From KTNV.
With a big read warning sign, one billboard says, “Due to recent police lay offs we can no longer guarantee your safety”.
While another shows a man in a mask holding a gun. It says there’s less police and no consequences thanks to your city council.
Steven Pogue was ticked off, so he flipped off another driver.
Pogue tells NewsChannel 5 it was a busy Saturday and he was sitting at a light on Manchester, heading west at Holloway. That’s when Pogue says another driver ventured into an already jammed intersection as the light was turning red, blocking his way, and voiding his green light.
“The driver of the van and I made contact. I was driving west and the arm was there and like I said, not proud, showed my displeasure in them blocking the intersection,” said Pogue.
Just a few blocks later, Pogue was pulled over by Ballwin police and given a citation.
“He said, ‘Yeah, I was thinking about going after them until I saw you flip them off.’ So it’s like let’s see, the person that breaks the two laws, walks. The person kind of doing their first amendment free speech right thing gets the ticket,” Pogue said.
The ordinance cited for the ticket reads, no person shall “…extend any part of his body outside of the vehicle expect the hand and arm for signaling purposes only.”
Seriously? The police were going to go after the other driver, who actually did something wrong, but chose to cite Pogue for flipping someone the bird.
Pogue plans to fight the citation in court.
Emily Good was arrested after filming the police perform a traffic stop outside of her house. She was charged with obstructing the officer’s administration of government. Now, the police have targeted her neighbors and supporters by ticketing them with the most minor of infractions.
during a neighborhood meeting in support of Ms Good, Rochester Police came out with a ruler and measured the parking-distance of the attendees’ cars. Cars that were more than 12 inches from the curb (even by half an inch) were ticketed. Needless to say, the 12 inch ordinance isn’t normally enforced with this kind of vigor.
This is the video of her filming the traffic stop.
Members of the community who are supporting Ms. Good haven now had the police’s eyes turned on them.
The message from the police is loud and clear: “We will do whatever we want, when we want. If you try to object, we will find some way to make you pay.”
From Reason.tv:
Who will watch the watchers? In a world of ubiquitous, hand-held digital cameras, that’s not an abstract philosophical question. Police everywhere are cracking down on citizens using cameras to capture breaking news and law enforcement in action.
Read Reason magazine’s January 2011 cover story, “The War on Cameras” and the companion piece “How to Record the Cops.” For Reason.com coverage of the war on cameras, go here.
From the YouTube summary:
Images of last week’s fatal police shooting in Miami Beach have been released.
Here you see footage recorded on a cell phone by Narces Benoit.
The police are surrounding a car driven by Raymond Herisse. Then they started firing at the 22-year-old.
Herisse was killed, three officers and four bystanders were injured.
Benoit and his girlfriend, Ericka Davis, are accusing authorities of destroying evidence and intimidation.
They say the only reason this video is still around because they were able to hide a memory card before authorities smashed the phone that captured this incident.
They have hired a lawyer, saying they “want the right thing to be done.”
According to Benoit, the police threatened him and his girlfriend.
The video ends as more officers are heard yelling expletives, telling the couple to turn the video off and get out of the car.
“They put guns to our heads and threw us on the ground,” Davis said.
Benoit said a Miami Beach officer grabbed his cell phone, said “You want to be [expletive] Paparazzi?” and stomped on his phone before placing him in handcuffs and shoving the crunched phone in Benoit’s back pocket. He said the couple joined other witnesses already in cuffs and being watched by officers, who were on the lookout for two passengers who, police believe at the time, had bailed out of Herisse’s car. It is still not known whether any passengers were in the car.
Benoit said the officers eventually uncuffed him after gunshots rang out elsewhere and he discreetly removed the SIM card and placed it in his mouth.
Officers again took his phone, demanding his video. He said they took him to a nearby mobile command center, snapped a picture of him, then took him to police headquarters and conducted a recorded interview while he kept the SIM card in his mouth. He insisted his phone was broken.
The couple and other witnesses claim that the only shots they saw or heard came from police, not Herisse.
Police say at around 4 a.m. on Memorial Day, officers stopped Raymond Herisse in his car, but after an altercation, he sped off. Miami Beach Police Chief Carlos Noriega said that Herisse drove recklessly, striking other cars, “driving on sidewalks, and you name it.” “One of the officers was struck,” he told reporters. Luckily the officer was not seriously injured, he said, but the suspect posed a threat to the officers and the public, “as a situation involving deadly force.”
While Herisse was reckless, it doesn’t warrant deadly force, no matter what the police are trying to tell you.
In the video below, you can see that Herisse’s foot was on the brake (look at the lights on the back of the car) until after the police killed him. From this video it appears that Herisse crashed into a lot of cars, fired out of his car, stopped his car, and then the police killed him. You don’t hear anyone shouting to him to get out of the car.
It doesn’t matter how bad Herisse may be, the police were wrong here. They lined up like a firing squad. They knew exactly what they were doing. I used to think police wearing cameras were a bad idea. The more stories I read about police abuse, the more these cameras might prevent the police from abusing their power. Maybe, if these police had been wearing cameras, Herisse might still be alive.
