The Blue Line

In a chilling display of police intimidation, Rochester police dressed in riot gear snatched a woman away as she was conducting an on-camera interview with a news reporter during a protest against police abuse in New York Saturday night.
“I’m not going to hit anybody, I’m not going to shoot anybody,” said the woman, whose name is not known at this time. “I’m going to speak to you, I’m going to use my words.”
“I’m going to articulate myself because the message needs to be heard, the message is important,” she expressed to Tara Grimes, a reporter for Time-Warner Cable.

In the moments after shooting and killing Alton Sterling in front of a convenience store where he had been selling CDs, Baton Rouge police entered the business and began confiscating all surveillance footage that may have captured the incident.
They also seized Abdullah Muflahi’s cell phone that had recorded the shooting, before handcuffing him and placing him in the back of a patrol car.
They did all this without a warrant, which is illegal.

The man who made the video of the Alton Sterling shooting death go viral, one of two brutal videos from two states that sparked a national outrage and led to the shooting deaths of five Dallas police officers during an anti-police brutality protest Thursday – was arrested 24 hours later.
Chris LeDay believes it was an act of retaliation.
Considering police handcuffed and leg-shackled him after accusing him of assault and battery – only to jail him overnight for unpaid traffic fines – it certainly appears that way.

A Baton Rouge cop pulled out his gun on a group of citizens protesting the Baton Rouge police killing of Alton Sterling Saturday night.
The cop waved the gun around at the crowd, telling them to “back up” because they were converging onto the street – not that they were charging him as he will probably claim.
“Hands up, don’t shoot!” the crowd began chanting as the cop placed the gun back into his holster to drag a woman away who had laid down on the street to block traffic.

Mark Hughes is either the unluckiest man in the world or the luckiest, depending on how you look at it.
Unlucky in that we was singled out by the Dallas Police Association as a suspect in Thursday night’s sniper shootings that so far has left five police officers dead and seven wounded, his picture tweeted out to tens of thousands of people in the country, a man considered armed and dangerous.
A man who could have easily been shot and killed by police during their frantic search for a gunman or by anybody else for that matter considering Texas is a very gun-friendly state.

Minnesota resident Philando Castile was two days away from his 33rd birthday when he became the 601th person killed by police this year.

An even more graphic video has surfaced of the Louisiana police shooting of Alton Sterling, showing the two cops planted on top of him when one of them pulls out a gun and shoots him multiple times in the chest.
“Get on the ground!” a Baton Rouge cop yells as Sterling is already laying on his back with his arms spread besides him, a gaping, bloody wound to his chest.
Sterling moves his left arm one final time as if to feel his chest while a cop reaches into his right pocket and pulls out his gun.
 

In another example of abuse of power and sheer arrogance, an NYPD officer arrested a man for recording officers from a public sidewalk, accusing him of blocking pedestrian traffic.
It was a lame excuse for an arrest in the nation’s most populated city where congested sidewalks are just a way of life.
The incident took place in 2014 when three NYPD cops were surrounding a man who had passed out on the sidewalk. The man was awake and talking to police when An walked by and began recording.

Co-written with Maya Shaffer
“It is shameful that this is happening in such a progressive state like Massachusetts, which is supposed to value transparency and freedom of information. I believe that nothing short of the threat of legal charges will convince the media relations department of the Boston police to do their jobs. Please do your part to make this happen.”

California police were not satisfied that a man driving through a DUI checkpoint had rolled his window three-quarters of the way down and handed them his drivers license.
No, they wanted the window rolled all the way down, so when he refused, they ordered a tow truck driver to latch on to the car and drive it away from the video of the men recording the stop – while the occupants remained inside – then had the driver use a slim jim to open the driver’s door.
The driver was then arrested on unknown charges, even though he showed no signs of impairment.