A white North Charleston [SC] police officer was arrested on a murder charge and the FBI opened a civil rights investigation Tuesday after video surfaced of the lawman shooting eight times at a 50-year-old black man as he ran away.The other cops also lied about rendering first aid and CPR. Time will tell as to whether or not they get hammered for that.
Walter L. Scott died Saturday after Patrolman 1st Class Michael T. Slager, 33, shot him in the back.
Until the video came to light, the coverup was in full swing. But not anymore.
The FBI likely opened its own case due to a long track record of cops who murder black men being acquitted by local juries.
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Not only did the cop shoot him in the back from at least fifteen yards away as he ran away as fast as he could, but the cop then planted the taser by the dead dude to justify the shoot, the video shows him walking up to the dead dude and dropping the Taser right by his shoulder. Dude hadn't been on the ground for five seconds and the cop was already planning the "he had a weapon so I had to shoot him" defense.
This is pretty much out of the playbook from forty years ago, but for a while we had cleaned things up a bit. But seems that ever since 2000 or so, the cops have been getting dirtier and dirtier and more and more brutal. I count the turning point as the November 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, where our lords and rulers realized that the peasants were getting uppity and something needed to be done about that. Hiring more and more brutal cops with no compunctions about brutalizing unarmed people seems to be their solution.
This has to be the turning point on policing in America, or the descent into Third World Police State is likely to become certain. Finally, this video is so clear and certain, that 90-95% of the people watching it will understand that something has gone terribly wrong with policing in America.
Hopefully, now "White America" will start to understand what minority America has known for years, it's not just a few cops that are bad, but a large number, aided and abetted by politicians and district attorneys across America. That's not to say that there aren't lots of good cops (or politicians or district attorneys), but that the good cops seem to be losing. Yes, I know there has been plenty of evidence up till now, but time after time there has been enough ambiguity for those uncomfortable with giving up the Andy Griffith Show view of the police to contort themselves into believing it was a legit shoot/arrest/beating or the work of one "bad apple". This video is (almost) undeniable.
Puh-LEEZE, CP88. you have to remember that probably 50% of Americans don't care how brutal police officers are, as long as police officers are brutalizing minorities rather than their lily-white asses. And the other half are oblivious, spending their days watching documentaries about Kardashian babies and space aliens. Nothing's going to change, because we have the most anesthetized and race-baited populace that hundreds of billions of dollars of the finest propaganda can buy. (And don't think I'm talking just Faux News here, pretty much *all* of them are in on it, thanks to corporate ownership of the vast majority of the media, and most are far more subtle and effective at it than Faux is).
The top 0.1%, the Oligarchs, want the cops to be brutal. They rely on the cops to keep the masses in line. And because we pay taxes to the local governments (sales taxes, property taxes, and excessive court fines), we fund our own oppression.
Otherwise, the Oligarchs will have to buy their own security forces, which would be expensive.
And so, the Oligarchs have candidates who run "Willie Horton's Gonna Rape You" ads, to get the most pro-police state politicians elected.
The propaganda is even more widespread than that. The television airwaves are full of heroic cops who must torture, kill, or brutalize suspects in order to save innocent white people from savage darkies. Count the number of television shows you see where a cop kills someone just because he's angry or upset or feels like killing someone, and then count the number you see where a cop kills only people who need killin'. Let's see, that's zero versus five jillion.
Today's Party of the Confederacy and the oligarchs behind them learned well from their forefathers who created the Legend of the Lost Cause with heroes Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis out of thin air. In 1865 those two were the most hated men in the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis was the autocrat who shelved the Confederacy's best generals and put incompetents in charge, Robert E. Lee was hated for sending his armies into campaigns where there was no attainable strategic objective and tens of thousands died for no reason, such as Gettysburg. But concerted propaganda after the war changed public opinion in the South and turned them into heroes whose statues are everywhere in the South. Our oligarchs have only gotten better at propaganda since then...
- Badtux the Propaganda-smellin' Penguin
Tux, as I said it seems, to me, to be an either or. I'm still slightly optimistic, but also a realist. Either this change the tide, or the Second American Revolution will make the French Revolution look like kids play. The nature of today's American's pretty much ensured that the revolt will be brutal and bloody. The oligarchs should think very carefully about their future if this is the path they are herding the county down.
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