on cops,” instead suggesting that the statistics merely show an end to a 40-year decline in officer fatalities.

There’s been a “sharp spike” in cop killings.  But according to the Monitor, that’s not proof of increased hostility towards police: it’s really only an acceleration in the non-sharp non-decline in cop killings.

Sort of like the other headline story in the Monitor this week:

Global warming mystery: Some Himalayan glaciers getting bigger

 

No comment?
March 27, 2012 10:52 am

Soros-Funded Atlanta Independent Media Center Cheers Attempted Cop Assassination, Encourages More Murders of Cops

6 comments
by    in Atlanta,war on cops

This is so sick, I’m just going to publish it before it disappears from the web.  Cameron Maddox tried to assassinate a cop in Atlanta, and Indymedia celebrated his effort and encouraged others to kill cops:

Atlanta Independent Media Center is part of Indymedia, funded by George Soros:

Squeezing Slowly: Atlanta Police Officer Shot in Little Five Points

Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 03/25/2012 – 1:40am

By now everyone’s heard: 19 year-old Cameron Maddox was arrested for shooting Officer Dexter Toomer in the legs last Friday night. Undoubtedly, the shooter intended to kill. His aim was off, but his target was just right.

Maddox explains that he was frustrated by the police who arrested a friend earlier that day. Some of us are inspired by his ambition.Rather then taking the time to track down the arresting officer, Maddox decided to kill the next officer he saw. As that saying goes: All Cops Are Bastards. Without delay, he perched eagerly across the street from the restaurant, Zesto’s, where police are known to hang out.
BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM!
7 shots. But only 1 connects and it’s in the legs.

Frantically, Maddox runs through the kitchen of the cafe he is staged on top of and tosses the gun inside a shirt at one of the cooks. Fingerprints sell him out and he is arrested a day later.

It is unclear what will happen to him beyond this but it is clear that the police are losing their grip on the streets of Atlanta.

Marches end with shattered glass and spray-paint, even casual walks leave heavily trafficked streets barricaded with dumpsters and broken glass bottles. Joe Stafford, Dwight Person, Ariston Waiters, Dawntrae Williams…so many more. We can never forget those who fell victim to the wild spray of police bullets, no doubt. But isn’t it also the case that every single moment is bottled by the prying eyes of the pigs? Atlanta has an extremely expansive surveillance system spanning across the entire downtown area…but nothing can stop the rage of those who just got woke the fuck up.

While anarchists and other anticapitalists have done their part to enact their passions against the police in an unmediated way, it always seems to be the “normal citizens” (the Blooms, if you will) who snap in the most violent expression of dissatisfaction and hopelessness.

Perhaps we should not be in a habit of “politicizing” crimes that wish only to be expressions of raw emotion, but Maddox has clearly expressed his hatred of the police through his actions and his words.

Although we will probably never meet him, we hope to see his courage inspire people everywhere (but not his recklessness – wear gloves, kids!)

It is never too late to realize your desires, whatever they are.

Be careful, but stay wild.

