Saturday, January 18, 2014

America’s police state: Worse than communist North Korea?

If Kelly Thomas had lived in Communist North Korea, rather than conservative Orange County, California, he might have survived his encounter with the police.

Two days ago, a jury in Orange County, acquitted the two police officers who led the fatal gang-beating of Thomas, an unarmed, mentally troubled homeless man. The jurors acted on the assumption that the lethal violence was justified because the victim tried to defend himself after the police began their assault.

American police taught to treat any act of non-compliance as “resisting arrest,” a supposed offense that justifies the use of pain compliance and – in cases like that of Kelly Thomas –lethal force, if it is necessary to subdue the victim. In fact, most police who go “hands-on” with a victim will pre-emptively shout “Stop resisting!” even when no resistance is offered. Any incidental contact with the sanctified person of a police officer is treated as criminal battery or even aggravated assault.

Interestingly, this doesn’t appear to be the case in North Korea.

Last night (January 14), the PBS program Frontline aired a documentary entitled The Secret State of North Korea that drew heavily from footage collected by a group of underground videographers. Among the scenes captured in that documentary are two encounters between women and soldiers acting as police officers. (The Communist government in North Korea, unlike the proto-totalitarian US regime, doesn’t cling to the fiction that the military and police are separate entities.) Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Cops who beat homeless man to death walk free...
  2. Duggan verdict: police can't take a life, mislead the public and just move on...
  3. The meanest of mankind: the brutality of America's fascist police goons...
  4. The police are the greatest threat to human liberty in history...
  5. US police have killed over 5000 civilians since 9/11...

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