"Occupy the Police State"

Jason Leopold:

Important questions have been raised about what role, if any, the federal government has played in dismantling the Occupy encampments around the country and what the protesters and civil liberties groups say is ultimately an attempt to stifle dissent.

While we wait for those answers, Kolin, a political science professor at Hilbert College in Buffalo, New York, has done a masterful job of tracing the origins of the "political repression of mass-based movements" and the rise of the "police state" in his exhaustively researched book, "State Power and Democracy: Before and During The Presidency of George W. Bush." (Click here to read an excerpt.) MORE...

Police officers in riot gear form a line near Occupy Los Angeles protesters outside City Hall in Los Angeles, November 30, 2011. (Photo: Ted Soqui / The New York Times)

"UC Berkeley Riot Police Use Batons to Clear Students from Sproul Plaza" (with video)

Conor Friedersdorf (The Atlantic) with video (01:32):

In iconic Sproul Plaza, many hundreds or perhaps thousands of UC Berkeley students and Occupy Oakland activists clashed with university police late into the night Wednesday, after officers carried out instructions from administrators to clear Occupy Cal protesters from their makeshift encampment. "We formed a human barricade around our tents, and they just beat their way through it with batons," said one student. "It really, really hurt - I got the wind knocked out of me," another protester, doctoral student Shane Boyle, told the San Francisco Chronicle, showing the reporter a red welt on his chest. "I was lucky I only got hit twice," he added. MORE...

GuardianUK: "Occupy and the militarisation of policing protest"

Police preparing to enter the Occupy Oakland encampment, 25 October. Photograph: Noah Berger/AP

Ayesha Kazmi (GuardianUK):

The excessive force exhibited at some Occupy locations – the use of tear gas; alleged use of rubber bullets and reported presence of sonic weapons – is becoming a pattern. A protester in California, who wished to remain anonymous, recalls experience of a long range acoustic device (LRAD) in Oakland last week:

"I had been tear gassed three times, so when I first saw the sound cannon, I panicked. When the cannon went off, I felt it pulse through me and I instantly felt dizzy and nauseated. At one point, I fell over. I noticed others around me had fallen over as well and some vomited."

Such anti-riot technologies were characterised as inhumane by human rights observers when they were used to subdue unarmed, peaceful protesters during civil unrest in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2007. They have no place in a democratic country. They may be characterised by authorities as "non-lethal", but they can all too easily become lethal if misused by reckless law enforcement agents. The Occupy movement is explicitly a nonviolent exercise of first amendment rights, yet its policing bears all the hallmarks of a chilling militarisation of law enforcement in the United States. MORE...

Howie P.S.: It has been noted by others that the reaction to the Frat Boy Riot in Pennsylvania by law enforcement was quite different than the reaction to the non-violent Occupy activities and the recent protest @Sproul Hall in Berkeley.

Norm Stamper (The Nation): "Paramilitary Policing From Seattle to Occupy Wall Street"

A man sits in front of a police line at City Hall during an anti-Wall Street protest in Oakland, California, October 25, 2011. (REUTERS/Kim White)

Norm Stamper:

There will always be situations—an armed and barricaded suspect, a man with a knife to his wife’s throat, a school-shooting rampage—that require disciplined, military-like operations. But most of what police are called upon to do, day in and day out, requires patience, diplomacy and interpersonal skills. I’m convinced it is possible to create a smart organizational alternative to the paramilitary bureaucracy that is American policing. But that will not happen unless, even as we cull “bad apples” from our police forces, we recognize that the barrel itself is rotten.

Assuming the necessity of radical structural reform, how do we proceed? By building a progressive police organization, created by rank-and-file officers, “civilian” employees and community representatives. Such an effort would include plans to flatten hierarchies; create a true citizen review board with investigative and subpoena powers; and ensure community participation in all operations, including policy-making, program development, priority-setting and crisis management. In short, cops and citizens would forge an authentic partnership in policing the city. And because partners do not act unilaterally, they would be compelled to keep each other informed, and to build trust and mutual respect—qualities sorely missing from the current equation.

It will not be easy. In fact, failure is assured if we lack the political will to win the support of police chiefs and their elected bosses, if we are unable to influence or neutralize police unions, if we don’t have the courage to move beyond the endless justifications for maintaining the status quo. But imagine the community and its cops united in the effort to responsibly “police” the Occupy movement. Picture thousands of people gathered to press grievances against their government and the corporations, under the watchful, sympathetic protection of their partners in blue. MORE...