In a recent Washington Post column covering a meeting setup by the U.S. Attorney General with law enforcement leaders, cops conveniently blamed YouTube and viral videos for their poor job performance:

Chiefs of some of the nation’s biggest police departments say officers in American cities have pulled back and have stopped policing as aggressively as they used to, fearing that they could be the next person in a uniform featured on a career-ending viral video.

That was the unifying — and controversial — theory reached Wednesday at a private meeting of more than 100 of the nation’s top law enforcement officers and politicians.

With homicide rates soaring inexplicably this year in dozens of U.S. cities, the group convened by new U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch concluded with a brief news conference promising a robust response to the reversal of decades of falling violent crime rates.

But for hours preceding that, mayors, police chiefs, U.S. attorneys and even FBI Director James Comey privately vented in a Washington ballroom that they don’t really understand the alarming spike in murders and applause filled the room when mayors said police officers’ sinking morale could be a factor.

Participants in the discussion were told that the meeting was closed to the news media, but the mayor of D.C. listed the event as public and a Washington Post reporter entered with her entourage and observed more than three hours of the discussion.

Could the root cause be drugs? Guns? Gangs? Perhaps a little of each, said Chuck Wexler, a former top officer in Boston and head of the Police Executive Research Forum.

Wexler tried to sum up the day-long discussion for Lynch, who arrived near the end. But there was another problem, he told her, one that hits closer to home for the nation’s top cop.

“Perhaps the most difficult to calibrate, but the most significant,” he said, “is this notion of a reduction in proactive policing.”

Police chiefs and elected leaders from Baltimore, Chicago, New York and St. Louis were more blunt:

“We have allowed our police department to get fetal and it is having a direct consequence,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told Lynch. “They have pulled back from the ability to interdict … they don’t want to be a news story themselves, they don’t want their career ended early, and it’s having an impact.”

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, left, New York Police Commissioner William Bratton and others at the summit. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
There is no evidence of a broad retraction of police engagement with the public in major cities, and no participant in Wednesday’s summit presented a single example of lackluster policing that somehow contributed to a violent crime.

Rather, chiefs and elected officials spoke broadly of a changed atmosphere in major city police departments over the past year amid high-profile police-involved shootings and in-custody deaths that led to riots in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore.
Chiefs said patrol officers still do their jobs, clocking in and policing their beats. But fewer take extra steps such as confronting a group loitering on a sidewalk late at night that might glean intelligence or lead to arrests, for fear that any altercations that ensued would be uploaded to the Internet.

New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton called it the “YouTube effect” that has emerged for officers post-Ferguson and, in New York, after the death of Eric Garner last year after he was put in a chokehold by an officer making an arrest.

Bratton told the gathering that he thought the malaise among New York City officers would have worsened if it wasn’t for the execution-style killing of two officers last December.

“Marchers in New York, marchers in my city were chanting, ‘what do we want, dead cops, when do we want them, now.’ Well, they got them, two dead cops in December. The legacy of those two officers deaths’ have slowed down the momentum of what was started before it reached tidal wave proportions — really throwing the scales of justice out of balance,” he said.

“The challenge going forward,” Bratton said, “is to keep it in balance so that our officers feel that as we ask them to go forward that if they, in fact, do the right thing, we will be supportive.”

Comey, the FBI director, was more circumspect. He said his department lacks the needed real-time data and trend lines on violent crimes — and, especially, police-involved shootings – to understand the current spikes.

“We stare at the math, and stare at change in cities that seem to have nothing in common with one another. What’s the connection among Boston, Washington, Minneapolis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Houston, Dallas, other than being American cities?” he said. “Has policing changed in the YouTube era? I don’t like the term ‘post-Ferguson,’ because I actually believe the ‘YouTube era’ captures it better.

“The question I keep asking my staff is, ‘Do these hypothesis fit the map and the calendar?’ ” he continued. “Cities with nothing in common are seeing in the same degree and in the same time – dramatic increases in violence, especially homicides — does heroin explain that? I struggle with that … is it guns? Well, what’s changed with guns in the last nine months? Is it the criminal justice system? Well, I keep asking my staff, what has changed that would explain that this is happening in the first nine months of this year and all over the country?”

New Orleans Mayor Mitchell Landrieu lamented the number of homicides of African Americans happening in major cities as a “national disgrace.”

