Did We Forget to Pay the Bill of Rights?

[Purveyor]

By Jeff Dorchen

What's this I hear about Los Angeles cops having contests to see who can make the most arrests or impound the most vehicles in twenty-four hours? Has all that sushi made the LA police go soft? What happened to framing and beating people? Here in Chicago, at least, the cops still know how to abuse their power. Even though many of them can be seen in short pants tootling along the lakefront on Segways, and the days may or may not have passed of electrifying suspects' genitalia to elicit confessions, the cops here in Chicago, where they invented the police riot way back in the Haymarket days and have enshrined it with a statue, are keeping the sacred principle of authoritarian license as shiny as a brand new badge.

On Monday, October 1, a couple of Chicago cops went on trial accused of sodomizing a man in their custody with the business end of a flathead screwdriver. Although three screwdrivers and traces of feces were discovered in the cops' glove compartment, the following isn't about this case, and any resemblance to officers on or off trial in Chicago for sodomizing someone with a screwdriver is purely coincidental.

There has been, however, a series of reports on WMAQ, Channel 5 Chicago on police officers practicing collective harassment of residents, and family and friends of residents, at the Harold Ickes Housing Complex on the 23d block of South State Street. It had got so bad, people organized to secretly videotape arbitrary behavior of police, such as sweeps in which residents and bystanders were taken away by cops without cause. I pulled part of the Channel 5 report from the MSNBC website. The anchor was Renee Ferguson:

FERGUSON: "Last June, one of Ickes' undercover mothers shot video. In it, 22-year-old William Hope is strip-searched down to his underwear. The strip-search takes place in broad daylight in front of a playground. A violation, says Deputy Superintendent Charles Williams, of written procedure."
A violation of written procedure? How about a violation of civil rights? Does anyone remember that the people are guaranteed to feel secure in their persons and property? Why does a law enforcement official not know that instinctively? Shouldn't you know the law if you're going to enforce it?

---eoe---

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-dorchen/did-we-forget-to-pay-the-_b_67899.html

[Bitwit1234]

1. This is supposed to have happened a week or so ago

The had the chief of police on one of the shows and he denied it.

[Cerridwen]

2. In response to you subject line question...not only did we forget to pay it

according to Thomas Jefferson we are many, many payments in arrears.

"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion... We have had thirteen States independent for eleven years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half, for each State. What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion?" --Thomas Jefferson to William S. Smith, 1787. ME 6:372

from this link