Anarchy!

~~~

Hatred of police, encouraged by groups like East Atlanta Copwatch, the Occupy Movement, and a hundred other organizations funded by George Soros, is bearing fruit.  Did Cameron Maddox take part in any of the Atlanta trainings by activists who teach people how to harass cops?

Officer Toomer was shot by an assailant who was hiding on a nearby rooftop, hunting cops.  He sustained “only” a bullet to the leg, but where is the outrage, and why is Maddox only charged with aggravated assault, instead of attempted murder of a police officer?

Officer Dexter Toomer

The shooter’s name is Cameron Maddox.  Let me know if you know anything about him:

Cameron Christian Maddox

6 comments!
March 19, 2012 1:43 pm

There’s Nothing “Senseless” About Nicholas Lindsey’s Killing of Police Officer David S. Crawford

2 comments
by    in Florida,gangs,media coverage of crime,Recidivism,war on cops

The St. Pete Times (now Tampa Bay Times) has run its latest sob story** about an accused killer, this one Nicholas Lindsey.  True to form, the Times announces in its headline that it will explore why life unravelled for the St. Petersburg teen.

There is the usual objection to be made about such stories.  The reporting is all about the killer’s alleged good qualities, and the reporters work hard to diminish the killer’s responsibility, even though doing so crudely diminishes the value of the murdered police officer’s life.  Buying a Pepsi for a teacher is presented as mitigation against murdering a good man in cold blood.  In the past, I’ve had reporters from that paper tell me they believe they are being “balanced” in their reporting by telling the sob story of the murderer one day and the life story of the murder victim the next, as if doing so balances some ethical scale.

And so, the brute known as mawkish sentimentality strangles moral perspective at her rickety desk in the darkest corner of newsroom.

But even if one sets the lack-of-human-decency objection aside, the reporters still failed.  They failed to explore what they claim to have set out to explore, which is the alleged “unravelling” of Nicholas Lindsey’s life.  The young man committed other serious crimes and apparently faced no consequences for them, but the reporters don’t want to talk about this, so they shove it away quickly, as if it is irrelevant.  In doing so, they deny the very thing they claim to be seeking: the reason why Lindsey went so wrong so young.

Nicholas Lindsey had already been caught and arrested, found guilty, and allowed to walk out of some courthouse laughing over prior crimes.  His father and brother, too, served time.  This ought to be the beginning, middle, and end of the search to explain Lindsey’s escalation to cop-killing, but the reporters do not linger on the subject.  Why?  Have they internalized anti-incarceration biases to the point that they actually believe his prior record is irrelevant?   Or are they that afraid of ruffling the feathers of those who control the anti-incarceration message by shouting “prejudice” when anyone broaches the subject?

Either way, the prior crimes are brushed over, and the “unravelling” is presented as a “mystery” and also a “surprise.”  This is a complete fabrication.  There is no mystery.  There is no surprise.  The reporters scurry away from the facts, tumbling over themselves to reach the only acceptable meme, the “too many minority youths are incarcerated” meme.  Here is the story they must tell, the only story they allow themselves to tell: the prior arrests are irrelevant because punishing the youth for them would have been prejudiced; “gang life” has simply “changed” an otherwise decent young man; the young man is not really responsible for the murder he committed because he is a decent young man, only changed by gang life; more money spent on more social programs for youths who commit crimes is the only answer: thus the only real villain is anyone who refuses to throw more money at youth programs in St. Petersburg . . . a city that already has more youth programs than cockroaches.  Yet young black men keep killing each other and innocents who cross their paths.

There is a great deal of money to be had in this view, and real danger in questioning it.  There is, in fact, a virtually unlimited amount of money to be had in this view, for every time a young person commits a crime, that crime may be used as evidence of the need for more “programs,” which keep bad kids out of jail to commit more crimes, thus increasing the need for more programs.  The alternative — arguing that a youth who steals a car ought to go to jail so he learns his lesson if he is capable of learning a lesson — is virulently attacked as pure racism by the anointed experts who populate every university and law school, federal agency, and editorial board.  Who wants to risk that?

Here’s a question: what comes first, the social program or the teen murderer?

This is less a journalism problem than an “experts” problem.  The journalists just carry the experts’ water.  And so, after closing their eyes to the only real clue and tiptoeing cautiously around the other taboo — assigning blame to the killer’s drug-selling, absentee dad — the St. Pete Times reporters are left with nothing but an embarrassing handful of anecdotes about a violent young man’s paltry virtues: a soda purchased for someone, Lindsey not screaming at a teacher in detention once, an ex-girlfriend who has a mother who is eager to insert herself into the news.  The reporters talk about the killer being a “shy wisp” of a boy and bemoan the “fuzz” just “starting to grow” on his face.  This is repugnant stuff, but it’s all they’ve got because they won’t ask the real questions.

Here are the questions they refuse to ask: who is the judge who let Lindsey walk on previous serious crimes?  How many other youths who walked out his or her courtroom committed more crimes, destroying their lives and others’?  What can be done about it?  Who in our justice system bears responsibility for the legal decisions that enabled Lindsey to be free to commit more crimes?

And this: if Lindsey’s parents were so worried about their son’s involvement in gangs, what, precisely, did they do when he was previously arrested?  Why did they let him advertise his gang connections on Facebook?  Why didn’t they move away from the apartment complex which, allegedly, as the reporters choose to assert as undeniable fact, was the sole source of Lindsey’s transformation into a murderous gang-banger?

If the bar to acceptable behavior is set so low in Lindsey’s community that multiple car thefts aren’t taken seriously, then somebody decided it would be so.  Members of that community who really want change should be protesting outside the courthouse, demanding that judges and prosecutors save young men’s lives by throwing the book at them the first time, and every time they break the law.  They should be sitting alongside the police, who are attending Lindsey’s trial in street clothes because they are not allowed to wear their uniforms, lest doing so deprives the murderer of every little drop of the sympathy the activists deem as his portion.

I know there are people in that community who want to support law enforcement and want to do it out of love for the children who grow up to be Nicholas Lindseys.  I’ve worked in communities like the one that produced Nicholas Lindsey and met those people.  But they are silenced by wealthy and powerful anti-incarceration activists, people who don’t live in or visit such places.  The good people trapped in bad neighborhoods will never be heard so long as the elite activist class — and their eager water-carriers in the media — continue to silence them.  More Officer Crawfords will be murdered as a result, and more Nicholas Lindseys will live their ruined lives behind bars.

But the activists and the reporters will feel virtuous.  And isn’t that all that really counts?

 

 

**bad link, try: http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/crime/article1220622.ece, or: At 16, Life Unravels for St. Petersburg Teen Accused of Killing Police Officer

2 comments!
January 27, 2012 8:30 pm

Police Radios Don’t Kill Cops: Thugs Grabbing Cops’ Guns Kill Cops. The radio is a distraction.

1 comment
by    in war on cops

Am I mistaken?  Am I insane?

This has nothing to do with how well the police radios worked.  It’s a story about a bunch of criminals getting off on watching police literally struggle for their lives, while nobody steps in to help them. 

Men Punch Out Temple Cops On Video: MyFoxPHILLY.com