Addressing Comey, he said he hoped that the FBI director was right that more data could help.

“My assumption is if we showed the numbers, and we broke it down and showed you the faces, and we gave you the names and we showed you what they looked like before they were killed and after they were killed, the nation would rise up and say this is a matter that is a moral imperative for the country.”

Comey said he hoped so.

“There’s no doubt the job I have, the fact of life is, if a single person in Chicago is beheaded by ISIL, the world will go on fire,” Comey said, referring to the group of militants also known as the Islamic State or ISIS. “If a 2-year-old is shot in Chicago, the Tribune will write about it, the Sun-Times will write about it. I despair trying to change that world. So I think the answer is, collect the data and then do our damndest to get smarter at what we do.”

Memebers of an Israeli police SWAT team perform during a training exercise organized by the Anti-Defamation League as part of a exchange program between Israel and US security officials in Holon, Israel, Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2008. A delegation of over a dozen chiefs of police from major cities in the United States observed the training exercise by the Israeli SWAT team. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)

The clouds of tear gas, flurries of projectiles and images of police officers outfitted in military-grade hardware in Ferguson, Missouri, have reignited concerns about the militarization of domestic law enforcement in the United States.

But there has been another, little-discussed change in the training of American police since the 9/11 attacks: At least 300 high-ranking sheriffs and police from agencies large and small – from New York and Maine to Orange County and Oakland, California – have traveled to Israel for privately funded seminars in what is described as counterterrorism techniques.

For some, dispatching American police to train in a foreign country battered by decades of war, terror attacks and strife highlights how dramatically U.S. law enforcement has changed in the 13 years since al-Qaida airplane hijackers crashed into New York’s World Trade Center. In many places, the image of the friendly cop on the beat has been replaced by intimidating, fully armed military-style troops. And Israel has played part in that transition.

As these trips to Israel became more commonplace, the militarization of U.S. law enforcement also was driven by the creation of various homeland security initiatives and billions of dollars of surplus military-grade equipment donated to local departments through the 1033 program after 9/11.

Shakeel Syed, executive director of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California, described the tactics he sees American police use today as “a near replica” of their Israeli counterparts.

“Whether it is in Ferguson or L.A., we see a similar response all the time in the form of a disproportionate number of combat-ready police with military gear who are ready to use tear gas at short notice,” Syed said. “Whenever you find 50 people at a demonstration, there is always a SWAT team in sight or right around the corner.”

The law enforcement seminars in some ways resemble other privately funded trips to Israel, such as the birthright trips for Jewish young adults and programs for politicians, educators and other professionals. Stops on the law enforcement tours include not just the Western Wall, but also West Bank border checkpoints, military facilities and surveillance installations.

Participants speak highly of the experience. Former U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer called Israel “the Harvard of antiterrorism” after taking part in a 2005 trip sponsored by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Capt. Brad Virgoe of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department in California called the 2013 session he took part in an “amazing experience,” recalling visits to checkpoints in Eilat at the Israeli-Egyptian border and in the West Bank near Bethlehem.

Since 2002, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee’s Project Interchange and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs have sent police chiefs, assistant chiefs and captains on fully paid trips to Israel and the Palestinian territories to observe the operations of the Israeli national police, the Israel Defense Forces, the Israeli Border Patrol and the country’s intelligence services. Tax documents from the Jewish Institute show the organization spent $36,857 on the trips in 2012.

The U.S. program began less than a year after 9/11, when the Jewish Institute brought nine American police officials to Israel to meet with Uzi Landau, Israel’s public security minister at the time. Participants represented the New York and Los Angeles police departments, the Major County Sheriffs’ Association, the New York and New Jersey Port Authority police and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority police.

Recently, the seminars drew attention during the Ferguson protests because the former chief of the St. Louis County Police Department, who retired in January, had participated in a 2011 trip to Israel sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League.

Israeli security forces’ history of training police in counterinsurgency tactics predated that trip. In Mexico’s Chiapas state, Israeli military officials have been training police and military to combat the Zapatista uprising since 1994. The most recent Israeli training mission to Chiapastook place in May 2013.

Topics covered have included preventing and responding to terrorist attacks and suicide bombings, the evolution of terrorist operations and tactics, security for transit infrastructure, intelligence sharing, and balancing crime fighting and antiterrorism efforts. The training also touches on ways to use Israel’s counterinsurgency tactics to control crowds during protests and riots.

