Land of the free

Eatgrueldog

“In case you’ve been under a rock lately, it is becoming quite clear that police in the US can and will kill people, even unarmed people, even on video, and do so with impunity.

The tallying methods, or rather lack thereof, used by both the FBI and individual police departments to count the amount of people killed by police, have been shown to be staggeringly inaccurate. 

However, this inability of the government to count the number of people it kills, has been met with multiple alternative means of calculating just how deadly the state actually is.  

One of these citizen run databases, is the website www.killedbypolice.com. The site is basically a spreadsheet that lists every person killed by cops in the years 2013 and 2014. In addition to naming those killed, it also provides a link to media reports for each of the killings, age, sex and race if available.

“THE TALLY FOR 2014? 1,100 PEOPLE KILLED BY THOSE SWORN TO PROTECT. THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF THREE PEOPLE A DAY.

Do not mistake this as saying that those who were killed were innocent. However, when we look at violent crime in this country, we can see that it is at an all time low.

While violence among citizens has dropped, violence against citizens carried out by police has been rising sharply.

When we look at citizens killed by police over the last two years, deaths have increased 44 percent in this short time; 763 people were killing by police in 2013.

As a comparison, the total number of US troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, in 2014 was 58.”

”

China, whose population is 4 and 1/2 times the size of the United States,recorded 12 killings by law enforcement officers in 2014.

LET THAT SINK IN. LAW ENFORCEMENT IN THE US KILLED 92 TIMES MORE PEOPLE THAN A COUNTRY WITH NEARLY 1.4 BILLION PEOPLE. 

It doesn’t stop there.

From 2013-2014, German police killed absolutely no one. 

In the entire history of Iceland police, they have only killed 1 person ever. After exhausting all non-lethal methods to detain an armed man barricaded in his house who actually shot 2 police officers, police were forced to take the 59-year-old man’s life. The country of Iceland grieved for weeks after having to resort to violence.”

”

America imprisons almost twenty five percent of all people imprisoned in the world, although containing only about 5% of the worlds population, an extremely disproportionate share of people imprisoned globally.

The U.S. houses 2.3 million inmates, while China, a country with four times the population of the U.S., is a distant second with 1.6 million prisoners.

The war on drugs coupled with the military industrial state created by the US playing police of the world, has created a deadly combination.

A constant pursuit of new weaponry by the military has paved the way for the hand-me-down cycle of military gear to police departments.

The idea was that if the U.S. wanted its police to act like drug warriors, it should equip them like warriors, which it has—to the tune of around $4.3 billion in equipment, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union.

WHAT WE ARE CALLING THE MILITARIZATION OF OF POLICE HAS ALREADY TAKEN PLACE, ON A LARGE SCALE. WE ARE NOW SEEING A DOMESTIC MILITARY, PRETENDING TO BE A POLICE FORCE.”

Excerpted from The free thought project. The rest of it is here :http://thefreethoughtproject.com/police-kill-citizens-70-times-rate-first-world-nations/#rBGD2LV7hvVi1tuh.99

A lot of what to blame is the “As long as you get home tonight mentality”. They are bullies coupled with fear that comes as part of their paramilitary training.

Everyone is a threat. Don’t let that 70 Yr. old man fool you, he has the potential to take your life. You never know when you walk up to that vehicle; he could be the one who makes it so you don’t go home tonight.

Even though your job isn’t in the top 20 most dangerous category. Even though on the job you are just as likely to die by traffic as gunshots. Even though on the job you are almost as likely to die by “Other”.

This fear is being instilled by training as part of the over all safety protocol. It is part of their removal from the public servant category and their transition into domestic military warriors.

I watched a young , fit, fully vested and geared cop pull over a Grand Marquis full of old folks the other day.

I live in a retirement county with a population of 140,000 that has a median age of 56 Yrs. old and it is loaded down with Grand Marquis’ full of old folks. In this instance,  I pulled over to watch because of the manner in which he was approaching the car.

He approached it from the rear in a crouch, hand on his gun and yelled to the driver to roll down the passenger side rear window. It was actually a little comical because the driver appeared to be in his eighties and couldn’t hear a thing.

There was an elderly couple in the back seat and they were bobbing and turning until one of them finally rolled the window down. The lady in the passenger side seat stuck her head out of the window and conversed with the officer until he apparently relayed the instruction.

The lady then got up pulling herself up with the front seat and talked into the drivers ear. Finally the driver figured out what was going on and turned around to converse with the officer through the open window.

So much for officer safety.  With all the moving, bobbing, turning etc. going on in the car ,had they actually wanted to attack him with a pill minder or cane, he certainly would have been done for.

But seriously, in my little county, there were two police shootings this month, both in one week. Both were unarmed, both “Threatened” officers with their vehicles.

Now read the below:

“The rules of engagement place the burden on U.S. air and ground troops to confirm with certainty that a Taliban fighter is armed before they can fire — even if they are 100 percent sure the target is the enemy. In some cases, aerial gunships have been denied permission to fire even though they reported that targets on the move were armed.”

Get it? The rules of engagement are stricter in Afghanistan than they are here for American police forces.  That’s right,the life of a foreigner in Afghanistan is worth more than an American citizen on the streets of the USA.

All a police officer has to do is “Feel” that his life is in threat and he can use deadly force.

The men and women  in your local P.D. view you as more of a threat than a U.S soldier does a Taliban fighter.     BOO!!……. No wonder they are killing us in such numbers.

All things taken into account I think that a safe bet is to say that it is going to get worse before it it gets better. I think that the end all is going to be a crushing clamp down by the police state. But if history is any judge,that is what is going to bring about change.

Only in times of severe repression do people actually stand up and do something about it. From the Roman rebellions to the Magna Carta, to the Revolutionary war, it has always been the cycle of repression and rebellion that has brought lasting change.

What I see coming in the next decade is the full severity of the police state coming down on the neck of ordinary American citizens and then….

An American Infatada.

When it gets bad enough, when people have had enough, all the crack down in the world will make no difference. All it can possibly do unite everyone to the cause and galvanize resistance.

Remember, worse is better.

https://eatgrueldog.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/land-of-the-free/