We are allowing our police to go way too far. Police overkill (often literally) has been around for decades -- see unjustified killings of "suspects" who turn out to be bystanders and the kind of rough treatment of demonstrators one might expect in Syria. Police attitudes, police weapons, police protocols all need to be trimmed down extensively.
There is something vengeful in the police treatment of the Occupy movement. Revenge and resentment on the part of "authority" show themselves even in this mild report in the Guardian.
Los Angeles police used nearly a dozen undercover detectives to infiltrate the Occupy LA encampment before this week's raid to gather information on the anti-Wall Street protesters' intentions, according to media reports.
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They tried to blend in during the weeks leading up to the raid to learn about plans to resist or use weapons against police, a police source told the Los Angeles Times.
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Occupy LA protester Mario Brito told City News Service he was not surprised by the revelation, but said it was "tantamount to 1950s McCarthyism".
(And, as with McCarthyism, a straw enemy has been created in order to "justify" misuse of law and political power. This time the straw enemy is imagined violence and/or resisting the heavy hand of authority applied to the assembly of citizens with grievances.)
46 of the 291 people arrested during the raid have been charged with misdemeanour crimes of failure to disperse from an unlawful assembly. Some also were charged with resisting arrest.
In other words, there was a round-up of innocent people, 15% of whom could actually be charged with dismissable "misdemeanors." The "misdemeanor" turns out to be the highly debatable "unlawful assembly." Where is it written than citizens can't assemble in a public area? Who is the real perp here, the citizen or the police? And what does it tell you, by the way, about a system in which the police themselves call their interference a "raid" and do it in the dark when the community they serve can't monitor them?