Virgoe told CIR that he and his Israeli counterparts frequently discussed protests and crowd control methods.

“Around Bethlehem, they deal with it on a daily basis,” he said. “Rock throwing, it happens all the time, and they’ve become very proficient at dealing with large crowds on a moment’s notice.”

Virgoe also recounted the Israeli national police’s efficiency in dealing with hundreds of thousands of Sephardic Jews who poured into Jerusalemfor the funeral of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef in October.

The head of the Maine State Police, Col. Robert Williams, joined a trip sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League in early 2013. Speaking to the Bangor Daily News after his return, he noted that his Israeli counterparts had decades of experience in dealing with protests and he was impressed with their ability to suppress demonstrations.

“They call it riots and we call it civil unrest,” Williams told the newspaper.

San Diego Assistant Police Chief Walt Vasquez was on the same October 2013 trip as Virgoe and described a week of travel and training with the national police, Israel Defense Forces and intelligence officials. Vasquez also recalled “lots of discussions about crowd control” tactics. He was intrigued by a demonstration of the extensive surveillance camera network that covers Jerusalem.

Crowd control training provided by Israeli authorities to American law enforcement officials disturbs Human Rights Watch researcher Bill Van Esveld, who studies Israel and Palestine.

In Israel, “in a majority of cases, you’re seeing demonstrations that start with rock-throwing and devolve into tear gas, rubber bullets and sometimes live rounds being fired at people who are throwing stones,” he said.

Van Esveld added that his research has shown the risks for law enforcement are not as high in Israel, where he said officers and soldiers frequently disobey orders governing lethal force against demonstrators and rarely face discipline or other consequences.

“It is very rare that you get a soldier or policeman thrown in jail for killing or injuring someone – in practice, there’s a lot of looking the other way,” he said.

Israel’s use of less-lethal munitions in crowd control received international attention in 2009, when American activist Tristan Anderson was struck in the face with a high-velocity tear gas canister during a West Bank demonstration against Israel’s border wall. His skull was shattered, leaving him in a coma for months. Now, he uses a wheelchair.

Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, said the seminars reflect a militarized mindset diametrically opposed to traditional police-community relations in the United States.

“If American police and sheriffs consider they’re in occupation of neighborhoods like Ferguson and East Harlem, this training is extremely appropriate – they’re learning how to suppress a people, deny their rights and use force to hold down a subject population,” said Khalidi, a longtime critic of the Israeli occupation.

He pointed out a fundamental difference between the American and Israeli justice systems: Jewish residents fall under Israeli criminal law, but Palestinians are subject to Israel’s military justice system. Khalidi said Americans are learning paramilitary and counterinsurgency tactics from the Israeli military, border patrol and intelligence services, which enforce military law.

The most tangible evidence that the training is having an impact on American policing is that both countries are using identical equipment against demonstrators, according to a 2013 report by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem and photographs of such equipment taken at demonstrations in Ferguson and Oakland and Anaheim, California.

Tear gas grenades, “triple chaser” gas canisters and stun grenades made by the American companies Combined Systems Inc. and Defense Technology Corp. were used in all three U.S. incidents, as well as by Israeli security forces and military units.

Footage shot by activist Jacob Crawford in Ferguson last month revealed law enforcement used a long-range acoustic device that sends out high-pitched, painful noises designed to scatter crowds. Israeli forces first used such devices in response to West Bank protests in 2005, according to the B’Tselem report.

David Friedman, the Washington, D.C., regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, organized the dozen Israel seminars hosted by his organization for law enforcement leaders. For logistical reasons, he said, participation has been limited to “the highest levels of law enforcement.” However, Friedman confirmed that the University of Wisconsin’s police department participated, and news coverage as well as news releases from his organization show other smaller agencies and campus police began participating in the mid-2000s.

Last year, the league brought American law enforcement to meet with Palestinian police in Bethlehem for the first time.

Friedman declined to reveal how much the seminars have cost his group. The main focus is on strategies and tactics, he said, but the Israeli officials are not “giving guidance or instruction on these matters.”

Friedman emphasized that counterterrorism is the focus of the seminar, though he acknowledged that crowd control does figure into the training, with Israeli officials showing footage and presentations from protests and demonstrating the equipment they use.

The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and the American Jewish Committee did not respond to interview requests about the law enforcement training seminars they sponsor.