~~~

Let me explain this post.  As I was sitting here writing this, the news story I linked to was a long dissertation on how the police radios needed to be blamed for putting these cops’ lives in danger.

I posted my criticism, ate supper, and then came back to check the link.

The story had changed radically.  Now it’s what it should be: a story of how cops were being endangered by . . .  people actually trying to take away their guns and kill them as onlookers cheered.

I’m going to leave the post the way it is.

It’s important to realize that anyone, even temporarily, would blame this sort of thing on anyone but the guilty parties.  Good to Fox news for sending in someone sober to correct that last, completely crazy, story.  Bad to Fox news for posting it in the first place, then hiding the evidence.

 

 

1 comment...
January 13, 2012 2:35 pm

Tom Robbins and the NYTimes Lie About Judith Clark’s “Rehabilitation”

8 comments
by    in New York State,Parole,Pro-Criminal,Rehabilitation,war on cops

What a surprise: the New York Times is lying again.  It must be . . . well, it’s Friday.

The lie starts with a pun.  Because dead cops are always the right occasion for lighthearted humor:

Judith Clark’s Radical Transformation

Judith Clark: a “ray of sunshine” who made some mistakes as a youth

The “radical” in the title refers to participating in the Brinks robbery that left two police and security guard dead.  Wordplay: funny.  The “transformation” is more of the usual claptrap about radical chic criminals — their in-prison AIDS activism that is actually about attacking the government, not a disease, and all the faked MFA degrees handed out like candy by PEN and other cop-hating syndicates and universities to talentless scum, including Clark’s colleagues Marilyn Buck, Laura Whitehorn, Susan Rosenberg, and so on.

The “lie” is that this article is about Judith Clark’s alleged rehabilitation.  In reality, the Times published this sleazy mythopoesis to advance a very specific yet entirely unmentioned goal: to advance a rules change regarding parole for murderers and other offenders serving long sentences — in other words, to make all those knitting classes and fake poetry degrees grounds for release if you helped kill cops — like the sainted Ms. Clark — or raped and killed women, like several other “reformed” poets and knitter-activists eagerly awaiting the rules change.

Anyone care for another Kitty Genovese?

Tom Robbins should apologize for participating in an unusually ornate untruth.  He should apologize to everyone who might see their loved one’s killer released because of his participation in this lie.

He should wear comfortable shoes: it’s going to be a long and extremely angry line.

I wonder why Times readers put up with this sort of manipulation.  It doesn’t reflect well.

And then there’s the other lies within the lie.

An officer carrying a shotgun waved the U-Haul over. Clark drove past the ramp and stopped.

“I was in this terrified, frozen state,” she said. She considered just driving away. “I can’t do that,” she told herself. “I am not supposed to leave people.”

She heard gunfire behind her. Suddenly “two people jump into my car and scream at me to drive.” She quickly drove ahead, up a curving mountain road, no idea where she was headed. When a police car pursued them, she drove faster. “I am so out of my league,” she remembers thinking.

Clark claims she’s rehabilitated based on her ritual performance of several faux social justice causes, but she’s still lying about the gun, the strategy of using stupid white girls like her to lure police to their deaths that day, and everything else she knows and has done.  She’s lying in very specific ways because she needs to say certain things and deny other things in order to meet the guidelines for parole.  Now, that would make an interesting story.  Not nonfiction, though.

Clark’s shoulder popped out of its socket — a chronic ailment since childhood. She was squirming in pain, trying to bang it back into place, when she heard a policeman barking orders to come out. The shouts came from the South Nyack police chief, Alan Colsey, who had chased Clark’s car over the mountain. After Clark and her passengers were taken into custody, a pistol was found behind the front seat and a clip of bullets in Clark’s purse. Colsey thought she was reaching for the gun as she twisted in her seat. Clark said she never knew it was there. “I sort of rolled out,” she said. “I didn’t want to be shot. I was scared but also relieved it was over.”

