The Most Censored News with Lee Camp hosted by comedian/ writer/ raconteur/ provocateur/ saboteur Lee Camp is a twice-weekly look at the most censored stories within corporate media hosted by the new video platform Behind the Headlines – a MintPress video project that is 100% viewer supported. Camp both brings to light stories that are […]
Bilal Yousef, a Palestinian producer and writer from the town of Dabburiya, semt me the following message, “We walked for six days, from Haifa to Jerusalem. Calling it difficult is an understatement!.” Yousef is a Palestinian citizen of Israel who has made several award-winning documentaries, among them a film he produced for Al Jazeera called ”Conflict of Loyalty.” It follows the story of Palestinian attorney and activist Yamen Zaydan.
With all the protests and anger and violence across the country, a justified discussion about policing has begun on our corporate media airwaves. (I would say the discussion is overdue, but in fact, we’ve had it roughly every three years for the past 40 years.) However, despite all the coverage, a deeper debate sits ignored – A debate about why our American police system exists at all, how it works (or doesn’t), and where it came from.
The following 19 facts about American policing will change everything you think you know. First, let’s start with the sheer amount of murder.
Racism and violence against people of color in the U.S. is nothing new. In fact, the United States, with its claims to be “the land of the free,” has always been a racist, genocidal and violent state. It was founded on genocide of the native people and on the backs African slaves. The United States committed the most egregious war crimes in the history of mankind, including genocide, the use of nuclear weapons, destruction of democracies and support for murderous dictators around the world, and the list goes on and on from the earliest days of the Union to this very day.
According to an article in the Guardian Friday, the police want to ban the sale of anonymous pay-as-you-go mobile phones. The rationale given for this is that drug dealers including organised gangs are using them. Presumably drug dealers also use knives and forks; should we ban them too?
LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY – Todd Shaw, the former assistant police chief of the city of Prospect, Kentucky, resigned November 20, 2017, after more than 20 years on the job. Shaw quit after Prospect’s Chief of Police Jeff Sherrard confronted him with copies of Facebook messages sent to a Louisville Metropolitan Police Department (LMPD) recruit.
Heavily armed police officers stand guard in the rain outside Trump Tower, Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2016, in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
Law Enforcement Today unwittingly demonstrated everything wrong with American policing in a single post on March 19, 2017. The post featured a photo of a masked militarized officer with the caption “I’ll never explain myself to a person who sleeps under the blanket of protection that we provide then questions the manner in which we provide it.”
As a preface here, as I have done many times as my role as writer for DV, I have to default to the local, as in, where you see fault lines and bright lines in a local situation, you can pretty much make the larger microcosmic statement about many things for a state, region, country, culture, what have you.
The School to Prison Pipeline has been written about many, many times, and my hat goes off to some of those writers:
The ACLU has it on its radar: **