By Allie Winston for revealnews.org

From Freddie Gray in Baltimore to Walter Scott in South Carolina to the more than 100 people tortured and framed over two decades in Chicago, the issue of police abuse has finally started to permeate the national discourse. But even as regular headlines reveal fresh abuses, many officers continue to take shelter behind the use-of-force framework for police interactions, suffering few or no negative consequences for excessive use of force.

There are roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States. Most of them operate relatively autonomously, yet officers are shielded in the same way in most states and jurisdictions. Spurred by the growing national movement against police brutality, lawmakers and activists have started looking for solutions that would hold police officers more accountable for the use of force. On Friday, President Obama’s new Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced that the Justice Department would investigate the Baltimore Police Department to determine whether there had been systemic civil rights violations by officers.

But given the sheer number of law enforcement agencies in the country, the DOJ doesn’t have nearly enough resources to investigate all of them. Between close relationships with prosecutors, secretive police culture, and laws that protect officers from taking personal responsibility for their actions, the obstacles to police reform are stifling.

Prosecutors and the Police
Trusting police officers is effectively a professional requirement for most prosecutors, and that trust doesn’t evaporate when an officer the prosecutor works with shoots a suspect. So it’s not surprising that indictments for on-duty incidents are exceedingly rare without incontrovertible evidence that contradicts an officer’s version of events.

In Los Angeles County, no officer has been prosecuted for an on-duty shooting since 2001. According to the Los Angeles Daily News, “In each of the 409 shootings since January 2010, prosecutors determined on-duty officers were justified in using deadly force.” Taken together, that seems like a lot of shootings without a single unjustified incident. But prosecutors look at each case individually on its own merits, and more often than not, they believe the police officer.

Generally speaking, prosecutors are not incentivized to doubt every story of the cops they work with daily. In addition to working together on criminal cases, many state and local prosecutors are elected officials who rely on political support from police. And prosecutors often run on their conviction stats, further disincentivizing them from questioning the people who supply the cases that keep them in office.

As for the use of force, over the years the Supreme Court has essentially created a checklist of requirements for police violence to be justified. Unsurprisingly, police explanations in use-of-force incidents often sound remarkably similar to those requirements: The most common explanations will include “the officer feared for his life” and “the suspect reached for his waistband,” as if for a weapon.

This doesn’t mean all officers who say something like this are lying. Rather, officers know exactly how to frame their account of an incident in a way that will satisfy a prosecutor. And the current state of the law gives a large benefit of the doubt to police officers, giving prosecutors all the more reason to accept their version of events.

The Problem with Police Culture
In 2010, the Village Voice published an exposé of New York City police officers in Bedford-Stuyvesant’s 81st Precinct. The report was based on many hours of secret tape recordings that revealed police practices that had been denied publicly, including manipulation of criminal charges to satisfy departmental statistical goals. Put simply, the precinct ran a coordinated effort to lie about crime stats.

The whistle-blower, Officer Adrian Schoolcraft, was dragged from his apartment by police supervisors and involuntarily committed to a mental health facility for six days—on those supervisors’ claims of his mental instability. For his public service, Schoolcraft was harassed by fellow officers, run out of the department, and still awaits action on his lawsuit against the city and NYPD. The deputy chief who ran Schoolcraft’s precinct and helped drag him from his home retired in 2014 with a $135,000 pension.

The retaliation is evidence of what is commonly known “Thin Blue Line” or “Blue Wall of Silence”—an internal cultural code that trumps constitutional policing with “how things are really done” in many police departments, enforcing trust and loyalty among officers over the individual rights of citizens. The penalty for breaching can be ostracism, harassment, or worse.

Sometimes, it’s as simple as officers covering for one another. In the shooting death of Walter Scott in South Carolina, the initial police reports were missing critical information about what happened, suggesting that other officers may have been complicit in crafting a narrative that looked good for the officer now facing a murder charge. Same goes for the Tamir Rice shooting, in which initial reports don’t match what the surveillance video showed. In other cases, the wall has been used to obscure a long-running pattern of torture more commonly seen under brutal dictatorships, or the sadistic retaliation for a punch that never happened.

Laws That Protect Cops
Last year, a months-long investigation by the Baltimore Sun exposed how much money the city was paying in police brutality settlements. The reporters had to dig through court records because police disciplinary records for Maryland law enforcement are kept secret by statute. Records secrecy is common among many states, but Maryland and a few other states go much further, giving police a full swath of procedural protections known as the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights (LEOBR).