Yes, we’re supposed to believe she didn’t know about the gun in her purse (that happens to me all the time) and that she was only “squirming” towards the gun because she hurt herself playing volleyball some time back before she became a weaponized hate-moppet trying to off an innocent cop, and we’re supposed to believe that she has achieved some cosmic level of rehabilitative bliss while we’re also supposed to believe that she knew nothing of the purpose of the Brinks robbery, which was to secure funds to buy lots of other guns that Clark apparently knew nothing about — while believing that she is some sort of unique saint among all the other utterly unique saints who coincidentally happened to converge on one little bloody armed robbery in upstate New York.

You’d have to be Eric Holder to believe all that.

Holder, after all, has made it his personal mission to get cop-killers and terrorists like Susan Rosenberg out of prison.  Judith Clark is the next in line for the Holder privilege: thus the Times clockwork encomium.  If Obama loses the election, the grey cloud within the silver lining will be the inevitable pardons of fistfuls of violent thugs like Clark who had the good sense to choose the right types of people to murder.

In jail, all she could think was that she had let down her friends and had to make up for it. “I was not a good freedom fighter,” she told herself, “but I can be a good captivefreedom fighter.” Her role models were Puerto Rican radicals, linked to a group responsible for a string of deadly bombings, who declared themselves prisoners of war after being arrested.

Why does the Times leave out the rest of the story of these hale and hearty freedom fighters — the part about who they killed, and the part about Eric Holder orchestrating their releases?  The part about the judge’s home firebombed while his children slept, about the prison guards tortured to death?  Why does Tom Robbins so carefully choose to focus on Judith Clark’s knitting of baby clothes, clenching and unclenching of fists, etc., while he cannot be bothered to so much as mention the part about an Attorney General who has repeatedly sided with terrorists who blew away cops and judges and prison guards?

Why not tell the story, if you are going to tell it, if you are an “investigative journalist” teaching, of course, journalism, and of course at CUNY?

Here’s a who, what, when, where, why for Journalist Robbins: how inhumanely elitist do you have to be to weigh Judith Clark’s hobbies against the lives she and her fellow revolutionaries gleefully snuffed out?  For this is precisely the goal of the not-reported campaign beneath this story: to make the hobbies trump the crime, to make a twenty-year pile of bad poetry and offensive radical chic win out over dead and buried men.

Inmate 83G0313, as Clark was known, was considered a major security risk, her every step carefully tracked. There was good cause for concern. Clark’s radical crew was known for plots like the 1979 prison breakout of Assata Shakur, a Black Liberation Army leader. At one point, the prison superintendent, Elaine Lord, was assigned a guard. Twice, Lord had to leave prison grounds as a precaution.

As a precaution against what?  If you have room to count the stitches in Clark’s remorseful sweater-weaving, surely you have the column inches to tell the truth about the real threat these people posed, and the real consequences of their long, in-prison campaigns of terror.  That’s part of the story, too.

In reality, people like Judith Clark become what they become because they are sociopaths, or just pure evil.  As Theodore Dalrymple recently observed in the New English Review, privileging your subjective feeling of mercy for murderers over the rule of law is really no different from privileging a mob who wants to bypass justice in the other direction.  The commenters praising Clark’s personality in the Times comment thread really should take a moment to look in that mirror.

How does the Times justify meddling in the justice system this way?

In December 2010, a few days before Governor Paterson’s term ended, he met with a small delegation of Clark’s supporters led by Bennett and Dennison. He told them that his staff advised against her release and that he was in agreement. Paterson wouldn’t talk to me about it, but he recently told Jim Dwyer, a Times columnist, that he feared being “tarred and feathered” if he released Clark.

Last June, I went to meet some of the people whose wrath the governor feared at a fund-raising breakfast in Nyack for a scholarship fund in memory of officers Brown and O’Grady. Most were still bitter over Boudin’s release and felt that Clark deserved to remain in prison. Did they believe such criminals could be rehabilitated? “I know, they’re all wonderful,” Bill Ryan, a former New York City Police lieutenant who lives nearby, responded sarcastically. “They’re teaching little children and working with the handicapped and unwed mothers.” His remarks brought knowing smiles around the table.

It’s a skepticism shared by many. When I first started visiting Clark, I also wondered whether her transformation was a calculated effort to get out of prison. Over time I’ve come to see her differently.

So Tom Robbins writes a long propaganda piece denying Judith Clark’s cruelty, while tarring her victims, who lost loved ones, with the term “wrath.”  That’s an ugly stunt.  Elsewhere, in places where people possess ordinary morals and judgment, it’s called prejudice.  But not in the universe of the Times, where the Judith Clarks of the world are just more human than their victims.

 

 

 

 

8 comments!
Older Posts »