As attorney Ken White explained at the Popehat blog, these codified protections give police more rights than citizens during criminal investigations. In Maryland, the LEOBR shrinks the statute of limitations to 90 days for a citizen to file an actionable complaint against a police officer on duty, grants the officer full access to the investigation against him, and strictly limits the time, place, and manner of interrogations of the officer. White also notes the notorious “cooling off” periods that an officer enjoys after a potentially criminal incident before investigators may question him. Depending on the state, those periods last anywhere from 48 hours to ten days.

Some states provide labor arbitrators to reinstate fired officers and award them back pay, even when they were dismissed for violent conduct. Such protections make it exceedingly expensive and difficult for cities and departments to purge violent officers from their ranks.

Is It Fixable?
The federal government exercises a limited role in overseeing police departments. In the wake of a scandal involving police corruption or violence in a major city, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division may launch investigations for “patterns and practices” that violate the civil rights of residents, as it has in Baltimore. But the decentralized nature of law enforcement in the US means that in most cases police reform will have to be implemented at the state and local level.

As Maryland lawmakers can attest, reform will not be easy. Nearly 20 law enforcement reform bills died in the legislature this year, though a dedicated working group promises to reintroduce many reforms—including repeal of Maryland LEOBR—in the next session.

On the plus side, the city of Baltimore established a searchable database of brutality lawsuits in response to the Sun investigation. In Missouri, the state legislature is considering modest reforms of the state’s use-of-force law in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting.

In New York State, the Legal Aid Society has created a database of lawsuits and allegations against police officers that defense attorneys and litigators can use in future actions against officers who re-offend. And a sustained campaign by activists and protestors induced the City of Chicago to set up a $5.5 million reparations fund to over 100 victims of torture by the police department over a 20-year period.

Exposing the human toll of systemic abuse to the public puts pressure on politicians to act to curb it in the future. This pressure is driven home to those politicians by the steep financial liability to which abusive officers expose their governments. The challenge lies in getting access to such information, publishing it, and shaping the reform when it comes.

Op-Ed by Jonathan Blanks

It looks as if House Republicans are moving in the right direction. The House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing this month on “police accountability” and “aggression towards law enforcement” — a direct response to recent police killings of black men, and the resulting violence in Ferguson and Baltimore.

Chairman Bob Goodlatte, a Republican from Virginia, hit the right note in a statement:

Tragic news reports of excessive force by law enforcement and attacks on police officers have raised our nation’s conscience about how law enforcement interacts with our nation’s citizens. In the coming weeks, the House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing so we can work together to ensure the safety of our communities, our citizens and those charged with protecting them.

Black voters are so estranged from Republicans, and vice versa, that Republican officials often behave as if black citizens are the sole responsibility of Democrats. One recent exception has been Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has made valuable — if symbolic — efforts to reach out to black voters. “I am optimistic, but peace will only come when those of us who have enjoyed the American Dream become more aware of those who are missing out on the Dream,” Paul wrote in January. “The future of our country will be secure when we break down the wall that separates us from ‘the other America.'” But as Eli Stokols noted in Politico on Thursday, Paul botched his response to the Baltimore rioting. “I came through the train on Baltimore last night,” the senator told radio host Laura Ingraham. “I’m glad the train didn’t stop.” (Good luck, Baltimore.)

In August, citing recent unrest in Ferguson over the death of Michael Brown, some House Democrats asked Goodlatte for a hearing. “Mr. Brown’s killing highlights what appears to be a continuing pattern of the use of deadly force by police against unarmed African Americans in cities around the nation,” the letter stated. “The use of overwhelming force by police against unarmed citizens requires our urgent attention.” Nothing happened.

In early December, a grand jury declined to indict any law enforcement officers in the choking death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York. “The American people deserve more answers about what really happened here,” said Speaker of the House John Boehner, adding that he hadn’t ruled out Congressional hearings. Nothing happened.

Nor did Congressional Republicans seem eager to understand the systematic exploitation of citizens in Ferguson — an especially striking disregard given the endless hours of Republican rhetoric devoted to oppressive government. And even some conservatives wondered aloud why top Republican Congressional leaders were absent from the 50th anniversary of the Selma march. (Some Republicans did show up, including House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and former President George W. Bush, whose administration featured two successive black secretaries of state, a de-escalation of racial politics and a small uptick in blacks voting Republican for president.)

The contours of racial politics are changing as the nation grows more diverse. Republicans have failed miserably to respond. The Democratic base, the foundation of the party’s growing multiracial coalition, is defined partly by its shared aversion to, and exclusion from, conservative white solidarity. It’s a glue that seems destined to outlast the presidency of Barack Obama — unless Republicans begin to make a case for themselves.

In the spirit of Woody Allen, that requires showing up. A single hearing that includes a discussion of “excessive force” by police against black men will not turn a powerful political tide. To compete realistically for black votes — which could be one key to other non-white voters giving Republicans a fresh hearing — Republicans will have to rethink a spate of policies, including their rabid opposition to Obamacare, which disproportionately benefits blacks and Hispanics. Of course, the chances of that, like the prospects for legalization of the nation’s roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants, appear less than slim at present. But you have to start somewhere. A hearing that includes Republicans displaying concern about police abuse is a pretty good place.

Originally published on Bloomberg News.

Deputies from Alachua County Sheriff’s Department are using armored vehicles to conduct routine traffic stops

by Virgil Vaduva

It is hard to imagine that this surreal story does not originate in a nation run by a violent warlord (or maybe it does), but it actually comes from Florida, where Lucas Jewell, a resident of Gainesville noticed local members of the Alachua County Sheriff’s Department were riding through town in a tank-like armored vehicle that appears to be a Lanco BearCat, an armored personnel carrier intended for military use.

As Mr. Jewell believes that this is a gross abuse of taxpayers’ dollars and is opposed to the militarization of police, he found this display of military hardware on public roads offensive and showed the individuals in riding in the tank his middle finger and proceeded to continue on his journey.

The deputies from the Alachua County Sheriff’s Department had other plans; they followed Mr. Jewell closely for several blocks and then decided it to pull him over in an attempt to punish and intimidate him.

What appears to be paramilitary group of individuals exited the armored vehicle and immediately proceeded to assault Mr. Jewell, accuse him that he was receiving oral sex from his girlfriend and his middle finger gesture constituted an “improper hand signal” in violation of Florida traffic law.  The suggestion that a middle finger raised in the air was intended to be a traffic hand gesture is ludicrous, but it did not stop these cops from attempting to bully Jewell into submission.

This unidentified member of ACSD did not want to be photographed because “there are weapons involved.”

The video below was provided to TruthVoice by Mr. Jewell and it illustrates the level of militarization that local police forces are reaching, including patrolling U.S. streets and using military vehicles to enforce minor traffic violations or punish peaceful citizens for protected speech. (Full disclosure: the video was edited to remove some personal identifiable information about the victims)

Gainesville Cops Using Tank For Traffic Stops from TruthVoice News Media on Vimeo.

As these police officers were property informed, an obscene gesture directed towards them is considered protected speech and has been cemented by a number of federal court cases over the years.

This did not deter the cops from pursuing various accusations against Mr. Jewell and his girlfriend, none of which were sound or reasonable.  Fortunately, a crowd started to gather and take pictures which prompted Mr. Jewell to start chanting, “Tell me what a police state looks like? This is what a police state looks like!”  After this the cops gave him a warning for an “improper hand signal” and let him go.

Regardless how one feels about making an obscene gesture towards police officers, the bottom line is that such a gesture is a protected constitutional right and nobody should be harassed for it, especially by heavily armed thuggish individuals riding around in what appears to be a tank through downtown Gainesville, Florida.

We object to this gross display of military force aimed at limiting the free speech of an American and we ask that you voice your opposition to this abuse by contacting the Alachua County Sheriff Sadie Darnell at 1-866-273-5910 or on their Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Alachua-County-Sheriff/127800077278

Below are some additional pictures of other unidentified armed individuals who appear to also be members of this department. If you know the identity of these armed and dangerous individuals please contact me at vvaduva at truthvoice.com so we can investigate what authority they have to use military equipment and tactics towards American civilians.

Virgil Vaduva is a Libertarian security professional, journalist, photographer and overall liberty freak.  He spent most of his life in Communist Romania and participated in the 1989 street protests which led to the collapse of the Ceausescu regime. He can be reached at vvaduva at truthvoice.com.